This site will henceforth serve solely as an archive of old posts that I’ve written. From now on, I’ll be writing over at The Masterplan.

I’ve been meaning to learn Python for the past few months, but something or the other has always gotten in the way. I finally got started a month or so ago, and I have to say, Python is a very elegant (and powerful) language to program in.

I’ve learnt “enough” basic Python to start playing around with Django, a brilliant high-level Web framework that “encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design”. I’ve just gotten started, and so far it’s been fun. I’m really looking forward to building Django-powered Web sites/applications in the near future.

Ruby is another language that I started learning along with Python, mostly to see if I wanted to use the Rails framework. Ruby is a great language as well, and seems to have a lot in common with Python. But when it comes down to it, I think I just “get” Python better than Ruby. I’m going to go with Python (and Django) for now, but will definitely consider learning/using Ruby and Rails in the future.

Also, I’m not sure if I want to work with PHP any more.

‘A Byte of Python‘ is a great book to get started with programming in Python, if you’re so inclined.

After a bit of a lull, here’s the latest in the ‘Sessions‘ series of interviews on The Masterplan; an exclusive interview with Jesse Grosjean, founder of Hog Bay Software, best known for his popular WriteRoom application. For those of you who haven’t heard of WriteRoom yet, here’s how Jesse describes it:

WriteRoom is not Microsoft Word. It won’t generate a table of contents, it won’t place borders around your documents, and it doesn’t have an animated paper-clip looking over your shoulder. Instead WriteRoom just provides the essential features required to get words on the page. Stay focused with WriteRoom’s distraction free environment. Stay on track with word count. Stay safe with autosave. You just type, and WriteRoom will do its best to stay out of your way.

To start with, what have you been up to of late, both personally and with Hog Bay Software?

My focus at Hog Bay Software has been on TaskPaper 2.0, since, well last October when I released 1.0. My initial plan was to release 2.0 a month or so later — well, that’s obviously not quite worked out, but 2.0 is coming along nicely I think. I make fairly regular “development” drops in my user forums for users to try out and comment on.

Personally, we have a two-and-a-half-year old, and thats been taking up lots of my free time in a great way. We are also planning a month long trip to Korea and Japan in a few weeks (in celebration of my wife’s graduation with an engineering degree). So that’s the big exciting thing we are looking forward to.

Would you like to tell everyone reading this a little more about Hog Bay Software? When was it formed? What made you start your own software company?

I started working on “it” (had a few other names to start with) when the OS X beta came out. At the time my real job was at the university of Maryland HCIL lab, working under Ben Bederson. He was doing lots of cool research in zooming user interfaces, and I helped write the frameworks to support that work.

In many ways, that was pretty much the perfect job, but in the end I still wanted to work “all” on my own and that’s why I started Hog Bay Software. I was particularly interested in the Mac from the technological side of things — I wanted to be working in Cocoa, instead of in Java, which is what I was doing my job in.

What other names had you thought of for the company? How did you come to settle on “Hog Bay”?

For a bit I was “Livingsoftware”. There I was trying to encode some of my goals (flexible software that involved my users) in the name. But it turns out that even though livingsoftware.com was available, there were lots of different companies that thought the term was “theirs”.

I decided to go with “Hog Bay” because that’s where I grew up. And my parents have a shop named “Hog Bay Pottery and Weaving“. So I was pretty confident that I wouldn’t have trouble with other people thinking that they owned the name.

For a while, the “Hog Bay” name seemed to be a bit of a drawback — I had quite a few people e-mail [me], saying that they loved the apps, but hated the name, but for some reason (I think once I’ve become a bit better known, and people have had a chance to get used to it), all those complaints seem to have gone away. Probably been years since I’ve [last] had a complaint.

Why did you choose to develop software for the OS X platform specifically?

Cocoa, or Objective-C, specifically. I’ve always wanted to be a SmallTalk developer, but I’ve also wanted tight integration with “real” frameworks. Objective-C seemed like the closest match. I can’t say that it’s my favorite language — I’d rather be using something closer to SmallTalk — but for me it’s the best language that’s “native” to an OS platform for building commercial applications.

