A Large Monitor is Actually Cheaper Than a Small Monitor
No matter where I go, I always see it. Every company that I know of, with the exception of a few companies, are more focused on saving pennies by getting their employees the smallest monitors possible that they can get away with. Why? Because they don’t believe that a larger monitor is worth the investment. But then again I also see many of these same companies skimping out on hardware for the same reasons. The bad news for them, good for me, is that studies have shown that larger monitors do significantly increase productivity as shown here, here, and here.
The reality is that the extra costs to invest in a better monitor, or better hardware, will generally be returned to you in multiples. I personally work on the Dell 24 inch widescreen LCD monitor right now, and I can’t rave enough about it. The only complaint I have is that it’s not the new 30 inch LCD widescreen monitors that Dell now has available!
But really, the reality is that I’m so much more efficient on the larger monitor that the time saved makes incredible sense for me. Comparing the price of a 17 inch, or even 19 inch monitor, yes I’m paying substantially more. But you know what, I’m also a many more times more effective!
But the real question is just how much more effective? Well let’s break down the numbers, there’s no better way to determine the value than looking at the bottom line. At this time of writing, a 24 inch Dell wide screen costs $800. An equivalent quality 17 inch monitor can be had for as little as $150-200, so let’s use the smaller number of $150. Therefore the price difference is $650. All I need to do to justify the extra cost is find $650 of value over the lifetime of the monitor, which we’ll assume is at least 3 years (probably more). Breaking it down even more, all I need to do is increase my value by $650 / 3 years, or approximately $213/year. That shouldn’t be too difficult! In reality, I’ll get a LOT more value than $213/year, not counting the joy of using it!
Ok, so let’s look at the value. Below this paragraph you can find three screenshots of the Jakarta Struts project in Eclipse. The first at 1920×1200 resolution from my 24 inch widescreen monitor. The next one with the same screen settings showing the coding section truncated, and the last one how it would normally be displayed at 1024×768. As you can quickly see there’s a huge difference in screen real estate space! If I was just using Outlook, Word, or even an internet browser, it wouldn’t make that big of a difference, but for programming purposes it’s a very large difference.
For those of you would aren’t as familiar, let me walk you through the screenshots to give you a better idea of the real estate value. On the left we have our project structure (almost like Windows Explorer). When programming, you separate the code out into logical files to make your life a LOT easier. Therefore you’re always referencing this panel all the time. And sometimes it can get quite deep, with many nodes on the trees as you can see in the screenshots), so it can take some space (much like if you have many directories within directories on your computer).
After that you have your console on the bottom panel. This panel is also use a LOT! This is where information from your program is outputted. This can range from debugging (sending out diagnostic information to the panel while the program is running to give an idea of what’s going on), to bigger things like displaying program error message, etc. The more space you have here, the more diagnostic information you can display, otherwise you just end up scrolling the panel a lot.
Next we have the optional Outline display on the right. On smaller screens this is often omitted because there just isn’t enough space, even though it’s very handy and helpful. What it does is give you a succinct list of all the methods, properties, etc. of the class (or classes) within the file you’re currently editing. This might not seem like much, but imagine if you have several hundred lines of code (best of luck if it’s thousands) and you’re looking for a particular method? Instead of always having to scroll through the code or doing a search for the text, you can quickly see the list and just double-click on it to move your cursor there in a second.
Lastly, and by far most importantly, is the main panel in the center. This is your programming code! This is where you will spend most of your time and where you want to see as much as you can. Often an algorithm will be spread across a decent amount of lines, possibly over several pages (multiple methods, etc.). The bigger this space is the better! I can’t stress this enough. Think of it as a working piece of paper when drawing plans for a house. The more you can see at once, the better off you are!
As you can quickly see from the screenshots above, with a smaller screen you have to start sacrificing space right away to be able to see everything at once. And don’t think that you mainly use one panel at a time, you generally move around between the different panels very frequently as I’ve just described. It’s much like driving, you look out your windshield, then your rear view mirror, your speedometer, and so on. Always moving your eyes around as you need to get more information. The same is true when developing.
