Marc Charbonneau’s Blog

It’s with great pleasure that I announce the 1.0 release of my latest application; Runner’s Log. I started work on Runner’s Log late last fall, when I was looking for the best solution to record distances and times when I went running. Looking at my options at the time, I realized I had a few [...]

One of the things I’ve been doing as I get ready to sell Runner’s Log is choosing a payment processing system. Since my expected sales don’t justify the cost and time of using a dedicated credit card gateway, I’m looking at services like Paypal, Google Checkout and Kagi, among others.
Doing some reading yesterday, I found [...]

One neat feature in Visual Studio I came across today is auto-incrementing build numbers. You can use this to avoid having to configure or write an external tool or version control system just (although you should be using the latter anyway).
To enable it, just open AssemblyInfo.cs in your project, and change the AssemblyVersion setting to [...]

SXSW 2007:
I’m searching my articles from last year regarding SXSW and I can’t find any documentation of one of the major discoveries. SXSW is the only conference I know where designers and developers hang out. Designers have design conferences. Developers have nerd conferences. SXSW has somehow convinced both parties to head to Austin and actually [...]

From rentzsch.com:
Programmers desire to rewrite because they know that after starting with a clean sheet of paper and building it all again, at the end they’ll understand the whole. Programmers write code to learn. Software has this double-edged sword where you can’t just wave your hands instead of implementing a particular function. It all has [...]

Tara Hunt posted a great article on Vitamin today about the role of community in software development. Although written for the web 2.0 app crowd, the same philosophy applies to any platform.

Principle #2. Design to delight
There are plenty of great articles on Vitamin that help you with this, but a really good rule of thumb [...]

John Gruber talked about software pricing a few times this week, which is a subject I’ve been thinking of lately as well. Finding the “sweet spot” is always a tricky issue, and pricing your application too low can hurt just as much as pricing it too high. The assumption is that if your application costs [...]

I’m a huge fan of “pre-built” Linux servers, which let you jump right in to the fun of *nix software without worrying about installation or configuration. One I recently came across is Buildix, a Linux version control server running Subversion, Trac and Cruise Control. Although I haven’t really heard of many people using Cruise Control, [...]

I read an interesting article from Steve Yegge today about agile development methodologies, and how things are done at Google. It’s interesting stuff, and tells a lot about why Google is a great place to work besides the usual “it’s that place place with the food and the swimming pools.”

Editing the default modes in SubEthaEdit is very easy, if you ever find one lacking. Hold down the alt-option key, click the Modes menu item, and select Show In Finder. SubEthaEdit modes are actually bundles, and the enclosed files can be edited to change the mode’s behavior. In my case, it was opening up ModeSettings.xml [...]