You mentioned earlier that you’ve been doing this since 2001. Would you care to elaborate on some of the applications that you’ve developed over these seven years?

Sure. The first was HBTimer (or well for a while LSTimer). The idea there was to create a the simplest possible app, so that I could have time to figure out license keys, payment processing, website, etc. In the end, it was a pretty good way to go, but I wish I’d thought a little more about the app — for me, it didn’t turn out to be all that useful, so I didn’t really use it myself very much.

After that I started HBNotebook (later named Hog Bay Notebook). That was sorta my “dream” app, for keeping organised. I concentrated on that app for a few years, and then did a rewrite for OS X 10.4 that used coredata and named the new app Mori. And then worked on that app until last year when I sold it to Apokalypse Software. Along the way I also rewrote and renamed HBTimer to Clockwork, which was also sold to Apokalypse Software.

The Hog Bay Notebook/Mori series was lots of fun, but in the end I felt that I’d somehow missed something, because in the end I found myself still using TextEdit to keep many of my notes. That’s when I decided to approach the “note” problem from the other end and focus on really simple applications. For example, TaskPaper started out as TextEdit, and then I just added features (as I used it more and more) that would make it better for storing notes and tasks.

And last, in between Mori and TaskPaper is my most popular app, WriteRoom. That started out as a feature request for Mori, people wanted a full-screen editing mode to edit there Mori notes. Lucky for me I decided to write that feature as a separate app.

Now, WriteRoom is really popular. What’s important is that I didn’t invent the whole full-screen thing, or even [come up with] the revivial of the whole full-screen thing. But what I did do is turn that “feature” that was part of a number of other apps, into just a simple application with no other baggage. And I think that made a big difference. Since then, most of my smart moves have been resisting the temptation to add more features.

Coming to WriteRoom, it seems to be one of the most popular apps available for OS X. Also, a lot of people swear by it when it comes to the productivity aspect of it. You’ve received a lot of great reviews from prominent publications as well. How does that make you feel?

Great! And lucky — I can’t say I really expected or planned the success. Mostly, I’m trying to just study it really hard to see what made it happen. My big takeaway has been that the amount of work that you put into an application doesn’t have a huge correlation with its success. Hog Bay Notebook/Mori were moderately successful, but I put years into them. The 1.0 version of TaskPaper took about a week, and in that time it already got a lot more interest than Mori/Hog Bay Notebook ever did.

My one regret is that I did add RTF text editing to WriteRoom. I really wish that I hadn’t added that, though I won’t be taking it out at this point. Who knows, maybe RTF is what made the application successful — but personally, I hate that feature!

What would you say the average user base is like for WriteRoom? What do people mostly use it for?

Unfortunately, I don’t really keep very good track of things like user base or what people use it for. But since I released TaskPaper last October, WriteRoom’s sales have really picked up. At least a couple hundred a month. My guess is that many people use it for medium-length writing like blog posts or long e-mails, but I don’t really know.

Mostly I go by the requests from people in my forums, and generally, those are just detail requests — they don’t give me great insight into how people are using the application.

Do you use TaskPaper and WriteRoom on a daily basis? What do you use them for?

I use TaskPaper on a daily basis for all my notes and tasks, which are generally all related to Hog Bay Software. I don’t use WriteRoom everyday, but I use it when I need to really focus and write something carefully. Or often, when I want to brainstorm an idea. For instance, I’ll use it when I’m writing a project description page for my website, or when I’m brainstorming a solution to a problem that I’m working on.

Nice. That seems like a good way to come up with stuff, actually.

Yeah, I think that plain text is a great brainstorming medium, for me [it's] almost always better then the graphical brainstorm/mindmap tools that are availble. I always used to use TextEdit, but I think WriteRoom has a big advantage over TextEdit for brainstorming.

WriteRoom and TaskPaper have both widely received good reviews as applications that enhance productivity. Having said that, what is your take on the whole obsession with productivity that seems to be happening on the Internet due to sites like Lifehacker?