That being said, if you look at the amount of real estate space on the smaller monitor, you have to make a lot of sacrifices. Going back to the car analogy, you don’t have the dashboard space to see everything at once, so you have to cut into some of the information. So for example, you can only see half of your speedometer (showing only the most common speeds in that window). You can only 1/4 of your rear view mirror, so pick the most advantageous spot. You can only see out 1/4 of your windshield, so definitely pick the area directly in front of the driver’s side, near the center preferably.
So right away, you’re limited in information, you can’t drive or program at nearly the same speed. The good thing though is that you can resize any of these windows as need be, but each time it costs you time and you have to sacrifice another panel. So for example, if you want to see out of your complete windshield, you can’t see any of the other windows (rear mirrors, speedometer, etc.). You can also just partially increase the size of any one window but you must also relatively decrease the size of the other(s) to compensate. As well, each time you adjust the size of a window, it costs you time. For programming, this means you have to move your hand to the mouse, adjust the size, etc. It might only be 2-3 seconds, but do this hundreds to thousands of times a day and it quickly ads up; 400 seconds to 4000 seconds – 6 minutes to a full hour!
Each time you make an adjustment, you lose other information, so if you need to move back and forth a lot, you’ll probably lose a little bit of the context. If you spend 1/2 your time adjusting the sizes of the windows, it’s easy to quickly forget simple details such as the speed you’re driving at, which means another adjustment, lookup, etc. This ads up.
Assuming your programming pretty consistently (ignoring things like attending meetings, being tired on Monday, etc.), I’ll use the one hour metric for our calculations, and then I’ll follow up with the 6 minutes to show that even that’s worth the return on investment!
Ok, so getting back to our calculations, assuming about 200 workdays, and assuming 1 hour is lost each day, that represents 200 lost hours of labor. But before I go on, I’ll just take a minute to talk about the cost figure I’m going to use for a developer hour. In a previous article I used $1000/day per developer, which caused some people to comment that this was too high. The reality is that this isn’t too high from the businesses perspective, this is the cost of a developer. The developer won’t receive $1000 in salary, they’ll just receive a portion of that. What you have to remember is that the business also has to pay for the employees benefits, real estate (for example IBM saved $700 million in real estate costs by having workers work from home), hardware, software, etc. All these things quickly add up!
Anyways, assuming a $1000/day cost for a developer (or $125/hour) , giving that they lose 200 hours a year because of the size of their monitors, that’s a $25,000 difference in cost. So you just lost $25,000 in productivity to save $800! If you like those kind of deals give me a holler, I’m sure I can provide you with other similar great deal!
Now what if I grossely overestimated my numbers, which I didn’t but what if, then that’s 200 days * (6 minutes/day at $125/day) = $2,500. So even at 6 minutes a day, we spend $2,500 to save $800! Wow!
To add on top of this, in the above calculations we assumed our monitor would last just one year (200 working days). So multiply the above numbers by 2-3 times since most monitors will easily last longer than that! You can quickly see how valuable a larger monitor becomes!
To add to this, getting a larger monitor will also make programming much more pleasant to your developers, which means they’ll be more efficient. No you can’t really measure the benefits here directly, but rest assured that they do exist. If you go with high quality monitor, your employees will be less tired (it’s less hard on the eyes), and so on. With LCD’s I also found that it significantly reduced the number of headaches I personally got, so that’s another measurable benefit in terms of productivity.
All in all, as you can quickly see, a large monitor is actually much cheaper than a small monitor when you consider the total value of your purchase. If you only use it to surf the internet, send emails, etc. then you’re absolutely right, there’s no real benefit in terms of dollars. But if you program on it, the return on investment is incredible!
