With my PhD edging closer and closer to submission, I'm increasingly spending time thinking about my upcoming foray into the world of the micro ISVs. There's so many things that need to happen to take my current application and turn it into a product people would pay for. Luckily there's lots of info out there to help do that. Here's a few links to resources I'm finding helpful:

• The Joel Test - There's heaps of good stuff on Joel on Software but this stood out as some good thinking regarding improving the coding productivity. I'll be aiming to up the score on this a bit when I start.
  
• The Museum of Modern Betas - Making things look good is tough for code monkeys like me but this site collects all the web 2.0 sites together in one nice list so I can browse through and steal ideas. Oh... and it's fun playing with some of the apps too.
  
• The Micro ISV Toolkit - A set of links to stuff that's supposed to be helpful for micro ISVs. Some good, some not...

I'll probably drop some more links as I find them. Plus I'll aim to blog a bit about the micro ISV process as I go through it. Of course, sometime soon I'll actually announce what I'll be actually be releasing, but I'll wait until I've pushed the PhD out of the way first.

I'm currently using Nozbe to keep track of things I need to get done and I'm loving it. The app is easy to use, relatively quick and accessible everywhere.

Now Nozbe is still in beta which is fair enough. And I've recently tried to take advantage of the free upgrade offered as part of the beta testing. This upgrade lets me track more projects. Unfortunately, the "Add Project" feature is no longer working. Since this is a beta it doesn't bother me too much, but I'd like to submit the bug so a) it gets fixed and b) because as a developer I know that hearing about bugs is important.

BUT, this is where the real problem is. I can't easily submit a bug report! There's no link within the app itself. A bit of searching discovered the forum has a bug area. However, to write to the forum I have to sign up. At this point I gave up and figured that somebody else will report the bug. If this was my app I'd be really annoyed with me for taking advantage of the beta stage but not reporting bugs, but it's just too hard. I should be able to just click a link, write some details about the bug and submit. No extra signup (I'm already signed up to use the app!), no searching for where to report bugs.

Anyway... I guess it's a lesson learnt for me. I'll make sure that reporting bugs is obvious and easy with my apps so I can hear about the bugs, fix them and thank my beta testers for helping out.

Rob Mensching has outlined some info on the targets for WiX v3. (http://robmensching.com/blog/archive/2007/04/10/WiX-v3-Roadmap-Draft.aspx) There's some good looking features in the roadmap. In particular I'm interested in the improved patch support and the expansion of ClickThrough support. The bootstrapper extensions sound good as well.

Congrats to the team for reaching the end of WiX v2.

I've made some updates and re-enabled pingbacks. Hopefully spam will be reduced this time, but only time will tell...