LandlordMax on Vista (The Story)
As several of you already know, we’ve been working extremely hard, harder than usual anyways, to get LandlordMax up and fully running on Windows Vista The reality is that Vista has been a harder than usual update for us. The good news is that we’re getting very close to releasing an update of LandlordMax to version 3.11b. If everything goes according to plan, you should anticipate the release of version 3.11b by the end of this weekend. I believe we’ve now got all of the major issues resolved, we’re just finishing with the details and doing some final testing.
Having said that, I thought I would take the time today to write what we’ve been through to get LandlordMax fully Windows Vista compatible. What we’ve been doing behind the scenes, what challenges we’ve been facing, and so on. So without further ado:
Unlike previous Windows upgrades (98 to Me, NT, 2000, XP), this Windows Vista upgrade has been a real challenge. You would think we wouldn’t even need to upgrade LandlordMax to support Vista, especially since it’s Java based, but the reality is that it’s been a major update. With the prior Windows systems, the LandlordMax updates were minor if at all (for example we didn’t have to do anything special to move from Windows 2000 to Windows XP). But as I just said, Windows Vista has turned out to be a very different story.
For our customers who tried to run LandlordMax on Vista, the first thing you saw was an “Error loading Look and Feel” message. In most cases you could just ignore this message and proceed. However by doing so, because the expected Look and Feel wasn’t available, many of the screens became useless. For example, in the screenshot below, you can see that a portion of the Scheduled Accounting entries form is missing. This is because the visual components (text fields, combo boxes, etc.) didn’t display as expected (actually even the font style, combo box styles, etc. are all off). The software worked as expected, but the screens didn’t. Well actually that’s not fully true, we had to resolve a few very minor coding compatibility issues with Vista.
In any case, this quickly lead us down a very slippery slope. What started off as one small change quickly grew. And not only that, along the way we found some new bugs in the Java language that are Windows Vista specific (for example Bug 6434444).
Before getting too far ahead here, let’s get back to the fact that the Look and Feel didn’t work in Windows Vista only. What does this mean? Without being too technical, it basically means that the Look and Feel definition we’re using in LandlordMax wasn’t supported for Windows Vista and it therefore automatically changed to its first available Vista Look and Feel. For our Look and Feel, we use JGoodies Looks library which is an amazing open source library. In tandem with this, we use JGoodies Forms library. Great libraries, I can’t say enough about them! In any case, after a little bit of investigation, we found that we had to upgrade the JGoodies libraries to the latest version to get full Vista support. Since we’d last upgraded LandlordMax, the Looks library had itself upgraded a full version which ended up meaning that we also had to do some code changes in LandlordMax to support the Looks upgrade to version 2. As we were already in the midst of this, we decided to upgrade the Forms library which turned out to be a very simple upgrade.
After we finished coding for this upgrade, we then realized that we also needed to do a Java upgrade to the latest version. The current Java version LandlordMax uses is the 1.5.0_09 JVM and the current version available is now the 1.5.0_11 JVM. Not a major upgrade, but as we bundle it with the installer, this meant that we not only needed to upgrade our development environments (and test for any issues) but also our installer.
Once we were done with these upgrades we found we were still experiencing other issues on Windows Vista only. One of the less obvious ones that took a long time to track down is that Java Swing will sometimes increase the size of the table column headers to something that’s really awful (especially when screen space is limited) only on Windows Vista (again Bug 6434444). Why did this take so long to track down? Firstly because it only happens on Vista, and secondly because this is a newly documented bug within the Java language and therefore there is no real documentation on it other than the Java language bug reports.
Knowing this doesn’t help resolve the issue though. And if you look at the Bug report, you’ll find that there is no known workaround at this time. People are asking for it to be resolved ASAP (I personally found several other related Bug reports open under different numbers). We can’t wait for a Java language update for LandlordMax to be Vista compatible, so we had to discover a workaround that solved the issue in Vista but yet didn’t break it in the other Windows versions. As you can see from the screenshots below, we’ve been able to do that. All I can say is that it wasn’t my favorite solution, but it’s one we’ll have to live with until there’s a update to the Java language.
As you can already see, we’ve had a few bumps on our road to releasing a LandlordMax Vista version. The good news is that the major hurdles are pretty much done, we’re now just tweaking the last details. On top of the Vista issues, we’re also including some minor bug fixes which will all be included in the release notes when it’s released.
All in all, what we thought, well at least what I thought, would be a simple Windows update turned out to be our large update. I can now appreciate why many software companies will not update their current/past software versions and only offer Windows Vista compatibility at an additional charge (for example Quickbooks 2006 will not support Windows Vista, you’ll need to upgrade to Quickbooks 2007 for that). I don’t necesarily think that’s fair, but I can appreciate it having gone through the pain and expense of making LandlordMax Vista compatible. We definitely won’t support Vista on prior versions either, but the current version of LandlordMax (version 3.11) will support Windows Vista at no additional cost to legible customers.