As someone who has created software that makes people more productive, I’d be interested to know your perspective on the whole thing. Do you think people have started to get more hung up on deciding which application to use for a given purpose, instead of focusing on getting the job done?

Hard to say. I think it’s really a bit odd — I have two apps, WriteRoom and TaskPaper, but I’ve never been a very good writer, and never been all that organised a person. But the “problem” of figuring out how people work and think has always (at least since I started programming) interested me.

As far as productivity apps go, I really like the ideas laid out by GTD, but in the end I don’t actually practise them very well myself. I mostly start up my computer every day, and mess around until I find something that I want to work on; I don’t just jump from one action to the next. But that’s why I think TaskPaper has received the amount of interest that it has. It supports getting things done for people who work that way, but it also supports just recording information for people who aren’t very disciplined.

I’m not really sure about the second part of your question. I’d say that in many cases, yes, people do get hung up on stuff, but that doesn’t really mean the applications or ideas are bad, just that people (myself included) are often good at wasting time.

I guess that’s a good, fair answer that plugs my product in the end… ha!

Ha. Notebook-style applications like Mori have slowly been gaining a lot of popularity — there are the Web-based apps like Google Notebook and Zoho Notebook, and then there’s Evernote, which offers both Web-based access and a desktop client. Have you played around with any of these apps? Do you regret selling Mori when you did?

No, selling Mori was the best thing that I ever did. I think it’s a great application, and “notebooks” are a useful software category, but for me personally, I finally realised that notebooks were not the way that I worked. In the end, I don’t like to collects lots and lots of information (I use Google for that) and so all the search and scalability provided by a notebook interface didn’t turn out to be that useful to me. And just typing into a text file like TaskPaper, where I can see everything at once in a big scroll view if I want, works much much better for me.

What software do you personally use on a daily basis?

I’m ashamed to say that I’m not much of an app connoisseur myself. Mostly Xcode, Safari, Mail.app, then NetNewsWire, iChat, and recently Twitterific.

Do you have any other applications in the pipeline that people can look forward to, or are you focusing all your attention on TaskPaper and WriteRoom for now?

Yes, but it’s a long pipeline with a lot of twists and turns. So I would say that realistically, it’s just WriteRoom and TaskPaper for now. Long term, I’ve been talking with Keith Blount (of Scrivener) about writing an app together — that would be lots of fun, but we are both so busy with our current projects that it could be a few years. And of course, even next week is hard to predict, so a few years is even harder.

I also have some ideas for “mini” applications, one for the iPhone (no, not TaskPaper yet) and one for iTunes album art. Those might come out sometime soon, but they will be “mini” apps from a developer whose “big” applications are WriteRoom and TaskPaper.

Do you have any advice for aspiring programmers/application developers reading this interview?

First, do it instead of thinking about it (you can spend years planning out potential projects), and second, keep everything as simple as possible for as long as possible.

I have tons of advice, but I’m really not sure which parts of the advice are good and which are bad, so I’ll just stick to what I said earlier. I guess I’ll add one more thing — read a bunch of marketing books. Marketing isn’t really that bad of a thing (well, you have a choice about how you do it), but it is important to tell your story as clearly as possible, and marketing books can teach you things that your programmer brain might not figure out. Actually, this forum contains a pretty good outline of my recommendations for building Hog Bay Software-style applications.

Lastly, do you have any last words for everyone reading this interview?

Nothing much, except that I hope you like my apps!

—–

Thanks to Jesse for taking the time out to do this interview. You can purchase both WriteRoom and TaskPaper here.

I hope you all enjoyed reading the interview. I’d love to know what you thought of it.

Just launched the brand new Split Radio Web site on Sunday night. Started in October 2006 as an extension of Split Magazine, Split Radio is an Internet radio station exclusive to bands from the Indian subcontinent. Over the past year and a half, the radio station has become quite popular in India, and will exist as a separate entity now, and not ‘just’ as a part of the magazine. It was also featured in the inaugural issue of Rolling Stone India (with a picture of me!) last month. Do check it out, there are a lot of really good bands on there.

I also launched a Videos section on Split about a month ago. Some of the featured videos are really well-made, especially the documentary about the Big Chill Festival, Goa. You definitely don’t want to miss watching that.

