The Gift of Feedback

I’m going to write an article on the “Gift of Feedback”. As cheesy as this sounds, feedback is crucially important for all businesses, especially small ones where the dangers are all too clear of continuing a project or services without solid market research to back-up your ideas.

Without wanting to come across as a business guru or life coach; I want to emphasise the point to anyone looking to start or operate a business of any sort: Run your ideas across intelligent people who have nothing to gain from your success or failure. Do your market research impartially and ask your existing customers for feedback.

An example from software - if you operate a business model with downloadable software, how do you keep track and open a discourse with those potential customers who are most important to you? Any software that doesn’t ask when it is uninstalled, for comments and suggestions is missing a massive opportunity to improve.

Any business that doesn’t contact customers post-purchase with a courtesy call or email is missing the opportunity to gain goodwill by providing support to the customer before any potential issue can become a sore point and the customer has to go looking for your support helpdesk to get emergency help.

Here’s another idea I implemented last week that’s paying dividends - automated error reporting. Our software has always implemented an unexpected exception handler which pops up an “Oops, an error has occurred” dialog and provides a facility to open a new support ticket with the error attached by email. But how many pieces of software, when a failure is encountered, automatically attempt to file details of the error as an online service report? I have managed to fix almost a dozen very minor bugs in our FSX Google Earth Flight Recorder this way, without the customer even noticing a fault, we know all about it - have fixed it - and pushed an update out. Look out for opportunities to use automation technologies to make your ISV more proactive, rather than reactive.

All our products are going to inherit this technology, look out for it!

With almost 1,000 users - proactive bug reporting, fixing, building and releasing has saved me, dozens of support tickets (and crucially kept those users on board who just uninstall software without providing feedback as to what the problem was).

But if you’re not in the business of software, you can still ask for, and receive feedback.

Last week, while working on a very fustrating localization issue for our norwegian flight recorder customers, there was a knock at the door. Vicky went to answer it, and lo-and-behold, it was GreenFingers (for Interflora) our local florist with a delivery for us from one of our customers:

Vicky, Dylan and Flowers from Simple Investments

The flowers were from Simple Investments, of Godalming, Surrey, for whom we had delivered a large enterprise-level bespoke trading and CRM solution for in 2005/6, had kindly taken the time to send us some beautiful flowers! Needless to say, Vicky was especially pleased although I’m not sure what Dylan thought about them

A quick plug for Simple Investments - if you’re in the market for investment services (both investment advice and purchase/sale execution), financial planning services (such as inheritance tax) with local city slick service, you should look them up. As a business, they are always creating something new and innovative, the staff are extremely pleasant, friendly and professional. Give them a call today!

Flight Simulator X Google Earth Flight Recorder (FREE SOFTWARE)

…or “FSXGE Flight Recorder” for short.

On October 10th; I launched our first Flight Simulator X product. It provides away for any player of Flight Simulator X to record their flights and view the path of the plane in glorious 3D within Google Earth.

Google Earth is a killer app; providing a detailed land mesh and satellite imagery for the entire globe. Flight Simulator X provides a simulation which allows a player to pilot a wide range of aircraft around the same globe. FSXGE Flight Recorder simply pulls information out of Flight Simulator and creates a drawing which Google Earth can read. The results, as I’m sure you’ll agree, are outstandingly cool! 

Here’s a flight I just recorded, using an “Ultralight” aircraft at Heathrow. Note the smooth and well controlled takeoff, downwind approach, final, landing and taxing

My first flight over Heathrow…

Use the Google Earth controls to spin around for a closer view…

The controls to the software are simple: record and stop, play (open) and delete. Click record before you fly, and this neat little utility will create you a Google Earth .kml file which you can open on any machine with Google Earth. You can even drag the control/menu bar onto a screen which you can access while in-flight, stopping and starting recordings at will. This is useful for those of us who need to practice take-offs and landings!

It’s easy to create new recordings on the fly

Best of all, FSXGE Flight Recorder 1.0 is FREE.

Yes, you heard me right, FREE. I’m releasing this edition as a gift to the Flight Simming community. It’s the first software product I’ve created for Flight Simulator X, and if you use this, and you like it - please let me know! Alternatively, if you don’t like it, let me know your honest thoughts. You can get in touch with me via my blog comments, or by the contact us form on our website. If you would like to open a support ticket to get help or report a bug, you can also do so here. I would be especially keen to see your .kml flight recordings - maybe they’re better than mine?

Download your free copy of FSX Google Earth Flight Recorder: from our website

If you would like to make a donation, there is a button within the software about page for this. Please consider it, if you like this software and use it regularly.

Comments please! Is this the sort of software you would like to see developed for Flight Simulator X? Do you like it, or not?

Multiplication bug in Excel 2007

What do you get if you multiply 850 by 77.1? According to Excel, it’s 100000.

It’s not the only sum Excel gets wrong, there are also fails on:

• =5.1*12850
• =10.2*6425
• =20.4*3212.5
• =40.8*1606.25
• =77.1*850
  and more!

A poster on Google Groups has identified the major bug in Excel 2007, which is caused whenever the multiplication answer is 65535. For some unknown reason, Microsoft Excel displays 100000 in place of the correct answer. As 65535 is the highest number which can be represented by an unsigned 16 bit binary number, I wonder if this bug also occurs in Vista x64 or XP x64.

Any calculations on the .value property of the cell will use the correct value. So, it’s just a rendering issue then?

Maybe! Microsoft are investigating. I bet we won’t be waiting long for a product update.

Comments, please!

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