Because of the time it’s taken us to get Windows Vista support for LandlordMax due to all the above difficulties (and others not mentioned), I’d like to thank all of our customers for your patience in letting us get this LandlordMax Windows Vista update out to you as fast as we can. Thank you.
Permalink to this article Discussions (2)
You Can Now Order LandlordMax by Snail Mail
Some of you may have already noticed, but as of today you can now order LandlordMax by mail as well as online. It took me a little longer to truly buy into this idea, but enough people have requested it that we’ll give it a trial run for a good year. So for now on, when you go to the LandlordMax purchase page, near the bottom of the page you will find three additional links, one for each of the order froms for the United-States, another for Canada, and one specifically from Ontario, Canada. We had to separate these out because we have to apply a Goods and Service Tax to all Canadian residents, and an additionaly Provincial Sales Tax to all Ontario residents.
For those of you interested I plan to do a follow-up post in the coming months showing the results of this initiative.
Permalink to this article Discussions (0)
LandlordMax Customer Testimonial
I know I just recently posted up a testimonial for LandlordMax (I generally try to at least space them out), but the following communications I had with Don is worth posting.
Don has been using LandlordMax for a while now and so far he’s been really happy with our support from. In our last exchange, which I personally answered, he sent back the following great comment:
“Once again outstanding service!”
As soon as I received this I asked him if I could have permission to use this as a testimonial for our Success Stories and Testimonial page on LandlordMax. Now normally when I ask for permission to use a quote people are generally delighted and give me the go ahead. Don went one step further and sent us this follow-up comment:
“You might add that: My business partner -who keeps the books- is very impressed with LandlordMax, in terms of its simplicity to use, its tremendous power of data capture and ease of report generation. LandlordMax is worth much more than we paid for it.”
That’s great! Thank you Don for the positive feedback!
Permalink to this article Discussions (2)
LandlordMax Mac Version
As many of you already know, we’ve been hard at work on a Mac OS X version of LandlordMax. So far it’s been going pretty well. Most of our issues in supporting the Mac have been visual, with very few real technical issues. That being said, we are currently experiencing two visual related issue that we’re finding harder to resolve. I know we’ll eventually figure it out, but I’d like to get the Mac version out sooner than later. Therefore, I’m putting out a help request to all developers who read FollowSteph for this one issue. If you know the answer, or if you have good pointers, I’d love to hear them. And if someone points us to a direct solution that we use (or the first person if there’s more than one), I’ll send you a $100 Amazon gift certificate to show my appreciation!
Before dwelving into the technical aspects, here’s some quick background. LandlordMax is written in Java, and therefore the port to the Mac OS has been relatively straightforward as I just mentioned. Although many of you might not know this, from the very beginning we programmed almost everything in LandlordMax to be operating system independent. Although it wasn’t always possible 100% of the time, it was for the vast majority. The biggest issue, as I alluded to above, is the visual look and feel and how that affects the screens.
The two biggest issues we’re currently encountering which we’re struggling with is related to the combo box (pull downs) within LandlordMax. In Windows, the combo boxes are the same size as the text fields whereas in the Mac OS they’re much larger (especially in regards to height, and only somewhat in length). Because of this, and because we have to suppport the 800×600 resolution (a full 15-20% of our customers still use this resolution), we’re very limited in screen space. What’s happening is that these combo boxes on the Mac OS are taking up much more space than they should, and hence pushing things down on the screen (and sideways as well). On some screens this isn’t a big issue, but others were space is very limited (for example the Scheduled Tabbed Panel), this means that some of the fields no longer show up on the screen, they’re pushed down off the screen.
Below is a screenshot below of LandlordMax on the Mac OS. What we’d like to do is bring the combo boxes down to the same size as the fields.
The second issue has to do with auto-fill combo boxes, such as the “Type of Payment” field in the screenshot. For some reason, the auto-fill combo boxes are not being rendered correctly. If you look at the screenshot closely (you can click on it to see the full sized screenshot), the field has half of the combo box missing. I suspect this also has to do with the same issue.
So far we’ve looked at a number of solutions which haven’t quite worked for us. The first, and what looked like the most promising, was the QuaQua Look and Feel. They’ve noticed this issue as well us and have rectified it in their own custom Look and Feel. When we implemented it, it did indeed resolve the combo box issue, but unfortunately it also caused many other issues. With this Java Look and Feel, they seem to overwrite many of the manual settings we programatically apply in the software. So for example, if we set a background color of light blue on a panel (or component), it seems to ignore this and apply it’s own Look and Feel. Therefore this solution isn’t quite working for us right now.
