Google is releasing a browser - Google Chrome - with plans to make it open-source. More here.

Google Insights for Search is a great service to see what people all over the world are searching for. Now mISV's have a tool to put their product ideas through.

The new version of our email list software - MailJet - is here. Version 2.5 brings some general GUI improvements, better performance and other minor features, but above all the new version is now able to send file-attachments with your marketing emails.

37signals blog has a great post on phone vs email support.

Yes. It is totally possible to provide great support without a phone number.

Jitbit Software gets a number of requests everyday from people who would like to use phone instead of email. But emails can actually provide faster support then a phone call. A phone call requires you to stop from what you're doing, find a quiet place and listen to hold music for an hour. And after all in 90% cases your phone call will be simply logged by support team as an issue in some helpdesk system.

After months of hard work we are happy to announce a new Jitbit product - Enkodr - the world's easiest on-the-fly text-encryption software.

It works like this: you write some text in ANY text-editing window (can be an MS Word document, Notepad or even a web-mail form like GMail or Hotmail). Then select this text with your mouse and press a keyboard shortcut. Then think up and enter a password and voila! The text changes to an unreadable set of characters.

Check this video:

Just to illustrate that creating an automation macro with Jitbit Macro Recorder is as easy as recording a macro, here is a simple (very simple) macro that starts defragmentation on disk C: in Windows XP, with three easy steps:

1) The first line instructs Macro Recorder to launch Windows XP Disk Defragmenter:

OPEN FILE : dfrg.msc :

2) The next line simply waits for the defragmenter window to appear:

WAIT FOR : Disk Defragmenter : appear : 2000

3) Finally this block launches the appropriate item in the defragmenter window menu (which in our case is "Actions - Defragment"):

Keyboard : AltLeft : KeyDown
Keyboard : A : KeyDown
Keyboard : A : KeyUp
Keyboard : D : KeyDown
Keyboard : D : KeyUp
Keyboard : AltLeft : KeyUp

The resulting macro looks like this:

OPEN FILE : dfrg.msc :
WAIT FOR : Disk Defragmenter : appear : 1000
Keyboard : AltLeft : KeyDown
Keyboard : A : KeyDown
Keyboard : A : KeyUp
Keyboard : D : KeyDown
Keyboard : D : KeyUp
Keyboard : AltLeft : KeyUp

Of course you don't have to actually type these commands when you create a script in Macro Recorder, you can use the toolbar instead. First you click "Insert 'Open file' command", then you click "Insert 'Wait for window' command" etc... Jitbit's macro-language remains "hidden", it is used only if you decide to edit a saved macro in some external text editor like Notepad (which is the preferred way for some programmers and tech-geeks).

Simply select the above text, copy it to the clipboard and paste it to the Macro Recorder. Or save as a plain-text file with a ".mcr" extension to open it in the Macro Recorder.

Like I said I believe that the best hosting option for a mISV is a combination of a VPS and Google Apps. And like I also said we've recently moved the webserver to a new location. But unfortunately VPSLand.com turned out to be a very unreliable hoster: our server was down twice last week, for 4 hours and for 8 hours. God knows how many clients we lost. So we've spent another sleepless night migrating the server. Now it's KickAssVps.com (and it looks like our search is over)

Lessons learned:

0) Stay away from VPSLand.com. OK, I might be biased. Forgive me.

1) Search for reviews. Always search for the hosting provider reviews before making a decision. The best place to search for VPS reviews is this forum at WebHostingTalk.

2) Beware of low prices. Good service costs money.

3) Beware of unlimited bandwidth. "Unlimited" providers reserve the right to disconnect you because of high traffic.

4) Buy a 1-month test-drive. And only if all goes right - pay annually. Note that some providers may add themselves to your Paypal's recurring merchants list, be sure to remove them. Open "edit profile" in your Paypal account and click "Pay list" to check.

5) Ask some pre sales questions to check the support response time.