The past few weeks have been really tiring for me, in terms of work. That situation isn’t likely to improve in the foreseeable future. Not sure if that’s a good or bad thing.

I first heard of and used WordPress a few years ago (back when the latest version was 1.5), only because one of the Web sites I was writing for was powered by it. My first impressions of WordPress revolved mostly around the administration panel — I thought it was fairly easy to use, but looked quite awful. I was also involved with another site at the time that was powered by Textpattern, and compared to that, WordPress definitely felt a bit bulky.

You should know that during this time, I used to work solely as a writer/editor (full-time as well as freelance), and wasn’t too involved with the programming and development side of things. Graphic design (print and Web) was just a hobby at the time.

A couple years later, I was still working as a writer, but I did a lot of design and programming work on the side as well. I launched Split Magazine at around this time (January 2006). The very first edition of the magazine was strictly hand-coded. I was looking for a content management system to power the magazine — I wanted something that wasn’t too complex, had a user-friendly admin panel and allowed you to implement your own designs (as opposed to a CMS that forces you to work around generic portal templates).

Having used it a few years ago, I remembered Textpattern as being quite elegant and easy to use, so I installed it on a test server and started playing around with it. After two or three days of trying to work with it, Textpattern somehow didn’t seem to be ideal for what I was trying to do. I started looking for other content management systems, and ended up trying Typo3, Joomla! and Drupal, but they weren’t the easiest to work with, and just felt like they did too many things. Just to clarify, I don’t mean to be disrespectful to these applications. I have heard a lot of good things about them — all I’m saying is that they just weren’t right for me.

I didn’t even think of WordPress at the time, because I didn’t have a very memorable experience the first time around — and frankly, I didn’t know too much about it. I don’t quite remember the details now, but somehow I happened to come across WordPress, and thought I’d give it a shot — one final attempt before I went back to Textpattern and tried once again to make it work for me.

By then, the latest version of WordPress was 2.0.2. I downloaded and installed it (the five-minute install seemed too good to be true until I tried it out), and was pleasantly surprised by how much the administration panel had improved. I found a nice theme (don’t quite remember which one it was, unfortunately) and tried my best to make it look as magazine-like as possible. With the help of a couple plugins, and after a lot of tearing my hair out, I was able to accomplish that.

I started playing around with WordPress some more until I knew enough to make my own theme from scratch. Around July 2006, I created my first “proper” magazine-like theme (with a white/grey/ice blue colour scheme) for Split Magazine (and was quite proud of that effort), after which I worked on the new avatar of Nirali Magazine with Priya in September 2006. By this time, I was quite sure I could create a WordPress theme based on pretty much any page layout. The current version (in terms of design) of Split was launched in October 2006. Fast forward to right now, and you have this weblog and The Morning After theme for WordPress to add to (several) other WordPress-based sites that I’ve worked on.

As most of you already know, WordPress 2.5 was released a few days ago. This release (code named “Brecker”) features a whole lot of new stuff, including a much improved file uploading system (now with multi-file uploads and progress bars), a built-in photo gallery system, easier plugin upgrades, and a brand new administration panel.

WordPress has clearly improved a lot since version 2.0 (which was a big improvement from version 1.5). I didn’t quite like the direction that the WordPress developers were going in with versions 2.1 and 2.2, but version 2.3 (”Dexter”) was a step in the right direction, and the current release is definitely my favourite version of WordPress by far.

To (finally) wind this up, I’d love to hear about how you got started with WordPress, and your thoughts about WordPress 2.5.

Go.

The much-awaited (if I may say so myself) version 1.3 of the Morning After theme for WordPress is finally out. Get it here.

Version 1.3 of the theme can (should?) be considered as a major upgrade. New features include compatibility with widgets and support for WordPress’ in-built tagging functionality. This version of the theme only works with WordPress 2.3 and above. If you are still using older versions of WordPress to power your Web site(s), then I’d recommend upgrading your WordPress installation or using the previous version of the theme. (Keep in mind version 1.2 of the theme is not widget-compatible.)