We’ve also looked at modifying the Java Look and Feel by just changing some properties, but as we’re not familiar with this aspect of the language (actually very few people are which is why I’m posting it here today), it’s just not working out for us as we intended. We’ve had some moderate success with this solution but not enough yet.
There are some other solutions we’ve looked at, but as far as I can tell, the best solution is to modify the existing Look and Feel. Either by modifying the Mac OS Look and Feel or by extracting what we need from the open source Quaqua project…
If any of you know how to do this for the combo box that would resolve both of our issues, I would be extremely grateful. Not only that, as a show of my appreciation, I will award a $100 Amazon gift certificate to the first person who can give me a direct solution that we end up using!
Permalink to this article Discussions (11)
LandlordMax Customer Testimonial
Yesterday we received the following great testimonial from Bill Anthopoulos who manages several properties in Ontario and Quebec (Canada):
“I speciallize in University Housing through Ontario and Quebec. I love the Product. You really did a great job and carved out a niche. I’ve recommended you to two other well established Property owners. I’ll keep talking about you.”
And upon asking him if we could use his comment above for our testimonials, he added the following:
“I’m starting up a Property services firm and this software will definitely be a major selling point in acquiring clients and instilling customer confidence. I am truly impressed with the speed of your responce time on a Saturday at 10:00PM. As I hope to grow, I will definetly work with any future products you may put forth. “
Thank you very much Bill for the great comments! They’re very appreciated.
Permalink to this article Discussions (1)
Interview
Ben from StartupSpark.com just posted up today an interview he did about me and my company LandlordMax. It’s a great interview, and I’d especially like to thank Ben for taking the time to interview me. As well he had some very complimentary comments about the interview:
“Stephane understands what it takes to be an entrepreneur. When I ask him about competition, he hits the nail on the head. When I ask him about what it takes to start a business he demonstrates incredible passion. You’ll have to read the interview to see what he says.”
Thank you Ben for those amazing comments!
Just an extra little note, for those of you who aren’t familiar with Ben’s blog StartupSpark.com, he’s been doing interviews with other small software vendors and getting their take on what it takes to make it. There’s some really good interviews there, I personally got some great nuggets of information from all of them. One interview that I particularly liked was with Ian about his company HelpSpot. So go check it out, there’s lots of good information.
Permalink to this article Discussions (4)
Manufactured CD's
Up until this week, we’ve normally had our CD’s created on an as needed basis. That is to say, either we created them ourselves through the special machine we purchased, or we sometimes had a local printing shop create them. Each CD is customized to the customer, which includes your personal license code, etc. saved on the CD itself.
On average only about 10% of our customers choose to have a physical CD shipped to them. Interestingly enough, for the first year or so we were open, we didn’t even offer the option of a shipped CD with your purchase. But enough people requested it that we had a CD professionally designed which we now optionally ship. Over the last year or so as our sales have increased, where we’re now at the point where it no longer makes sense to have them manufactured in-house or even by our local printing shop.
Therefore, we’ve just ordered our first test run of 100 manufactured CD’s as a test from a larger printer/manufacturer to see how they would turn out. Although I know that ordering in larger quantities does drop the price, I’d rather pay a bit more now per CD to see how they turned out. This way in case were not fully satisfied with the end result, or even just with the manufacturer, we’re not stuck with 1000’s of bad CDs. So far I have to say I’m very impressed with the manufacturer, the CD’s look great as you can see in the image above.
I’m really happy that this initial test run succeeded so well. And it’s great to see the company growing to a stage where we now need to do CD production runs rather than one-offs! I can’t wait until we do our first full run, this time for at least a full 1000 CDs at a time!
Permalink to this article Discussions (10)
What's New at LandlordMax?
I’ve just noticed that since we released the latest version 3.11a of LandlordMax Property Management Software I haven’t really written much about the company, at least not much from behind the scenes. I did write a few articles, but nothing much about what coming up for the future.
Well, along with our current ongoing development, we’re currently pushing two major initiatives for the near future. We’re currently doing a complete redesign of our purchase pages as well as trying to get a version LandlordMax for the Mac OS.
We’re redesigning the purchase page for several reasons, most of them forward looking. Firstly, we came to the conclusion that our current purchase page is not entirely clear in conveying its purchase options. For example, we’ve noticed an upward trend in the number of questions related to what the purchase options are. This could possibly be due to the increasing traffic we’re getting, but either way we’re receiving more and more support requests from people asking about the different purchasing options. For example, we get questions about the difference between the downloadable and shipped version, as well as what’s the difference with the “upgrade” version. For us it seems simple, but that’s very likely because we’re biased from working with it everyday. At the end of the day, if people are asking the question, we’re probably not clearly explaining things (The Design of Everyday Things).