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LandlordMax Customer Testimonial
In the last while we’ve been getting a lot of great testimonials for LandlordMax Property Management Software. Here’s another great one from Chris Venter all the way from Africa!
“Thanks for all the great work you do in improving the program. It is really appreciated and makes my work easier as well. Keep up the good work.”
Chris Venter
Thanks Chris!
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Lines of Code Revisited
Yes, I know lines of code (LOC) is not a very good metric for measuring complexity of software, growth, etc., however it’s still the only real metric I have easily available right now. That being said, since I last posted about this in June comparing the differences in lines of code between the four major releases then, I figured it was only appropriate that I do the same again for this release, our 5th major release of LandlordMax (version 3.11a).
As you can quickly see from the graph above, we climbed from 105,757 lines of code to 137,868 lines of code for this release (version 3.11a), for a whopping increase of 32,111 new lines of code! Compared to our other major releases (excluding the initial release version 1.00), this is our biggest major release in terms of scale so far! It’s at least 50% bigger than than any of our prior releases as measured by lines of code! As well, the code base is now 2.68 times larger than when we first started with version 1.00!
For those of you who are interested, since I did show in a prior article how many lines of code changed between each minor update for version 2.12 (ie patches), the difference between version 3.11 and 3.11a is only a few lines of code in the build script, nothing changed in the actual program.
I’m not trying to prove anything specific here today, I just personally found these metrics very interesting and I thought I’d share them.
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LandlordMax Customer Testimonial
I recently received the most interesting testimonial I’ve seen in a long time. What’s interesting about it is that although it comes from Kent, it really comes from his accountant!
“My new accountant appreciates LandlordMax. He felt it was really helpful when he completed my tax returns for last year.”
Kent Petschow
Thank you Kent for the great testimonial!
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Why It's Important to Test in Production
Every real software developer I know knows the importance of testing their software in a production environment because there’s always that slight chance that something may be different from your development environment. This is why in enterprise software you have a development environment, a staging environment, and a production environment. The development environment is as you might expect, is where things are tried out. However staging is where things get different, this is where your environment should replicate as closely as possible your production environment. Although it’s not always entirely possible to completely reproduce it, the closer the better. And production is your live environment.
Normally for LandlordMax, when we’re developing we run it directly from our IDE (Integrated Development Environment), which is our development environment. If everything works here, it should work in the production environment. You always want to test it in staging though, just in case, which we do. Also, to remove the chances of errors, what you also want to do is automate the process of taking your development application and “productizing it”. That is to say, you want to create something called a build script which will automatically create everything for you, removing any chances of human errors in creating the final product.
Once that’s done, at least for us here at LandlordMax, you have an installer created. You then try the installer. You then run the software to make sure everything is still working the same (hopefully someone else will do this to avoid any biases while testing). It’s a pretty simple process.
However with version 3.11 of LandlordMax we re-learned the valuable lesson of just important it is to test and re-test the software after it’s been productized. Yes we normally run it through it’s gamut of tests, but for some reason we missed one simple test case with version 3.11 that where we just a few minutes ago released version 3.11a tonight to correct. The bug, which worked in our development environment, didn’t work in staging, or production. Unfortunately it wasn’t caught until just recently by two of our customers, which I personally thank you for letting us know so quickly. The good news is that because they contacted us right away, within 1 day we have a new version with this fix available!
So what happened between the two environments, shouldn’t they be the same? Yes they should be the same, there should absolutely be no difference. However this was not the case with version 3.11. But before I get into the details, let me step back a minute and explain what happens in our automated script (which by the way was not at fault for those of you thinking ahead).
Our build script consists of several steps. First it gets the latest code from our version control, compiles it, and creates the appropriate objects. Once this is done, it grabs all the appropriate resources (for example images, etc.) and puts them into their appropriate objects. After that, it takes these objects and “Obfuscates” them (if you’re interested there is a famous contest held each year to see who can create the most obfuscated code called IOCCC). This is important for us as a company because it takes the compiled objects (intellectual property) and makes it extremely hard to reverse engineer. Nothing is impossible, but I can tell you from looking at the code after the obfuscater has run through it that I can barely understand it myself! Anyways, once this is done, it takes all the objects, and runs another script which then creates the installer (LLMaxSetup.exe) which you download and install. That’s our build script. Not too complicated, but not too easy either (I’m glossing over some of the details).
