How to Save on Bandwidth Costs
Reading many ISV (Internet Software Vendor), uISV (Micro ISV) blogs, etc. you often hear how bandwidth costs can sometimes quickly escalate with success. Jeff Atwood of CodingHorror.com posted an article (with a nice follow-up) on this very subject describing many things you can do to minimze your bandwidth costs. These are:
- Switch to an external image provider.
- Turn on HTTP compression.
- Outsource Your RSS feeds.
- Optimize the size of your JavaScript and CSS
All great options, no doubt about it. But another option that is very often overlooked by software companies is the size of their software installers. It’s very easy to forget, never mind completely miss, the size of the installer. For us here at LandlordMax it was always an issue because we also install a local JVM which is considerably large. With each new version the size of the installer steadily increased until it was about 36Mb. This might not seem so big compared to some of the other larger software applications in the market, but when you’re looking at thousands of downloads a month this quickly adds up to a lot of bandwidth.
Late last year we changed the software we used to create our installer to Install4j (you can read my review on this great installer here) and it was able to drastically reduce our installer size by about 50%! Yes, that’s a full 50%! What does that mean? Well if you consider that the majority of our bandwidth is used for downloading LandlordMax, then we were able to reduce our bandwidth by about 50%.
None of the suggestions above could have reduced our bandwidth nearly as much as this one change to the installer. On this blog (FollowSteph.com), the above four suggestions do indeed have a very significant impact, but on LandlordMax because of the nature of the website, the change in the installer completely overwhelmed any of the impact these changes would have had. This is not to say that I don’t strongly believe you should do them, but that in this particular instance another tactic to reduce bandwidth was much more crucial.
So the lesson of the day, other than to do the above great suggestions by Jeff (especially for blog type websites), is to look at your software installer and see if you can’t reduce its size (assuming you’re a software company). The impact may be more significant than you might realize.
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Latest Links
In software no good deed goes unpunished
In software there is often a large disconnect between perception and reality. This is a clear example of such a disconnect.
My Own Successful Startup Story … In 1984
A well writen real life story with lots of life lessons.
Top ten things ten years of professional software development has taught me
The title says it all.
Oops! Techie wipes out $38 billion fund
Talk about a disaster. But the real tidbit to get from this piece is if you’re own software/data is correctly (and regularly) backed up?
If Crack Dealers Took Lessons From Walgreens, They Really Would Be Rich
A great example about pricing and complacency.
9 Confessions From A Former Enterprise Rental Salesman
Everyone knows there’s certain things that make renting a car more pleasant. This is the first time I’ve seen it written down.
Features vs Ideology
Ian writes a great article on the debate many software vendors have when including new features into their software.
Good Programmers Do Like to Code; It’s All the Other Crap They Don’t Like
The argument of this article is that developers want to spend time solving problems and not rewriting solutions to the same problems over and over (they don’t want to re-inventing the wheel over and over).
The Truth About the Single Founder Startup
A very good article about what it takes to start your own company if you want to do it solo. This is the route I took and I can attest that you need to wear all the different hats at one time or another.
Why There Isn’t More Multilingual Support
At LandlordMax continually get asked why we don’t support other spoken languages within the software, especially by developers. The truth is that providing multi-language support is no longer that difficult, whats difficult is all the other stuff that goes along with it that Ian describes here.
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LandlordMax Sales Record
I just finished all the revenue/sales tallies for last month (March 2007) and it looks like we broke our sales record again! Last month was our highest sales revenue ever for a single month, beating our previous record set in October 2006. It wasn’t a large difference. Actually the number of units sold was exactly the same which in itself is quite remarkable! We broke our sales record within a couple hundred dollars simply because we just shipped a higher percentage of CD’s last month than usual. Like I said, if you look at a difference of a couple hundred dollars over sales in the thousands of dollars, we barely broke our sales record. But nonetheless we did break it (in February we just missed breaking our record by a very small amount which was frustrating).
As for our net total (profits), March definitely wasn’t our record month by any means. We had much higher than normal expenses this month for several reasons which I won’t go into today.
All in all though I’m very excited about March, it turned out to be a great month for us in the bigger scheme of things. And looking at April, if things continue as they are now, we’re looking at another very good month. We’ve already at least matched the number of sales for this time in March today in April!