Although this is still in development (and hence still subject to change), one thing we’ll that will definitely be modified is how you enter the shopping cart. Rather than show the initial six options from our current purchase page, which is probably too many options to start with anyways, we’re going to show only two options: “Are you a new customer?” (default) and “Are you a returning customer?” (which you will be able to validate by entering one or two fields directly below).
Then once you move past this screen, you will be presented with your shopping cart (containing only your license for LandlordMax at this time). Directly below there will be an “Options” section with items you can optionally add to your shopping cart. The first option will of course be the option to have a retail CD shipped to your mailing address. We’re expecting that this simple layout and conceptual change will better convey that this is an option and not a different version of the same software. Again, another great snippet of advice from the book “The Design of Everyday Things”
Looking forward, this also gives us the option to pursue some of our other future objectives. I’ve been considering for some time now of offering a multi-year license as part of the purchase options. So for example, if you want to save money now and lock in your price for future upgrades at today’s price, we could offer you an additional upgrade license for 1-5 years right now with 50% discount. Just imagine if you had that option with Windows! What about 10-20 years? I don’t know if we’ll ever offer this far into the future, but I have to admit I’m very tempted to try a 1-5 year extended upgrade license option. If this interests you please feel free to comment below. As well, if you own an ISV, or if you work for a company that’s tried this, please comment on your experiences. Actually I’d love to hear any and all comments on this option!
We also looked at another extra purchasing option for the last version that we unfortunately had to push back for now. Part of the reason was the implementation time of the feature itself, but part of it was also that the purchase pages weren’t ready to support it. With this new revamp we’d be more than ready. For those of you who are curious, I’d say more but I don’t want to give our competitors an edge. As far as I can tell we’re the only ones who would offer this service in our market!
The other big objective I mentioned is that we’re looking at offering a Mac version of LandlordMax Property Management Software. I don’t know if we’re going to, but we’ve already started to take the steps towards this goal. For example, we’re in the process of purchasing the necessary hardware to test and tweak the current version for the Mac OS. The good news is that LandlordMax is written in Java, which is platform independent. The bad news is that we use some third party tools and frameworks, and not all of them are platform independent. So it all comes down to how much effort is it going to take. We won’t really know until we’re right in the midst of it but I think it’s worth the time and money to investigate.
Why are we trying to hit the Mac market? For several reasons. First and foremost, we get a lot of requests by Mac users for a Mac version of LandlordMax. I don’t know the exact numbers, but not a week goes by without requests as to whether or not we support the Mac OS.
Secondly, if my “guesstimate” is right, it shouldn’t take an inordinate amount of time to offer a Mac version. Again it all comes down to how well the third party tools and frameworks work in a multi-platform environment. We won’t know until the hardware gets here for us to really test. As well, will our screens look good on a Mac? That is how many GUI (user interface) tweaks will we have to do? We have some unknowns but we’re going to really take a crack at it to see if it’s worth the effort to expand into this market.
Thirdly, it will give us an additional revenue stream. I don’t know what the percentage will be in terms of total sales, but from what I’ve seen there are few if any competitors in the Mac market for this space. That’s a good thing!
Fourthly, it will increase our web presence. What we might not make in terms of sales, at least compared to the Windows market, we’ll make up for in terms of extra web exposure and presence. By offering a Mac version, we’ll be mention on many new websites that we don’t have a presence on right now. And if we’re lucky, we’ll become the de facto standard for property management software in the Mac world!
So there you have it. We’re always extremely busy here at LandlordMax. Not only are we working on the next version of LandlordMax but we’re also trying to expand the company in new directions. These aren’t our only initiatives, these are just the most advanced and active right now. We have many other venues we want to pursue but we unfortunately we can’t be everywhere. I’ve already alluded to one other future object, and I can also tell you that we have at least three other major objectives we’d like to hit by 2008! This year should prove to be an exciting year once again!
Permalink to this article Discussions (3)
LandlordMax Customer Testimonial
We very recently received the following great compliment about LandlordMax:
“We have just started w/ your program in the last 6 weeks and are really liking it – and your tech support has been great.”
Pat Young
Thank you Pat for the great compliment on both the software and the technical support!
Permalink to this article Discussions (0)
LandlordMax SSL Certificate is Fully Operational Again
I just wanted to take a minute to let everyone know that our (LandlordMax) SSL certificate is now back up and we’re again a “trusted” website. I again apologize for this inconvenient, and you should no longer see any types of warning messages from any web browser.
For those of you who read this and own a business, or are in charge of the SSL certificate for your business, don’t let it lapse. Our sales definitely had a noticeable dip in the interim. The good news is that we’ve already sprung right back up and everything has returned to normal.
Permalink to this article Discussions (0)
| « PREVIOUS PAGE | NEXT PAGE » |