What happened with version 3.11 is that we updated the software that obfuscates LandlordMax. We’ve done this many times over the last 4 years, but this time for some reason it changed the way it reads the configuration file. Not significantly, but enough that it caused this issue. Without being too technical, in our code we overwrite a few libraries we use (for example we changed how the report printout calculates the report totals by adding a clause for “NSF” checks, and so on). Now when LandlordMax tries to call this library, our code is intercepted beforehand and is used rather than just going directly to the library’s code. Nothing major, this is called “overwriting” in programming. However, one key feature in overwriting code is that you need to use the exact same names!
Well to our dismay, the configuration in our obfuscater no longer accepted the wild card we used in the past. It overwrote the names of these classes, and therefore because the names weren’t the same, our code didn’t intercept the library’s code. And because of this, the software didn’t know how to handle “NSF” or other little tweaks we added! Hence all the totals were $0.00 on the printout.
So between our development environment and our staging environment something had changed. Something that wasn’t suppose to change, had never changed in the past, but suddenly now did. This is why it’s important to thoroughly test your final production product. We did, but we somehow still missed this issue and for this I apologize to all our customers. We have therefore just released a new version (version 3.11a) that you can download and install to resolve this issue right now.
PS: As an aside, I’d just like to say this was a fairly difficult bug to track down. This is a bug that worked in every development environment but not in our staging or production environment, regardless of the settings and configurations! It also illustrates even more the importance of properly testing in every environment!
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LandlordMax Traffic Triples in One Year!
Today I just took a look at the number of unique visitors my company’s (LandlordMax) website got over the past year, and I just noticed that it’s now tripled in traffic in just one year! Well we’ve actually only increased by 2.953x over 1 year, but that’s close enough to 3x. Very exciting! It really shows that interest in LandlordMax is growing, and growing fast!
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LandlordMax Customer Testimonial
Today I just received the following great testimonial. Thank you very much for the positive feedback Briana!
“Thank you very much for all of your help. Please rest assured that your product will be highly touted by myself, my staff, and the owners of my property. Thank you again.”
Briana Reese
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LandlordMax Version 3.11 is Released!!!
It’s official, version 3.11 of LandlordMax has just been released within the last few minutes!!!
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LandlordMax V3.11 Sneak Peak
Although we wanted to launch LandlordMax version 3.11 late tonight, I’ve decided to push it back another day. We’re almost there, we just found one last very minor bug that I’d like to clean up before we go live (I’m a perfectionist at heart when it comes to LandlordMax). In the meantime, here’s a sneak peak of the release notes (minus one main feature).
It’s just as well that we delayed it one day because while I was finishing up creating the last of the Release Notes tonight, I couldn’t come up with a good way to represent some of the very major speed improvements we’ve done in this version. The database I was playing with to create this particular animated tutorial consists of:
- 30,394 Accounting Entries (483 pages worth of entries)
- 921 Scheduled Accounting Entries
- 2,293 Tenants
- 2,414 Units
- 247 Buildings
- 75 Vendors
- 14,282 Invoices
- 2,182 Scheduled Invoices
- 13,950 Receipts
- 2,182 Scheduled Receipts
- 19,149 Workorders
All this was running on my desktop that’s almost three years old now (it runs on a basic P4, 2.4Gz Intel processor). To view the Accounting Entries Workarea which includes displaying 30,394 entries (I didn’t apply any filtering) and process the 921 Scheduled Accounting Entries (to see if any Suggested Accounting Entries are due), it took about 4 seconds! And that’s while I was running a video and audio recorder capturing everything going on on my screen!!! Without the recorders, the time significantly drops.