I know some of you have been waiting a while for the widget-ready version of the Morning After theme, and I’d like to thank you all for your patience and continued interest in the theme. I hope you enjoy using it.

It’s been a while since I posted anything regarding the Morning After theme for WordPress. Since I released the theme in September last year, the response that it has received has been fantastic, exceeding all my expectations. I’ve seen a lot of Web sites using the theme, and some of them have done a really great job of customising it to suit their needs. Check these out:

London Theatre Blog ⋅ NewEnding Studios ⋅ PopSofa ⋅ The Coveted ⋅ Nyquist Capital ⋅ Bill Nighy Info ⋅ Utah Luxury ⋅ Tube Guitar ⋅ Edinburgh Sucks ⋅ House and Fig ⋅ The Traveler’s Notebook ⋅ Truth on Cinema ⋅ Can We Be Frank?

You can check out a listing of other Morning After-powered sites here, if you’re interested. Feel free to post your own in the comments.

Over the past few months, there has also been a strong community of users built around the use and customisation of the theme, as is evident in the support forums. I’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who has thought highly enough of the theme to use it on their own Web site. I’d also like to thank everyone on the forums who has been volunteering to help other Morning After users with customisation and other issues.

For those of you who have been waiting for a widget-ready version of the theme, I have some good news for you. I will, in fact, be releasing a widget-ready version of the Morning After theme, and it should be available sometime in March.

I have been getting quite a few e-mails from users of the theme, asking me if they can donate via Paypal instead of Moneybookers. I have just added a ‘Donate via Paypal’ button at the bottom of the theme page, if you’re so inclined. As mentioned there, the Morning After theme is absolutely free for you to download and use, and donations are strictly optional.

Lastly, for those of you wondering why the theme is called what it is, here’s the story behind the name. I was actually listening to a Duran Duran song called “Save a Prayer” when I was trying to think of a name for the theme, and as many of you might know, the chorus of the song goes, “Don’t say a prayer for me now, save it ’til the morning after”. ‘The Morning After’ sounded like a cool name for the theme, so I thought I’d use it. Now you know.

What, you expected something more exciting?

I don’t normally like talking about money-related matters online, but over the past few weeks I’ve noticed articles about quite a few Web-based applications that let you manage and organise your money online.

The applications might do a good job of managing your finances, I’m not denying that, but why would anyone voluntarily divulge their financial information and let it be stored online on third-party servers, no matter how secure? Most of those applications might not require you to directly provide your bank account details, but why would anyone let information about their spending habits, bills, cheque books, etc. be stored on a third-party server? Am I the only one who sees something wrong with this?

Those of you reading this: would you contemplate using applications like the ones linked above (or any Web-based service) to manage and organise your money?

For people who run Web sites, one of the most important applications that you use on a daily basis is an FTP client. I’ve written about Filezilla in the past on this weblog, about how it’s a great (and free) FTP client. Filezilla 3, the latest version of the client, is multi-platform — it works on Windows, Linux as well as OS X.

Filezilla 3 works really well, but looks — let’s be honest here — quite unpleasant. The default icon set, progress bars, etc. are terrible. But that’s not really a big deal for Windows and Linux users, as they can change the default icon set easily. I haven’t really found a good way to do the same for Filezilla on OS X.

As far as free, open-source FTP clients for OS X go, Cyberduck seems to be a popular choice. I’ve been using Cyberduck for a while now, and barring the occasional crash while transferring large files, it’s quite a good client. Transmit seems to be the best, most reliable, and most popular client amongst Mac OS X users — and for good reason. It sports a rather slick, usable interface, and lets you get your work done quickly and without any fuss. It is also, I think, the only FTP client for OS X that supports browsing files using the column view — very cool. Transmit costs $29.95 — totally worth the price — but if you wouldn’t like to spend money on an FTP client, then it’s (obviously) not for you.

A couple of days ago, I just stumbled on probably the best FTP client for OS X users. It’s totally free, has the best (in terms of both, looks as well as usability) interface amongst all FTP clients, and is blazing fast. And you don’t even need to install anything. Sound too good to be true?

