The Sherpa Project

I prefer notepad over word.
I prefer writeboard over notepad.

Still, I always feel like nothing has struck the write balance between these three tools. I’ve been looking for something with the formatting capabilities of word (although an easy-to-use subset), the cleanliness of notepad (although with some more options), and the conveniences of writeboard.

It looks like Virtual Ubiquity figure it out. Check out Buzzword.

Looks very promising. Especially now that they’ve been purchased by Adobe.

I’ve been using Newshutch for a couple of months now. This is probably the longest time that I’ve ever used a single feed reader and I have to say that I’m loving it. The shortcut keys, the simplicity, and the fact that it doesn’t overwhelm me with a large number of unread feeds at first glance makes it a pleasure to use.

If you haven’t checked it out, it’s worth the time to explore.

It really pisses me off that there are so many software companies out there that don’t understand the importance and implications of user experience. I just sat through a demo of a large product suite and the only thing that ran through my mind throughout the demo was “If I had to use this tool, I would shoot myself.”

That feeling came primarily because the look, feel, (lack of) usability, and (lack of) user experience of the application suite sucked. The capabilities of the suite were mediocre, but I just couldn’t get past how ugly it was. How the hell are you supposed to get excited about software like that?

On the project that I'm working on, we are currently tracking our sprints with index cards (on a wall gantt) and by daily/sprint/release burndowns in a spreadsheet. The wall gantt is the tracking that is used for our day-to-day tasks and the spreadsheet is used more as a communication tool for our external stakeholders.

Our team has recently run across some issues with a few third-party software packages that have impacted our velocity and required some additional tasks. As part of the on-site team, my visibility has mostly been with the wall gantt. I've noticed that our velocity has taken a hit, but I wasn't sure how our velocity had trended over the release as a whole.

I recently ran across sparklines and was interested in using them to take a look at our velocity. I was extremely impressed by how much information could be viewed in a short space.

It's fairly obvious where the trashing started (around sprint 10). The sparkline shows a daily story-point burndown inside of each sprint. The high and low points of work remaining for each sprint are shown through the different colors. For the spreadsheet, I used the free Bissantz tool (thanks guys).

I'm looking forward to picking up Beautiful Evidence by Edward Tufte and reading about more visualization patterns. Reading his work is always extremely insightful.

Jim Holmes has put together a list of ReSharper shortcuts for the current 2.0 EAP build.

The EAP isn't quite ready for primetime yet, but it's getting a lot closer. 

Thank you Jim!