6) Check the non-paged memory on your VPS. Some hosting companies provide a lot of memory at cheap prices, but they limit the amount of non-paged (kernel) memory. This can slow down or even freeze your IIS server because HTTP.sys requires a non paged pool structure for every connection. So pay very close attention to this during your 1-month test-drive.

7) Ask about the outbound ports policy. We've faced this one with Godaddy. They block outbound port 25. So if you use Google Apps for your mail and your website needs to send out emails to your customers, remember to check.

8) Don't sit and wait hoping for the best. Run away with the first signs of a bad service. "Maybe it was just a temporary glitch?" "They say they fixed it, what else could happen?" Don't fool yourself! Run, not walk! Grab your backups and deploy them to another server.

9) Subscribe to a website monitoring service. The best option is to find one that sends an SMS message when your website is down. We use host-tracker.com

A VPS (Virtual Private Server AKA "Virtual Dedicated Server") is a must-have for a mISV I must say. With shared hosting it was nothing but pain. With a VPS you can host any number of databases, websites and services on it. If you consider yourself more experienced than the average "shared-hosting-support-guy" - why not use your skills?

We've just moved our server that hosts the website, the customers database and other stuff to a new location. Our previous hosting provider - DotNetPark - that we've used for the last two years, has their servers really overloaded, so we decided to move.

Now we have a virtual server in the Atlanta-based datacenter from the VpsLand hosting company. VpsLand's support was quite helpful so far. The connectivity also seem to be fine. We'll see for the rest...

Now, speaking of the website hosting and tech-support,
CHECK THIS OUT: thewebsiteisdown.com.
Awesome hilarious video about the helpdesk everyday work. Must see!

Steve Jobs: "Everyone wants an iPhone, but we need to make it more affordable". Sounds very cool and generous at first.

A classic example of charming marketing jabber from the most influential CEO in the industry.

The new $199 iPhone is actually $160 more expensive than the old $399 iPhone cause it requires a 2-year contract with a $35 monthly fee (old iPhone costed $20 a month). more here.

We all should learn from Apple.

Chris Hynes from Krystalwire has wrote a great article on how to migrate from Community Server to Jitbit Asp-Net Forum. Thanks Chris!

After months of hard work we have released the version 3.0 of our web-based Helpdesk software.

Above all, it features the improved email handler: the incoming email attachments are now transferred to the issue attachments. That's what most of our clients were asking for. We've spent hours learning MIME encoding and the way it is parsed... What a dumb format I must say! Anyway, the feature is here.

Also HelpDesk 3.0 brings a new design:



The tabbed interface is more intuitive, colors are more contrast and the overall look is much better.

Other features are listed here.

Video from Mix08. Looks really impressive.

Just received a message from Tucows, a formerly popular software archive. The message says they're accepting our RSS Editor software. Which I've submitted... about two years (!) ago.

Wow. Now I know how a woman feels when her drunk ex-boyfriend calls at 3:00am saying he misses her... While she's trying to figure out who's calling.

PS. It's hard to find the time for full blog posts these days, so follow us on Twitter if you want.

Piracy is what every software company worries about. We all do our best to protect our software from cracking, patching and other kinds or reverse engineering. But should we really try to build an invincible protection? With all these hardware-lockers, network activations and stuff?

No way. That's what we think here at Jitbit Software. And here is why:

There are three kinds of users:

1. Ones that will buy your software and never use a pirated version.
2. Ones that will never buy your software and search for a crack till death. If there's no crack, they turn to your competitor or even buy it with a stolen credit card, which is even worse, because you will have to deal with chargebacks and bank penalties.
3. Ones that will try to hack (or search for a pirated version), and if this cannot be done easily, they buy (bingo).

The purpose of a software protection system is - turn group 3 users into buyers. Period. A simple asynchronously (to prevent keygens) crypted serial number will do. But if you make it unbreakable, you will have to deal with carders and chargebacks from group 2. If you make it too complicated (network activation, hardware-binding, USB-keys and similar crap), you will lose your customers from group 1.

But this is not the whole story.