Hold that thought.

I’m talking about The Finder, of course — the default file manager that comes with Mac OS X. Most long-time Mac users probably know about this functionality, but I was surprised that people don’t really talk about it that much. I mean, I’m using OS X Leopard, and I was able to connect to my FTP server (which was mounted as a network share in The Finder). I was able to browse files using column view (nearly as fast as browsing my local files) and also using Cover Flow. I was able to preview all files on my FTP server using Quick Look. Did I mention browsing files was really, really fast?

I mean, really, I was surprised that people don’t use or talk that much about The Finder as an FTP client.

And then I found out that it doesn’t support uploading files to your server.

Talk about being a spoilsport. Gah. It only supports downloading files from your FTP server, i.e. read-only access. Why would they not support writing to an FTP server? What the hell?

Here is a little bit of a screenshot tour of connecting to an FTP client using The Finder, if you’re interested. Read-only access has never looked better.

By the way, in case you were wondering, this post is missing something important. You know, that thing that people look for at the end of a long, rambling blog post. What’s the term… oh, yeah. A point. There isn’t really a point to this post. Thanks for reading, though.

But while you’re here, I’d love to know what FTP clients you guys use on your OS/platform. I know that some of you like using a combination of a text editor and FTP client — Kate/Konqueror, Coda/Transmit, Smultron/Cyberduck, etc. What do you use?

Note: Linux users can avail of the same functionality present in The Finder. They can connect to a remote server using their file manager (Nautilus, Konqueror), and it works very well. The only difference is, with Linux, you can upload as well as download files. So, not really the same functionality, I guess.

No, I’m not bitter. Just saying.

I hope all of you enjoyed my interview with Evan Hamilton from Flock, the first in the ‘Sessions‘ series of interviews. Here’s presenting the next in the series, an exclusive interview with Luke Stotler, founder of DropBoks, one of the best online storage solutions I’ve come across.

How would you describe DropBoks to someone who hasn’t heard of it?

It is an online storage service. But unlike other services in the market, it is extremely straightforward and simple.

That seems to be one of the most striking things about DropBoks, the simplicity. The interface itself is minimal yet attractive, without compromising on features or usability.

Yeah, that was the goal from the beginning. The reason I started DropBoks was in response to all the other options out there [that] had a hundred and one features that I didn’t want. I just wanted a product that did one thing and did it really well. And since I couldn’t find it, I decided to create the product myself. Of course, it has been a team effort to actually bring my ideas to fruition.

For a lot of first time users of DropBoks, the solution seems too good to be true. First of all it’s free, without any advertisements. You offer 1 GB of space, and users can upload up to 50 MB in one go. Not to mention how simple it is to use — there’s really no fuss involved in the process.

Thanks. That was our goal. We try to make a product that we ourselves would actually want to use.

Really, the first time I came across DropBoks, it seemed too good to be true. I was waiting for something to go wrong, but everything worked extremely well. I was very pleasantly surprised.

Ha, it’s funny you say that, because I had the exact same thought the first time I visited Google. I thought it was broken or something because I was waiting for all the other images to load — and then I realised that there were no other images.

Again, I can’t stress enough on how simple it is to use DropBoks. There aren’t any glaring graphics or unnecessary effects or options. As you mentioned, it does one thing and does it really well. It is quite feature-rich as well, offering users the option of uploading multiple files at once and creating folders to organise their files. Are there any more features in the pipeline?

Oh, yes. But before I go into those I want to stress that any feature we add is very carefully reviewed before we decide to make it part of DropBoks. Part of the reason all the options in the market are so bloated is because they are in “feature race” mode. We are very careful to not be in that frame of mind with our product, otherwise we will have gone over to The Dark Side.

So, new features. The big one we are working on right now is the ability to select multiple files for upload. Meaning that instead of clicking the ‘Browse…’ button and selecting a file, then repeating the process over and over, you will be able to click ‘Browse…’ once and select as many files as you want, all in one shot. You wouldn’t think its that big of a deal, but it makes a huge difference when you want to upload an album with 13 MP3s on it. Also, a visual indicator of a file’s upload progression (progress bar) will be associated with this feature. That way you can see how close each of your 13 files are to being completely uploaded.

