Windward Studios

Life is Good

We had a rough spell for a good chunk of last year in our sales operation.  Without going in to details we had trouble figuring out how to successfully grow the sale operation. It's amazing how a couple more people changes how a group needs to run. There seem to be certain sizes that change things. I have seen the same thing in small development teams going from 3 to 5 people - it makes quite a difference.

But in December we had our new system in place, and started to nail it. Hit quota, hit quota, exceeded quota. And we're now exceeding quota consistently. It's a really nice affirmation that we have a good system in place now.

So we added a new policy here. Every month we hit quota, the following month work ends Friday at 3:00, and the company pays for beer at the local brew pub after for any who want to go. So the entire company is rewarded for our sales success. It's a nice thing to do and everyone seems to appreciate it.

We also learned that when we do everything wrong, this company still does quite well. Better to do things right, but it's nice to know that Windward has this built in resilience, primarily due to how superior a product we have.

Here's wishing you all have a nice weekend too.

The Windward Community

We've been growing and with the increase in our functionality, and the increase in the number of customers we have, we are close to outgrowing our support website.

So it gives me great pleasure to unveil the Windward 'Ohana. This is our new web community for our customers. It includes a more sophisticated forum, adds a wiki, and my favorite, allows customers to enter feature requests and vote for the ones they would most like to see us implement.

One of the beautiful things about Windward Reports is it requires very little support because it is so easy to use. With this new web community, we provide a full set of resources to complement that ease of use.

And for those that remember Lilo & Stitch, yes 'Ohana means family. Windward is located in Colorado but the roots of its name come from Hawai'i. So welcome to our family. (Interesting tidbit - 'Iolani Palace in Honolulu is the only royal palace in the United States.)

And now Excel

The whole idea of this blog was to push out interesting news here first. Instead once again I'm getting it here last. For those that are not on any of our mailing lists, we now allow designing reports in Excel. We did a couple of interesting things with this.'

First, we support some (not all) Excel functions in our engine. So if in generating a report a line in the template becomes 10 lines of data from a database, and the row under it is a sum(B3), that sum is now applied to all 10 rows as sum(B3:B12). If the output is an XLS file, then Excel will re-calculate the sum - but this is still incredibly useful because the range for the sum was expanded to include all inserted rows. And if the output is Word, PDF, HTML, etc, it is even more valuable because the engine calculates the sum and displays the total as none of those programs can do so.

Second, we support the excel number formatting. This is the capability to say a positive value of 1234.56 is displayed as $1,234.56 while -1234.56 is displayed as ($1,234.56). Again, this means you get the desired output for Word, PDF, HTML, etc., and again, this is something that cannot be done in a Word template.

The beauty of the above (and some other items) is threefold. First, if your output is a spreadsheet, even if it is as a PDF file, then the logical way to create it is in Excel. Second, for people used to Excel for setting up their data, this makes for a much easier design tool. And third, it allows for functionality that does not exist in any other reporting package - but provides that capability in a manner that people already know how to use.

Why we did this now

Ok, so we have this new functionality that turns out to be really useful (and we are getting a strong response to). All because we studied the market, determined what was needed next, and executed - right? Well no.

Actually we were discussing it and had moved it near the bottom of the feature list when one developer got upset claiming that he could implement the whole thing in 2 weeks. The developer in question is very good and we had nothing critical on his plate so I let him run with it.

As anyone who works with developers could predict, it was not done in 2 weeks. But it was a lot further along than anyone had predicted. The engine was accomplishing the basics. So we continued. The formula evaluator, number formatting, and image handling (that one surprised me) all took quite a bit of additional time. And then porting AutoTag over to Excel took almost as long as all the other work put together.

But we're mostly there. We've put it out to get feedback on the feature set and there may be some final tweaking based on that feedback. And the test group still finds bugs daily - but the bug count is rapidly declining.