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LandlordMax version 3.11b is Now Available!
Well it’s official, we just released version 3.11b of LandlordMax. As I mentioned in my last post, this latest update was probably our biggest update (not including any major upgrades) in terms of effort yet. There were a lot of Vista specific issues that we had to work through for LandlordMax to fully support Windows Vista, some of which even included bugs within the programming language itself! This doesn’t even mention the new hardware and software we had to purchase and setup just to get our test and development environments going.
In any case, we just released version 3.11b of LandlordMax today, so you can now download it. And on top of fully supporting Windows Vista, we also added several smaller fixes for everyone else. You can find the complete list of the latest fixes and changes in the release notes.
Now our main efforts are going to return towards getting the Mac version of LandlordMax ready as soon as possible. Hopefuly that won’t be much longer now too.
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LandlordMax on Vista (The Story)
As several of you already know, we’ve been working extremely hard, harder than usual anyways, to get LandlordMax up and fully running on Windows Vista The reality is that Vista has been a harder than usual update for us. The good news is that we’re getting very close to releasing an update of LandlordMax to version 3.11b. If everything goes according to plan, you should anticipate the release of version 3.11b by the end of this weekend. I believe we’ve now got all of the major issues resolved, we’re just finishing with the details and doing some final testing.
Having said that, I thought I would take the time today to write what we’ve been through to get LandlordMax fully Windows Vista compatible. What we’ve been doing behind the scenes, what challenges we’ve been facing, and so on. So without further ado:
Unlike previous Windows upgrades (98 to Me, NT, 2000, XP), this Windows Vista upgrade has been a real challenge. You would think we wouldn’t even need to upgrade LandlordMax to support Vista, especially since it’s Java based, but the reality is that it’s been a major update. With the prior Windows systems, the LandlordMax updates were minor if at all (for example we didn’t have to do anything special to move from Windows 2000 to Windows XP). But as I just said, Windows Vista has turned out to be a very different story.
For our customers who tried to run LandlordMax on Vista, the first thing you saw was an “Error loading Look and Feel” message. In most cases you could just ignore this message and proceed. However by doing so, because the expected Look and Feel wasn’t available, many of the screens became useless. For example, in the screenshot below, you can see that a portion of the Scheduled Accounting entries form is missing. This is because the visual components (text fields, combo boxes, etc.) didn’t display as expected (actually even the font style, combo box styles, etc. are all off). The software worked as expected, but the screens didn’t. Well actually that’s not fully true, we had to resolve a few very minor coding compatibility issues with Vista.
In any case, this quickly lead us down a very slippery slope. What started off as one small change quickly grew. And not only that, along the way we found some new bugs in the Java language that are Windows Vista specific (for example Bug 6434444).
Before getting too far ahead here, let’s get back to the fact that the Look and Feel didn’t work in Windows Vista only. What does this mean? Without being too technical, it basically means that the Look and Feel definition we’re using in LandlordMax wasn’t supported for Windows Vista and it therefore automatically changed to its first available Vista Look and Feel. For our Look and Feel, we use JGoodies Looks library which is an amazing open source library. In tandem with this, we use JGoodies Forms library. Great libraries, I can’t say enough about them! In any case, after a little bit of investigation, we found that we had to upgrade the JGoodies libraries to the latest version to get full Vista support. Since we’d last upgraded LandlordMax, the Looks library had itself upgraded a full version which ended up meaning that we also had to do some code changes in LandlordMax to support the Looks upgrade to version 2. As we were already in the midst of this, we decided to upgrade the Forms library which turned out to be a very simple upgrade.
After we finished coding for this upgrade, we then realized that we also needed to do a Java upgrade to the latest version. The current Java version LandlordMax uses is the 1.5.0_09 JVM and the current version available is now the 1.5.0_11 JVM. Not a major upgrade, but as we bundle it with the installer, this meant that we not only needed to upgrade our development environments (and test for any issues) but also our installer.