We all know, that you can buy a fake Rolex for 40 dollars, or a D&G shirt for 20... That's something we should learn from non-software (tangible) companies: D&G does not fight piracy! Actually D&G even encourages piracy as it promotes the original. That's why when you release the first version of the software, you should use an intentionally weak protection system.

When we released the first versions of our Network Settings Switcher and Macro Recorder back in 2004 (and Network Sniffer later), our serial number system was so lame, that a keygen was out two days after the release. We had gigabytes of traffic and thousands of visitors coming from piracy websites, but we've gained publicity, backlinks, downloads and Google-PR.

...just don't blog.

If you have a website with an RSS-feed on it, you're just 2 clicks away from converting your feed into a podcast. Odiogo is a cool service that "reads your feed aloud", making a podcast from it. The quality is surprisingly good (check out the demo).

Why would you need it? Cause it's another way of promoting your blog/website: create a podcast, submit it to podcast-directories and get traffic and a backlink.

Some podcast directories:
Podcast.com
Podcast.net
Podcastalley
PodcastPickle
PodcastDirectory
Odeo

P.S. Don't have an RSS-feed yet? Try our RSS Feed Creator software.

We've recently released updates for some of our products, here are the details:

Jitbit ASP.NET Forum 4.7.0. - this version has finally fixed the Security Exception, which was thrown when the forum was run in a partially trusted environment AND SEO-friendly URLs module is enabled. This has been fixed. Also, the 4.7 allows reordering forums in the list (we've added a custom "OrderByNumber" column to the database, which can be edited in the admin panel).

Network Switcher 5.42 improves the IE proxy switcher and overall performance.

RSS Feed Creator 3.46 also features improved performance and usability (processing keyboard shortcuts), and generates cleaner XML code.

Google-bot already knows how to parse Flash and Javascript on our websites, extracting URLs to index. And now it's been oficially announced, that Google starts submitting forms, filling the fields with keywords, playing with options, and indexing the results.

Google submits only GET forms, that have no login/password fields. So if you don't want the robot to fill your database with junk, rewrite your forms to POST.

Google 1998



Google 1999



Yahoo 1996



MSN 1996



Netscape 1996



Ask Jeeves 1997

BrowserShots makes screenshots of your website in different browsers, even in exotic ones, like the Konqueror browser for Linux.

A cool web-service that every web-designer was waiting for: the Flickr Color Picker. You set the background color and it picks some "relevant" photos from Flickr.

About a week ago I have contacted Google's support. I wanted to let them know, that when their web services (Google Apps, Google Reader, AdWords/Adsense etc.) are being accessed via httpS, the browser sometimes shows a security warning: "This page contains both secure and nonsecure items". This message is always shown when you click the "help" link, sometimes it even pops-up during normal operations (opening items, logging-in etc), especially when using "Google Apps".

Simple steps to reproduce: navigate to https://mail.google.com/mail/ and click "Help".

[webmaster-hat-on] The reason is obvious: some element on a secure web page (one that is loaded with "https://") is not being loaded from a secure source (uses "http://" absolute path). This typically occurs with images, JavaScript, frames, CSS etc. It's a well known "mixed content error" which can be easily fixed [webmaster-hat-off]

Anyway, I decided to contact support. First, it took me dozens of clicks to finally get to the Google Apps support form through all their suggestions and troubleshooters. Then, Google has answered me with an automated email with links to FAQs, top suggestions and the closing phrase: "if you still have unresolved questions after looking through this material, please reply to this email". I still had unresolved questions, so I replied. After 4 days of waiting the Google's answer was:

Please switch to Firefox
OR
use our application via unsecured http.

I don't want to read my confidential emails via unsecured http. I don't want to switch to Firefox. I guess I will continue seeing this lame error from Google webdevs...

When Windows Vista was first released we had a lot of trouble with our network switcher tool, cause Vista requires administrative permissions to change network settings on the fly. And getting admin permissions is a real pain under Vista. We've had tons of support requests. Imagine if we would answer:

Please use Windows XP
OR
Disable "User Account Control" in Vista security settings.

