Rastin Mehr

This is the 100th post from a dyslexic mind who thought he could not write to save his life, so for all of you avid bloggers out there, please don’t laugh! This was seriously an achievement for me.

I must say that Twitter has contributed a lot, and all those microposts of 145 characters pushed my mind to write a few more words. I also learnt that I don’t have to write full blown articles all the time, so in 2009 if my post is too large to fit on Twitter, It’ll qualify to become a blog post.

So Happy New Year! We know it is a bit late, but we have been recharging our batteries and reviving ourselves from the hard work we did in the last few remaning weeks of 2008. A lot of good things happened last year such as the Anahtia Social Engine Project, starting to develop iPhone Apps, moving our office to the heart of Yaletown Vancouver, and much more.

to mark the 100th post we would like to mention some of the popular rmd studio blog posts here:

• What is Business System Analysis?
• Not all programmers can develop software
• Computer Programmers’ Skill Set
• To Better Protect The Democratic Internet
• Engineers Vs. Architects
• When Corporate IT Resists the Open Source
• Bringing back the Zen to programmers

So what else is new?

A lot actually. In a nutshell here is the list

• Anahita Social Engine project is growing fast and it is now Google Open Social compliant. Within 60 days, we are about to launch a client project which has more than 200K users, and it is powered by the Anahita Social Engine. We are going to launch the support and distribution website for the Anahita project this year.
• We are now developing iPhone Apps too! We are about to release our 2nd client project which is a Medical Calculator. Do you have an iPhone project, please bring it on. You know that millions of iPhones have been sold and millions more will be sold this year right? You can also sell them on the iPhone Apps store and make money! That’s right, there is business model right there. So bring on those projects, and we would be happy to help you
• We’ve received many encouraging responses for the RubberDoc project, we are also overwhelmed by large number of support requests ( here and here ), which means we have to setup a system so we could get paid for the hours spent on the support, or else we won’t be able to do a good job keeping the users happy. We will be further improving the Joomla RubberDoc extensions mainly becuase some of our prime clients such as SPARC BC are currently using it.
• New rmd Studio website and blog are being developed, we need to upgrade and improve our websites as we do every new year.
• rmd Studio is Blessed to be working with such a great team of associates such as JenTekk Web Solutions, Peerglobe Technology, Joomlatools, and Rockettheme.

[tags]rmdstudio, newyear, anahita, rubberdoc[/tags]

Here is a little tip to make your price negotiations easier during the 2009.

As technology experts we often like to use every opportunity to remind our clients that we are on top of things and perfectly able to take care of their problems.

It is a bad idea that while we go through their list of requirement to say:

“Oh that’s easy!”

“Oh that only takes 20 minutes”

“Oh that’s just a (insert fancy technical name) that’s fine!”

Because then client will be having a difficult time justifying why on earth they should be paying you big bucks for jobs that are too easy, take 20 min to implement, and use technologies that are common place!

The reality is that:

Easy jobs will still take up some time to be implemented and the Client is billed for those hours.

Once tunned into the work mode, Programmers, Designers, and those who are in love with their work often don’t realize how fast time is passing, so several hours actually do feel like only 20 minutes.

So next time that we see an “easy” list of requirements, it would be better to say, “Sure, we know exactly how to do it, how much time do we have for this?”

Trust me! Your price negotiation will  go through a lot smoother!

[tags]tips, consulting, price quote, business, negotiation[/tags]

Congratulations Johan Janssens for being the most valued person in both Joomla and Mambo project.

“His work on Joomla! is excellent.”

“Johan is responsible for the development of the Joomla! Framework., he lead the Joomla! project to become the succesfull project it is today.”

“Johan is the man behind the amazing architecture design of the only PHP based CMS with a solid development framework.”

Packt Publishing has announced the names  of most valued people in different open source content management system projects. These names have been put forward by the core development and community members of these projects. Johan has been the former Lead Architect and Project Manager in the Joomla Core development team.

Currently Johan Janssens is the Managing Director and Lead Architect in Joomlatools. He and his team are responsible for amazing projects such as Nooku an amazing content translation solution and also he has done great framework contributions to our ongoing project the Anahita Social Engine framework.

Perhaps you have noticed the lack of activity on our blog and website. No we haven’t won any lottery tickets yet ( we don’t buy any ), but for the past few months we have been really busy with Client projects and also moved offices to Downtown Vancouver in the beautiful Yaletown area.

Our new office is located at #109 – 1118 Homer Street, Vancouver, BC (Google Map). We are the very social people offering Social Media solutions.

When we take a break and go for a walk, this is our view.

We are still unpacking and organizing the new location and try to keep up with the client projects in the same time.

Ash Sanieyan from PeerGlobe Technology. He is the best freakin Software Architect you can ever find

My wonderful friend Elliot, brought us awesome chocolate goodies! This fellow is my hero!

Another good news is that we have been working hard lately on the Anahita Social Engine project with my wonderful team-mate Ash Sanieyan from Peer Globe Technology and some great help from the folks at the Joomlatools. We like to think that the public GPL release of Anahita will be out within 4 months or less. If you like to get constant updates regarding the progress of the project please feel free to subscribe to my tweets

[tags]rmdstudio, office, peerglobe, anahita, socialengine, vancouver, yaletown[/tags]

Aug 25th Update: we have just resolved 2 bugs regarding the doc reordering in the Administration back-end. We aren’t going to release a new version for only 2 bug fixes, so if you have downloaded the version 0.9.6 prior to this date, please download and install the extension again, or simply update the source code files for the administration back-end.

Now RubberDoc can not only keep your Docs in a row, it can keep them in Order too! We have implemented ordering for the categories and category pages. You can even assign ordering from the edit RubberDoc Plugin.

This was a one day update, based on some requests from our Client SPARC BC and some of the recommendations that all of you have provided.

We apologize for not being as responsive lately in answering your comments posted here. We’ve head an early Fall client rush and we have to deliver all of those contracts that we sign. If you have any immediate enquiries that requires enhancements to the RubberDoc, you can always hire us. In the mean time we do our best to respond to your questions here on our blog.

This project has been first inspired by our client Social Planning & Research Council of British Columbia (SPARC BC) you can see RubberDoc being used to manage more than 140 documents on their website. We have just launched their Joomla powered website few days ago.

• To learn more about RubberDoc: Go Here
• To see some screen shots:  Go here
• To Download RubberDoc: Go here
• To post your Questions or Feedbacks, please either post them as a comment right here or on my business associates blog post. We would be glad to answer your privately sent questions as well in exchange for a consulting fee.
• To view the previous support page Go Here

Updates

21-Aug-2008
+ Document ordering has been implemented
+ Download Link ordering within the articles has been implemented

Please Feel free to improve the code

The source code is released under the GPL license, so feel free to read through it and improve it if you liked and in that case please give us a copy too. You will get credit for your contribution on the “About” section of the component.

Credits

RubberDoc is a collaborative project done by:

• rmd Studio – Development
• PeerGlobe Technology – Development
• JenTekk Web Solutions – Documentation and Testing

If you find this extension useful, we would really appreciate it if you leave positive ratings and reviews here on this page

[tags]rubberdoc, joomla, extension, document, asset management, content management, cms[/tags]