Ytria Tools

A few weeks ago I posted about useful software and mentioned that I had heard good things about Ytria but had not been able to get their tools to work myself. Well within a day I had been contacted by the guys at Ytria who wanted to help me get it to work. In the end the problem turned out to be the fact that I run an old version of Teamstudio CIAO. Their technical support couldn’t have been more helpful.

Anyway, I thought I should play with the tools for a while before commenting further but now I have to say I am very impressed. Of the five tools I am trialling, I won’t use three very often (designPropEZ, actionBarEZ and viewEZ) but when it comes to releasing an application, to audit and making sure there is consistency they will be hugely useful. They allow you to bulk update the designs of all or a selection of design elements in a database using common settings. I think probably if you’re a Notes developer (I do almost exclusively web development) that these would become required during day to day work.

signEZ will be superb for our release manager who we send our templates to before they go live. Whereas in the Admin client in Notes you have a simple “Sign” button, Ytria give you an incredible set of signing tools using your own or some other ID. It will certainly improve their life of switching IDs all day.

But to be honest the single best tool, and by far the most feature rich is ScanEZ. In the simplest terms this is the old classic Notespeek on steroids. But as well as being able to read notes, it allows you to update them. Looking at design elements it tells you everything about every field on a form such as data type, formula and so on. The thing which has proved most useful to me is when you are looking at individual documents. As well as seeing all of the fields on a document (which you can find by any number of methods such as by UNID, formula, view or formula) you can actually edit them as well. But beyond that you can compare documents side by side. This has been and will continue to be an absolute lifesaver for me.

Each of the tools can be downloaded and tried for free and work in reduced, read-only mode for ever. Now they do cost to buy but I think most serious developers will be able to justify them to their managers. Certainly ScanEZ is worth it’s weight in gold for me and I’ll be recommending it to my clients.

June 9, 2007 by 4

Back Home

The journey home was pretty uneventful, took ages to get out of the airport though, they had trouble opening the plane door, then there was a huge queue at customs, then the bags didn’t turn up for a while. But that seems to be the norm these days.

Anyway, the challenge now is to stay awake until a reasonable time this evening. Time to catch up on e-mail and blog reading I guess.

June 8, 2007 by 0

The journey home

I headed over the the Prudential tower last night to meet up with the hardy few who were having dinner after The View conference. In the end I rocked back to the hotel at about 2:30am and am wondering how bad I’ll feel for the flight tonight, lots of water to be consumed today. When I left the others they were heading up to Bill’s suite for more drinks as the hotel bar had closed. I wouldn’t like to think about what state those hardy few who stayed until the end will be in today.

Anyway, there’ll be several photos floating around Flickr to incriminate and amuse shortly no doubt.

Now I need more water.

Update: I bumped into Paul at the airport and it sounds like I got out at the right time. Everyone was suffering this morning. He’s posted a few photos on Flickr.

June 7, 2007 by 1

What's happened to air travel?

Maybe I’ve been lucky in the past but I’ve never really had any trouble when flying. But for this trip I’ve done eight individual flights and every single one of them has been delayed by more than an hour. In the end yesterday I arrived at the hotel at about 1am instead of 9pm. Has something happened to make air travel worse over the last year or have I just been unlucky?

June 6, 2007 by 1

Grand Canyon and Skywalk

I just got back from my trip to the Grand Canyon and the Skywalk. A great day all round with temperatures at around 106 degrees the flight was just great fun, more like a roller coaster than a normal plane trip. I’d forgotten how much fun light aircraft can be. Photos are up already.

It’s only about 25 minutes from the Boulder City airport to the Grand Canyon and then after that the group split off with half going to do helicopter trips to the canyon floor and the other half, including me, heading off to the Skywalk. Now, as Carl warned in the comments of a previous blog entry it does cost more, $27.50 to be precise. The thing which annoyed me more than that is that you are not allowed to take your camera onto the platform, instead they try and scalp you with “official” photos. Well I didn’t get any of those but the view is absolutely stunning. The place is still a bit of a building site at the moment, just the walkway itself exists at the moment, in the future they are going to add a whole visitors centre onto it. There was also talk of the tiny airport being expanded to take 737-type jets, I think that would ruin the rather ramshackle feel of the place so I hope it doesn’t happen.