Once we were done with these upgrades we found we were still experiencing other issues on Windows Vista only. One of the less obvious ones that took a long time to track down is that Java Swing will sometimes increase the size of the table column headers to something that’s really awful (especially when screen space is limited) only on Windows Vista (again Bug 6434444). Why did this take so long to track down? Firstly because it only happens on Vista, and secondly because this is a newly documented bug within the Java language and therefore there is no real documentation on it other than the Java language bug reports.
Knowing this doesn’t help resolve the issue though. And if you look at the Bug report, you’ll find that there is no known workaround at this time. People are asking for it to be resolved ASAP (I personally found several other related Bug reports open under different numbers). We can’t wait for a Java language update for LandlordMax to be Vista compatible, so we had to discover a workaround that solved the issue in Vista but yet didn’t break it in the other Windows versions. As you can see from the screenshots below, we’ve been able to do that. All I can say is that it wasn’t my favorite solution, but it’s one we’ll have to live with until there’s a update to the Java language.
As you can already see, we’ve had a few bumps on our road to releasing a LandlordMax Vista version. The good news is that the major hurdles are pretty much done, we’re now just tweaking the last details. On top of the Vista issues, we’re also including some minor bug fixes which will all be included in the release notes when it’s released.
All in all, what we thought, well at least what I thought, would be a simple Windows update turned out to be our large update. I can now appreciate why many software companies will not update their current/past software versions and only offer Windows Vista compatibility at an additional charge (for example Quickbooks 2006 will not support Windows Vista, you’ll need to upgrade to Quickbooks 2007 for that). I don’t necesarily think that’s fair, but I can appreciate it having gone through the pain and expense of making LandlordMax Vista compatible. We definitely won’t support Vista on prior versions either, but the current version of LandlordMax (version 3.11) will support Windows Vista at no additional cost to legible customers.
Because of the time it’s taken us to get Windows Vista support for LandlordMax due to all the above difficulties (and others not mentioned), I’d like to thank all of our customers for your patience in letting us get this LandlordMax Windows Vista update out to you as fast as we can. Thank you.
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You Can Now Order LandlordMax by Snail Mail
Some of you may have already noticed, but as of today you can now order LandlordMax by mail as well as online. It took me a little longer to truly buy into this idea, but enough people have requested it that we’ll give it a trial run for a good year. So for now on, when you go to the LandlordMax purchase page, near the bottom of the page you will find three additional links, one for each of the order froms for the United-States, another for Canada, and one specifically from Ontario, Canada. We had to separate these out because we have to apply a Goods and Service Tax to all Canadian residents, and an additionaly Provincial Sales Tax to all Ontario residents.
For those of you interested I plan to do a follow-up post in the coming months showing the results of this initiative.
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LandlordMax Customer Testimonial
I know I just recently posted up a testimonial for LandlordMax (I generally try to at least space them out), but the following communications I had with Don is worth posting.
Don has been using LandlordMax for a while now and so far he’s been really happy with our support from. In our last exchange, which I personally answered, he sent back the following great comment:
“Once again outstanding service!”
As soon as I received this I asked him if I could have permission to use this as a testimonial for our Success Stories and Testimonial page on LandlordMax. Now normally when I ask for permission to use a quote people are generally delighted and give me the go ahead. Don went one step further and sent us this follow-up comment:
“You might add that: My business partner -who keeps the books- is very impressed with LandlordMax, in terms of its simplicity to use, its tremendous power of data capture and ease of report generation. LandlordMax is worth much more than we paid for it.”
That’s great! Thank you Don for the positive feedback!
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LandlordMax Mac Version
As many of you already know, we’ve been hard at work on a Mac OS X version of LandlordMax. So far it’s been going pretty well. Most of our issues in supporting the Mac have been visual, with very few real technical issues. That being said, we are currently experiencing two visual related issue that we’re finding harder to resolve. I know we’ll eventually figure it out, but I’d like to get the Mac version out sooner than later. Therefore, I’m putting out a help request to all developers who read FollowSteph for this one issue. If you know the answer, or if you have good pointers, I’d love to hear them. And if someone points us to a direct solution that we use (or the first person if there’s more than one), I’ll send you a $100 Amazon gift certificate to show my appreciation!
