ISV Kaizen

The software improvement advice, techniques and ideas that I post here are taken from our real practice. I try to keep this blog practical and hype free. This post is a rare case (the previous one was about 9 months ago) when I’d like to tell a little about our own products.
During the recent months we have been working actively to make new versions of our existing products and to develop a new product as well. Recently we have released two new products.

Dr.Explain 3.0

Dr.Explain v.3.0 ( http://www.drexplain.com ) is an innovative software documentation tool. Thanks to unique technology, with Dr.Explain you can produce attractive and professional looking help files just in a few hours, not in days.

The Dr.Explain captures windows, dialogs, and forms from live application and web pages, makes screenshots, and automatically adds interactive references to all controls. You have not to spend hours annotating your software GUI. Focus on your content - Dr.Explain will do all the tedious work for you. The program can produce CHM, RTF and HTML help files with annotated screenshots, live menus, cross-references, and navigation from a single source file.

What’s new in v.3.0

• The new capturing engine captures and automatically documents windows, menus, GUI elements, web pages, and even flash applications
• Revamped text editor allows pictures, tables, lists, fonts, multibyte encoding, RTL mode, etc…
• Enhanced topic management supports topic statuses, marking and locking\unlocking
• Lots of other improvements including optimized export routines, Google sitemap generator, predefined macro variables, and many more improvements and tweaks.

The new version download: http://www.drexplain.com/download

TBS Cover Editor

TBS Cover Editor ( http://www.trueboxshot.com ) is a full featured software box cover creator with 3D rendering and template library. We accomplished the project in partnership with True BoxShot Software.

With the TBS Cover Editor you can create your 3D box shot design in a single flat worksheet. Say goodbye to separate designs for each side; no more design slices in many image files. The single-sheet concept of the TBS Cover Editor allows you editing of all box sides on a single screen. The real time 3D preview immediately shows how your 3D box shot output image looks like without switching between different windows or applications.

With the TBS Cover Editor no additional expensive third party tools are required. The program supports all the steps of box shot creation: from drafting and design, to 3D scene setting and image rendering. You can create professional-quality 3D box shots with no extra expense in a single program. The TBS Cover Editor comes with a brilliant collection of software cover design templates for various types of software. You can make a box cover in less than two minutes.

The TBS Cover Editor has a powerful rendering engine that produces realistic 3D box shots by applying original 3D rendering and ray casting algorithms. Your every box shot will look as if it is made by a studio.

More details: http://www.trueboxshot.com

Both these products will automate the most tedious and time consuming routines of your software business – software help and documentation writing, and graphical design. The Dr.Explain and TBS Cover Editor will help you present your software product in a professional manner with minimal efforts. As a software vendor you may focus on your business growth and leave the dull operations to the specialized systems.

Many novice (m)ISVs design websites for their products themselves. The home-made design allows the quick and low-cost getting started. However, if you have no experience in web design there are lots of non obvious peculiarities that you have to know to make your website attractive. One of the most important things is graphics. Look at your web site in different web browsers and check if your logos, screenshots and artwork are clear and glamour. The website images appearance depends on the image file formats. There are three standard formats for website images: JPEG, PNG, and GIF. You should use each format for different purposes.

Today I’d like to tell about the common mistake of freshmen designers - using inappropriate image format for their logo or screenshots. I met this situation many times. The simple demonstration bellow shows the specifics of using those three formats for logo picture.

Using JPEG format
Although JPEG offers good compression ratio and allows using high color palette, it affects the picture quality. The better compression means the lower quality. If your image consists of monochromatic areas with sharp bounds then using JPEG format will make your picture “dirty” and inaccurate. That’s why JPEG is often good for photos rather than for logos, screenshots and artwork.

If we’d use JPEG for the logo picture on our Dr.Explain website then it would look inaccurate.

Not good, right?

Using PNG format
PNG is a very useful format indeed. It offers high color palette support, good compression ratio, transparency and doesn’t affect the quality of the picture. PNG images look clean. The format is perfect for screenshots. Nevertheless there is an issue that sometimes makes PNG useless for web design. Web browsers may display PNG images in slightly altered gamma, especially if the picture uses transparent alpha channel. So, if you use PNG image in conjunction with other design elements its borders may be visible and the whole design will look like patchwork.

If we’d use PNG for our logo picture then its borders would be visible on the gradient background in some browsers.

This is not perfect also.

Using GIF format
Although GIF format supports only 256 color palette in most cases it’s enough to display your artwork without loosing the quality. Of course you must adjust the picture palette in image editor first to select the right colors. It’s better to use the same color table for all elements of your website design to make the it seamless and solid-drawn.

We do use GIF format for our logo to make the header graphics seamless.

It looks perfect, does it?

Conclusion … Please recall this post when you’re making a new design for your website. Choose appropriate image formats for different graphical elements… or hire a designer