After this release, we will be next working on giving the user the ability to select multiple files and folders for download, rather than having to download each file one at a time. We are also going to give the user the option to select multiple files and folders and do different things with them, such as put them in the trash.

The other big feature is the ability to share the files in your DropBoks with someone else.

Yes, that seems to be a much-requested feature amongst DropBoks users.

It is probably our number one requested feature.

So, the aim seems to be that the interface should be as intuitive and work as well as a desktop file manager, along with the added benefits of being online, thus providing ubiquitous file access for users.

Yes. We tend to look at things differently in that we try to figure out the goal of the user and subsequently how to create the simplest path for the user to reach that goal. We are not technology centric. Within the next year we will be launching a huge feature in DropBoks that will take advantage of the blurring of the line between desktop applications and Web-based applications.

Would you care to share what the feature might be?

I’d rather no go too far into that one right now. We’re still hashing out the details. But it’s going to be cool.

I bet. Do you have any sort of timeline for the features you mentioned above?

The multiple upload and file progress indicators will be complete in the next few weeks. File sharing is still probably about one or two months out.

The DropBoks company blog is updated quite frequently, and there seems to be a healthy community of users built around it who offer suggestions and feedback on a regular basis. How important is user feedback to your development process?

Big time! For example I never planned on having the ‘folders’ feature. I thought that it would be visual clutter for the people that didn’t want it. But users kept asking for it over and over. So we launched the feature and people really liked it.

Here’s the thing about us. We don’t believe in egos when it comes to our product — meaning that I could think I really know what I’m doing, but at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter what I think, it matters what the end user thinks. They are the ones using it every day and they also have more objectivity than I do. So when our users talk to us, we listen very closely.

That’s great.

See, my professional training is in User Interface Design and Usability Engineering, so I really understand the importance of what the end user thinks. I try and get in their head when ever I am creating something. I think the reason that there are so many bad products out there in all types of different markets is because the people who create the product think they know it all, or are building the product from a technology perspective. Or a combination of both.

The free account currently offers 1 GB of storage for users. Will users be able to avail of any additional storage plans in the near future?

Within the next month or two we will be launching our upgraded service, so that people who want more storage can pay to get it.

Can you reveal any of the plans yet?

Sure.

1 GB (50 MB per-file maximum) — Free
1 GB (100 MB per-file maximum) — $1/month
2 GB (200 MB per-file maximum) — $2/month
3 GB (300 MB per-file maximum) — $3/month
5 GB (500 MB per-file maximum) — $5/month
10 GB (1 GB per-file maximum) — $10/month

Those plans are quite inexpensive.

Yes, our costs are very low so we pass that on to our users.

What advice would you give to budding developers who are just starting off with building Web-based applications?

I would say the first thing is to hire a User Interface Designer who really understands usability. If they can’t afford that person in a full-time capacity then hire a consultant. Either way, there needs to be someone on their team that really understands how the user thinks. Once that is nailed down, they will have a really good chance of creating a good product.

Other than DropBoks, what Web-based applications do you personally like using? Why?

I absolutely can’t live without Netvibes and Meebo. I think the reason I like them is that they both solve a solid problem and their interfaces are very well designed and straightforward. Del.icio.us, as well, is another [application] I couldn’t live without. Such a good idea, and talk about bare-bones — it makes DropBoks look over-designed. I would also add Gmail to that list, though there are certain things about the interface that really need to be fixed. But I can live with them because all the other features are done well.

Thanks a lot for taking the time out to do this interview, I really appreciate it. Do you have any final words for everyone reading this?

I guess I’d like people to know that in the coming months, DropBoks is going have some amazing features, yet will still remain very simple. In 2008, we will be launching some very cutting-edge stuff, so definitely stay tuned.

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Thanks again to Luke for the great interview. I hope you enjoyed reading it. You can get your own DropBoks here.

As I mentioned earlier, ‘Sessions‘ is a new series of interviews on The Masterplan, and I’d love to hear your thoughts about the same.