Before dwelving into the technical aspects, here’s some quick background. LandlordMax is written in Java, and therefore the port to the Mac OS has been relatively straightforward as I just mentioned. Although many of you might not know this, from the very beginning we programmed almost everything in LandlordMax to be operating system independent. Although it wasn’t always possible 100% of the time, it was for the vast majority. The biggest issue, as I alluded to above, is the visual look and feel and how that affects the screens.
The two biggest issues we’re currently encountering which we’re struggling with is related to the combo box (pull downs) within LandlordMax. In Windows, the combo boxes are the same size as the text fields whereas in the Mac OS they’re much larger (especially in regards to height, and only somewhat in length). Because of this, and because we have to suppport the 800×600 resolution (a full 15-20% of our customers still use this resolution), we’re very limited in screen space. What’s happening is that these combo boxes on the Mac OS are taking up much more space than they should, and hence pushing things down on the screen (and sideways as well). On some screens this isn’t a big issue, but others were space is very limited (for example the Scheduled Tabbed Panel), this means that some of the fields no longer show up on the screen, they’re pushed down off the screen.
Below is a screenshot below of LandlordMax on the Mac OS. What we’d like to do is bring the combo boxes down to the same size as the fields.
The second issue has to do with auto-fill combo boxes, such as the “Type of Payment” field in the screenshot. For some reason, the auto-fill combo boxes are not being rendered correctly. If you look at the screenshot closely (you can click on it to see the full sized screenshot), the field has half of the combo box missing. I suspect this also has to do with the same issue.
So far we’ve looked at a number of solutions which haven’t quite worked for us. The first, and what looked like the most promising, was the QuaQua Look and Feel. They’ve noticed this issue as well us and have rectified it in their own custom Look and Feel. When we implemented it, it did indeed resolve the combo box issue, but unfortunately it also caused many other issues. With this Java Look and Feel, they seem to overwrite many of the manual settings we programatically apply in the software. So for example, if we set a background color of light blue on a panel (or component), it seems to ignore this and apply it’s own Look and Feel. Therefore this solution isn’t quite working for us right now.
We’ve also looked at modifying the Java Look and Feel by just changing some properties, but as we’re not familiar with this aspect of the language (actually very few people are which is why I’m posting it here today), it’s just not working out for us as we intended. We’ve had some moderate success with this solution but not enough yet.
There are some other solutions we’ve looked at, but as far as I can tell, the best solution is to modify the existing Look and Feel. Either by modifying the Mac OS Look and Feel or by extracting what we need from the open source Quaqua project…
If any of you know how to do this for the combo box that would resolve both of our issues, I would be extremely grateful. Not only that, as a show of my appreciation, I will award a $100 Amazon gift certificate to the first person who can give me a direct solution that we end up using!
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LandlordMax Customer Testimonial
Yesterday we received the following great testimonial from Bill Anthopoulos who manages several properties in Ontario and Quebec (Canada):
“I speciallize in University Housing through Ontario and Quebec. I love the Product. You really did a great job and carved out a niche. I’ve recommended you to two other well established Property owners. I’ll keep talking about you.”
And upon asking him if we could use his comment above for our testimonials, he added the following:
“I’m starting up a Property services firm and this software will definitely be a major selling point in acquiring clients and instilling customer confidence. I am truly impressed with the speed of your responce time on a Saturday at 10:00PM. As I hope to grow, I will definetly work with any future products you may put forth. “
Thank you very much Bill for the great comments! They’re very appreciated.
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Interview
Ben from StartupSpark.com just posted up today an interview he did about me and my company LandlordMax. It’s a great interview, and I’d especially like to thank Ben for taking the time to interview me. As well he had some very complimentary comments about the interview:
“Stephane understands what it takes to be an entrepreneur. When I ask him about competition, he hits the nail on the head. When I ask him about what it takes to start a business he demonstrates incredible passion. You’ll have to read the interview to see what he says.”
Thank you Ben for those amazing comments!
Just an extra little note, for those of you who aren’t familiar with Ben’s blog StartupSpark.com, he’s been doing interviews with other small software vendors and getting their take on what it takes to make it. There’s some really good interviews there, I personally got some great nuggets of information from all of them. One interview that I particularly liked was with Ian about his company HelpSpot. So go check it out, there’s lots of good information.
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