All that being said about the Skywalk I think I got more of a thrill just walking up to the edge of the canyon proper. I came here with my family when I was a kid and I was afraid that it would have become sanitised by our risk averse culture but gratifyingly they still don’t have any safety rails, you’re just told to use your common sense. A vertigo sufferer’s nightmare but really quite exciting if you’re OK with heights.

Bizarrely for the first time while I was at the edge of the canyon I got just the slightest urge to jump, I obviously didn’t but it was a very strange feeling. No idea where that came from!

Anyway, back to Boston tomorrow and then off home on Thursday. Boo.

June 5, 2007 by 1

Mystere

I just got back to the hotel room after seeing Mystere, it was absolutely superb with unbelievable acrobatics and really funny clown filler content while the stage was reset. They really know how to put on a show. In comparison to Ka which I saw last year this was so much better as it relied almost exclusively on the performers abilities and not on any fancy engineering behind the scenes.

A quick sit down and then I’m off for dinner and a spot of blackjack I think.

June 4, 2007 by 0

Vegas Baby

So, the work elements of my trip are done with and I managed to find a cheap flight from Boston down to Vegas yesterday so here I am. Today I’m off to see a Cirque du Soleil show, Mystere. But the real reason I flew all the way down is that I want to see the new Grand Canyon Skywalk so I have a trip out there on a plane booked for tomorrow.

All a bit extravagant I know, but what the hell, you only live once eh?

June 3, 2007 by 3

Dreaming in Code

I just finished reading Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg, a book which follows an open source development project led by Mitch Kapor to create a Lotus Agenda style application for the modern computer. It’s a definite recommendation from me, with a good look at why software development projects often go wrong.

But that’s not the point of this post. The book follows the development of Chandler, and app written in Python to act as a free form multi-platform PIM tool. I’ve downloaded and played around with and apart from being very “beta” like it’s very nice. However, when reading the book, for almost every feature that the team was trying to work out how to produce I kept finding myself thinking “I know how to do that in Notes” or “I can already do that in Notes and Domino”. Yet another example, to my eyes at least, that we continue to under estimate exactly how powerful Notes and Domino are. Maybe distinctly unfashionable but very powerful. Have a read of the book and see what you think. Even if you don’t agree with me it’s a useful read for anyone who is involved in the computer industry or even just those who have to use a computer during their daily lives.

May 31, 2007 by 1

Redsox

I went to see the Boston Redsox play the Cleveland Indians in the second game of the series at Fenway Park last night. It’s the first time I’ve been to a game there and was a great experience. The stadium is old so only holds 35,000 but it still manages to generate quite an atmosphere. I took a few photos which are already up on Flickr.

I do enjoy baseball when I see it live, even if I don’t really understand it that well. I played the stupid tourist role and had all of the proper fans around me explaining the rules and why certain things were happening, they were actually really helpful, I can’t see many football fans doing the same for an American. I guess Boston is the spritual home of the game so a good experience all round. For the record the Redsox won 4-2 with no real challenge put up by the Indians.

May 30, 2007 by 2

And relax

The journey over to Boston was a little delayed due to an air traffic computer crash but otherwise uneventful. I slept for a long time last night due to the lack of sleep over the last few days plus quite a hectic schedule over the last few months. I really needed this break.

So for the next few days I’m playing tourist, you can see my photos here as I add them but as I said, blog posting will be sporadic as I just unwind. I was thinking I should play with the Beta 3 CD which I picked up in Dublin but I think that can just wait until I get home as well.

The weather here is beautiful, sunny and not too hot. Although tomorrow it’s meant to be mid-80s so maybe I’ll just find a few nice looking bars and chill out. Oh I love holidays 😉

Tuesday night I have a ticket to see the Red Sox play Cleveland which I’m really looking forward to, it’ll be a first visit to Fenway Park for me. But for the moment let’s enjoy the holiday weekend and relax.

May 27, 2007 by 0