Of course Google is a giant company which gets tons of emails and support requests from their users and crazy fans. They are obliged to filter these requests by forcing users to read their FAQs and troubleshooters. They simply can't afford being personal. It's not their fault. But that's the advantage of being a mISV. You're small enough to be personal to your customers.


[UPDATE] 2 seconds after posting this, I found this thread on BoS: Google support

***Disclaimer: these opinions and views are my PERSONAL opinion and may be right or wrong.

A long time ago in a galaxy far away I was happy using IE6 and Symantec Antivirus and was pretty much sure I was protected from all kinds of malware, being very skeptical about all the IE vulnerability horror stories.

But you know what they say: "there are two types of users - the ones who already do backups, and the ones that will".

Of course after a while I accidentally discovered several trojan-programs on my drive. One was trying to connect to a botnet, another was trying to steal my email passwords... So I installed Comodo Firewall (which I believe is the best personal firewall software, which is also free) on all our machines, changed my antivirus, reconfigured my office and home routers and their built-in firewalls etc. etc. And moreover, I switched to Firefox.

But after many months and the release of IE 7 I'm back with IE and here is why:

1. Firefox is slow. Which is no surprise since much of Firefox and many extensions are written in Javascript (like any other application based on Mozilla's XUL platform).

2. IE7 is fast. In spite of all my toolbars - and I have ieHttpHeaders, IE Developer Toolbar, Google Toolbar, SEO Quake toolbar and more. But IE7 is still surprisingly fast

3. Memory requirements. I'm writing this post with 8 other tabs open in IE7, and two of them are loaded with heavy AJAX-rich Javascript applications that I've been running for more than two hours now. And IE7 uses only 89 Mb of memory. Firefox wants over 280 Mb for the same task, which is 3 times more.

4. Security & Privacy. IE7 comes with the latest code updates introduced in Windows XP SP2, including download blocker, improved URL parser, ActiveX add-on manager and optional Phishing Filter. IE7 also has privacy cleaners similar to the ones in Firefox (delete cookies, delete history, cache etc.)

5. W3C Standards. Firefox has always been a better renderer than IE6. Yes, writing HTML code for IE6 has always been a nightmare. Now IE7 has changed that.

(But still a lot of people use IE6, so we have to check our pages in it - we use a great tool called Multiple IE which makes it possible to test your websites under different IE versions, from 3 to 7).

6. Usability. I believe that IE7 has a cleaner look and is easier to navigate. IE7 finally has tabs, and tab-operations are simpler (for example, closing a tab in Firefox is a two-click operation).

Microsoft has released IE8 beta 1 to the public. The new version features HTML and CSS developer tools, Javascript debugger and more. Check out the first screenshots:

Recently we've received several proposals from a well-known eCommerce provider asking us to switch to them from Plimus (our current online payments processor). Their somewhat insistent email has induced me to write this post - 7 simple rules for writing sales emails, that we follow here at Jitbit:

1. No questions. "Please tell us your sales volume, and we will send you our rates". No way! Send out your rates table in advance. When a recipient reads your email, he is not deciding whether he wants your services or not. He decides whether he deletes your email right now, or after a while. So no questions.
   
   
2. Create a USP (a unique selling proposition) and place it at the top of your email. Give your recipient one good reason why he should spend another second reading your email. Give him, what Bob Walsh calls "the Hook" - your initial statement which differs you from all the other junk.
   
   
3. Know your competitor. Visit their website, look through their features and prepare a short list of your features that beats them, before offering your services. When you ask someone "please switch to us from XXX", be ready for the appropriate question - "why the heck do you think you suit me better than XXX?".
   
   
4. Make it short. Be succinct and make your email clear.
   
   
5. Read it aloud. This is a great tip from professional editors.
   
   
6. Don't CC multiple recipients. Instead, send multiple personalized emails (for example, by using our MailJet email marketing software).
   
   
7. Don't send it! Save your email as a draft and re-read it in the morning. If you still like it - send it.

Interesting finds for today:
-Gavin Bowman talks about Idiotic Version Numbers
-Don't listen to your users by Jeff Atwood