I've started a Twitter feed for us at Scimatic.  Jim and I will be using this account to announce new blog posts and general science/work related news.

If you have a Twitter account, please follow us at twitter.com/Scimatic

Ever have two completely unrelated problems ... only to realise they are manifestations of exactly the same issue? Sometimes it feels like a win.

We've submitted a proposal lately that  involves bringing a popular Mac application to Windows.  When doing research for this proposal, I've finally figured out the claim "Macs just work".  My answer to this claim is that:

 The Operating System is the framework.

By this statement I mean that the engineers at Apple have put a lot of thought into what support developers require.  They make sure that this support is bundled with the Operating System and a nice touch, it is all free.

... Version Control.

I might as well put in my two cents about version control, now that git has been getting all the blog press for the last, oh, forever. I'm always late to the party. For example, I just started working in ruby this year, and have already missed all the cool kids at RubyFringe.

Jamie had a meeting with a prospective client in London last week. It went alright, but it's going to be at least a few months before it kicks off.

One of my favourite coders Reg Braithwaite shuttered his blog a while back, and I thought it was a huge loss. Everything he wrote got me thinking, and I only understood half of it on the first pass. I got to meet Reg at SciBarCamp and he seems like a really personable guy. I see him in the neighbourhood at Le Gourmand, but I haven't re-introduced myself.

For the first time since I joined Scimatic, I'm working from home. Which is a big change for me, since at my last job, all I did was telecommute.

In general, I'm a big fan of telecommuting and distributed groups. It's how I worked for the last seven years at my previous job, and I found that the benefits far outweighed the disadvantages. The primary advantage is one of efficiency:

I switched to a MacBook Pro about a year ago.  A dirty little secret is that I do all my word processing in Windows.  I needed to purchase Office 2007  for a client project a while back and its price tag made the decision for me.

On the Mac I wanted an open source solution for quickly editing documents.  I know that Pages is great and Office for Mac can be ok at times but I already paid for Office 2007.

The economy is in a death-spiral and we're heading for the Second Great Depression.

Well, that's what everyone seems to be saying. Bad time to be a small software company. Bad time to be self-employed. Start heading for the exits because les bon temps cessent de rouler. Maybe all of those things are true, but I'm actually pretty happy to be where we are right now.

A small update to the AnIML Tools project was released today. The functionality to navigate between AnIML nodes in the Colobus viewer was moved to the Main Menu and Toolbar.