So all this to say, we’re extremely close to releasing LandlordMax version 3.11. I suspect it will be tomorrow night in the wee hours of the night. You always want to release your software when it affects the least amount of people, when you have the least amount of traffic to your website, which is generally late at night when everyone’s sleeping.
In any case, as I mentioned above, if you’re interested in getting a sneak peak, you can see a preview of the release notes for LandlordMax version 3.11 here.
Let me know what you think.
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Just How Important is Your Software Installer?
Most people probably think it’s not that important, as long as it just works and installs your software for you. However the reality is that this is far from true. Your installer is the first impression people have of your software, and you only get one chance! If it doesn’t work, if it’s hard to do, it will cause a negative perception of your software before they even have a chance to try it! I don’t know how many of you are familiar with Zune, but this software is getting a horrible reputation online because of how difficult it is to install. Just look at the size of this review, it doesn’t really talk about the software, it’s all about how horrible the installation process is! So why start with a negative against yourself when there’s no need.
Not only is it your first impression, but just as importantly it’s not part of your core product. So in other words, not only is it important to do right, you also don’t want to spend too much time on it (it’s used only once) and it’s not your core competency. Talk about contradicting priorities!
Therefore, that being said, I strongly suggest you look at a software solution that will build your installer for you. Some of them are great, others not so great. Not only that, but they also range in price from free to very expensive, as well as in complexity, and what you can do with them. Before I start to go into details, just to give you a disclaimer, we at LandlordMax now use Install4J which I strongly personally recommend.
Getting back to the discussion, I’ve personally used 4 different installer packages in my career, including 3 with LandlordMax alone (there is some overlap). The first installer I ever played with was a custom built installer for the company I was working for at the time. Yes this solution worked, and it had by far the most customization, but it was also the most expensive to maintain and support. It’s really a second application for the company. They eventually moved to InstallShield, which at the time was one of the better solutions (this was many years ago). It worked, it definitely simplified the installer process. Now although I said it simplified it, it wasn’t the end all be all solution by far. If I remember right (this is a long time ago), every wizard screen had some code behind it in InstallShield’s own proprietary language. And at that time if you clicked on the back button, it didn’t remember the state you were in, which resulted in some very crazy scripting code.
Moving on to today and LandlordMax and skipping several other installation experiences, we initially started with InstallAnywhere. One of our requirements was that the installer we used also install a JVM with the local application. I don’t remember why I picked InstallAnywhere, this is about 4 years ago, but that’s the solution I chose. After a couple of years, we also started to use NSIS (Nullsoft Scriptable Install System) for our patches, which created much smaller installers (the patch installers just overwrote some files in the application directory versus a full install). I used NullSoft for the patches because it was a much quicker and simpler installation than InstallAnywhere.
At several points, we even looked at using NSIS to fully install LandlordMax, but let me tell you this is a complex endeavour! Although NSIS is a great little installer, it’s all script based. That means you need to learn another programing language. Not only that, but you need to become proficient in it do anything beyond the basics. Yes, we could learn it, copy snippets, etc., but from that point on we’d have to keep maintaining it. Someone would always have to be familiar with the language. This might seem like a small factor, but let’s say the “Installer person” quits? We have to find someone with that skill or train another person. Very expensive! Especially having gone through something similar with my first installer experience, I’m not willing to go that route again.
Since I wrote about JProfiler here on my blog, the people who make this amazing software contacted me to tell me about their installer solution called Install4J. After a few emails with them, I decided to give it a test run, and boy am I glad I did!!! They’ve created an amazing installer that’s in the same league as their code profiler! Within 1 hour I had created a brand new and fully functional installer for LandlordMax, including time to read a couple of advance features in the user manual! That’s amazing! Not only that, but if you consider the human resource costs of learning an installer like NSIS and the cost of Install4J, Install4J wins hands down!