The key to the effort

The key to being able to do this so quickly was we support the new Excel 2007 XLSX file format only for templates (we do output to XLS and XML(SpreadsheetML)). Because Microsoft shipped a file filter for Excel 2000/XP/2003 to support reading and writing XLSX we were able to not bother with XLS and that saved us a lot of time - but older versions of Excel can still be used because of the MS file filter.

So there you have it, a terrific effort by everyone on the team. If you're interested in more detail on the new Excel support, please click here for the datasheet or click here to get the demo.

thanks - dave

Travels in Uganda

One of our interns after graduating from the University of Colorado went on a 1 month trip to Uganda where she helped out in some of the villages. She sent an email back to the company here afterwards and I think it is so good I am posting it here (with her permission).

Hello once again family and friends!

How is everyone? As you may know, I returned from my trip to Uganda last Monday, the 19th. I was out of the country for 1 month and had an amazing first experience on the African continent. I sent out some pretty long, heart-felt emails while I was there, and I again want to thank all of you who wrote back while I was so far away from home.

There is much more I can say about my time in Uganda, but let's put it this way: when people say that going to Africa will change your life forever, they aren't kidding! Suddenly I'm back at home in the U.S. surrounded by rich white people, and I'm having trouble connecting with reality. Honestly, I'm not seeing the world or life through the same eyes any more; certainly this can be accredited to the fact that my world view has suddenly expanded times a thousand! I would love to tell you how it's changed my life and mind-set, but only if you're interested! So please write back or call if you want to talk - because I would certainly love to talk to you! If you don't want all the details, no hard feelings! But at least have a look at my pictures - they're ALL posted to my Picasa web albums at: http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/BCorbat 

There are tons of pictures, I couldn't help myself. Some are better than others, but together they'll give you a good idea of what I saw and did during my time in Uganda. Each album has a short description on the left and shows a map. I can't add captions cause that will take forever, so if you want to know more about any of them, just ask! I hope you enjoy looking at them as much as I enjoyed taking them and sharing them with you. I also hope they inspire you to travel, volunteer and/or get educated about issues in 3rd world countries such as poverty, AIDS, and hunger. It may be a tired phrase, but I really do believe that one person can change the world - we all can - one act, one person at a time. Since I've been home I've been doing a lot of soul-searching, and for some reason I've been pulled to learn more about Mother Teresa. So I thought I'd share some of the information I've found about her with you:
In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus says that when we meet those in need, we meet Him, and that when we serve those in need, we serve Him. Mother Teresa was certainly a living witness to the truth of Jesus' words, and to their power. Mother Teresa also reminds us that if Christ is present in the poor, we have much to learn from them. They teach us about human dignity, patience, and wisdom. It is, as Blessed Teresa said, a privilege to live with and serve the poor. It is tempting to turn away from the difficulty of suffering, to let someone else handle it, to hope it will go away. But as she exemplified, it is my job, your job, our job to help, somehow.

Mother Teresa was once asked: "Why do you give them fish to eat? Why don't you give them a rod to catch the fish?" She responded: "But my people can't even stand. They're sick, crippled, demented. When I have given them fish to eat and they can stand, I'll turn them over and you give them the rod to catch the fish!" She felt that we each have a role to play in serving those in need. She understood that there are many different levels of service, each of them important. Mother Teresa personally was called to serve at the level where people could not even help themselves; she was called to do work that was essential, and to do work that most of us would never care to do.

Anyway, sorry to get deep on you again, but I can't help it! I hope all of you are well and happy! I can't wait to see many of you when I come home to Colorado for Christmas.

Lots of love,
Brianna =)

"We can find Calcutta all over the world, if you have eyes to see. Everywhere, wherever you go, you find people who are unwanted, unloved, uncared for, just rejected by the society -- completely forgotten, completely left alone. That is the greatest poverty of the rich countries."

"Stay where you are - find your own Calcutta. Find the sick, the suffering, the lonely, right there where you are - in your own homes and in your own families, in your workplaces and schools."

- Mother Teresa

We're in Business Week

Ok, it's the SmallBiz magazine but it is an actual magazine that is in bookstores. Take a look at page 74 of the Aug/Sept issue.