I did mention that we were using InstallAnywhere as well. After trying Install4J, we decided to convert entirely over to Install4J and stop using InstallAnywhere. It was a good product for us at the time, but it’s now time to move on to a great product like Install4J. This is why in the upcoming version of LandlordMax later this month you’ll see a new look and feel to our installer. We’re now using Install4J for all our installers.
Why did we convert over? For several reasons. First, it was just too easy to learn and use. To do the same things I did in InstallAnywhere in Install4J takes me a fraction of the time. And I’m not the only one who thinks this way, the following thread on JoelOnSoftware has other people expressing their sentiments on the unnecessary complexity of InstallShield (same family of products as InstallAnywhere).
It’s not just the complexity of creating an installer, it’s also the ability to perform tasks. Everything seemed intuitive within Install4J. To give you another example, let’s say you want to install an application local JVM with your installer, you don’t need to go download it from their website (never mind finding it on the website which always take me a while) and put it in the right file location for the software to pick it up, they have it built right into their software. You just select the JVM version, and if it’s not there, you just press the “Download JVM” button right below which lets you pick it from a list. It then automatically downloads it, installs it, and you’re ready to go. No need to do anything more.
Another feature I really liked about Install4J is it’s ability to compress the installer itself. With InstallAnywhere last installer had grown to over 35MB in size. With Install4J, our new installer is going to be about 15MB, and this is with a bigger install on top of that. That’s more than a 50% drop in download size! This might not seem too significant, but remember that if you have thousands of people downloading your software, it sure can make a large reduction in your bandwidth usage.
Something else I really appreciated, which I have to admit I’m not as familiar with in InstallAnywhere, is the ability for it to use files relative to the project file. Why is this important? Because I can use the Install4J installer script directly within an Ant task! I build my main Jars, pick up my other Jars and resources, and away I go, all from within the same Ant script. I can now check the installer script right into CVS, and any other developer who has a license to Install4J can create their own test installers! WOW! Yes you generally don’t need to do this, but when it comes to testing an install environment versus your local environment, there’s no faster way to get the latest install than just generating it yourself within your IDE at will!
Another thing to realize with Install4J is that it’s not limited to just Java applications. Actually I’d say it’s amazing for Java applications, but you can use it to install any type of software. They have hooks for pretty much all types of installs. It’s just that for us, we also need the ability to install an application local JVM, which greatly limits us in terms of which installer solutions we can use. If it wasn’t for this limitation, I would still use Install4J, it does everything you need your installer to do and more. For example it has the different install modes (silent, graphical, etc.), multi-platform support, multi-language support, etc.
As an additional little tidbit of information which really excites us, from what I understand the fine people at Install4J are looking at potentially extending their API to allow hooks into your own software application for auto-updates in an upcoming version! What this means is that you’ll be able to use their knowledge and technology to allow your customers to click on an “Update” button directly within your software which will update it, without the need to download and install a patch. This is great! Yes, we could build it ourselves, and we actually did look into it. From our calculations, it would take at least 2-4 weeks, so let’s say 20 days * $1000/day (this includes salary, benefits, etc. i.e. all the costs for one developer), then our costs is about $20,000. If we can outsource this technology, assuming the highest price point, we come out ahead by more than an order of magnitude! And not only that, this is their field of expertise, their core competency, and they will maintain and update the feature for us. We could instead spend those resources building other highly valued features that are unique to LandlordMax.
Therefore, as you’ve seen, your choice of how you build your installer is important. First, it’s your first impression, so make it a good one! You only get one chance! As well, since your goal is to minimize your costs in this area, you should look at purchasing a solution rather than building a custom one. If I had to calculate the costs of a custom solution, well any of the installers available today on the market would probably be cheaper. Even NSIS, which has many copy/paste scripts available is still fairly expensive in developer time. After having used several alternatives, I’m strongly recommend you check out Install4J. This is the one we’re going to be using from now on, it’s the best one I’ve ever worked with!
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