There is nothing major about the story but it is cool at our present size to be the subject of a half page article in Business Week. I would guess that Business Objects (which is a bit larger) is the only other reporting/BI company to make the pages of Business Week.

AutoTag 5 is ready to go!!!

It has been a long road but we have the release candidate of AutoTag 5.0 up on the web. (And this is not a beta release candidate, this is the actual candidate.) We've made it.

I hate the last 6 weeks of the development process more than any because every day it's like you are almost there, but the test team keeps finding bugs or usability issues that require tweaking features or adding new ones.

But we're through that. It's usable, boy is it usable. I remember when AutoTag 4.0 came out and it was a gigantic step forward in making report design easier. At the time we were thrilled and proud because we knew we had something that was so much easier than anything else out there.

And now with 5.0 it makes the 4.1 version look obsolete. One of the things I learned at Microsoft is don't wait for others to catch up, we need to compete against ourselves. And with AutoTag 5.0 we did exactly that. We've made it even easier.

So it was a long process - but well worth it. I am really proud of what the team created. You can see the results here.

As to what is coming next? We are going to slip-stream features in as we complete them and if I had to bet, I would bet on the matrix tag next.

You would think this would be easy

The difficulity of this is blowing me away.

A bitmap is rectangular. However, in many cases the actual bitmap is irregular and the pixels in the rectangle that are not part of the drawing are set to transparent. With the transparent pixels this allows the icons on your desktop to have a non rectangular shape and to go on top of your desktop. Those icons are actually square bitmaps, but with transparent pixels.

In the old days this was handled with 8-bit GIF files where a pixel could be 100% transparent or could be a color in the bitmap. But in today's world of high-res monitors and 24-bit color this does not work well. When you see an icon with a rough edge, you are seeing one where it has just this on/off transparency mode.

About 10 years ago the PNG bitmap format was created and it has a 32-bit mode where the transparency, or alpha channel has 8-bits or 256 values. So each pixel has 24-bits of color and 8-bits of alpha.

A program then blends the underlying color and the bitmap color based on the alpha channel. A value of 100% and the final color is the bitmap color. A value of 0 and the bitmap color is ignored. A value of 50% and they are blended equally.

Ok, so piece of cake. Simple concept. Well supported output format. When a graphic artist creates an image in PhotoShop (.psd file), they can just render it to a 32-bit PNG file. Artists for 2-D PC games do this all the time.

But... but...

In the last 2 months we have asked 6 different graphic artists to do this - and they have all been incapable of doing so. And what has really blown me away is that they have not really even understood the concept - to the extent that some send an 8-bit GIF file and are apparently unaware that they have dropped from 24-bit color to 8-bit color.

Maybe I'm expecting too much but I figure artists making a living creating bitmaps for the web would be capable of creating 32-bit PNG files. Because for irregular bitmaps, that is the only way they should be rendered now.

ps - If anyone knows of a url that is a tutorial for doing this in PhotoShop, please post here because there are apparently a large number of graphic artists that need to know how to do this.

Latest version of Kailua released

We have merged all of our .NET open source code into the Kailua project and just put a new release up here. Like many other companies, we have made good use of open source code and this is our way of giving back.

We have also contributed in various places in the Java world but there we are merely contributors to existing projects. In this case, we have created our own open source project and we have had several thousand downloads to date.

What this provides is:

• A very lightweight API for ADO.NET that adds some basic functionality. We have drivers for Sql Server, Oracle, DB2, MySql, ODBC.NET, and OleDb.NET that adds things like a standard way to put parameters in a select statement.
• An extension to TimeZone that can create a TimeZone for any of the timezones in the world and can set their time changes for any given year. This information actually exists in the Windows registry so all we have to do is retrieve it.
• A class that will open an XML file for almost any given sharing configuration (such as is a share for domain users on a domain you are not on).

If you find this code useful, please do let us know.

AutoTag 5.0 is entering beta

Well we finally made it. I hate the last 2 months of the development cycle because the end seems so close but it's still weeks of hard slogging away. But we're through that. We've finished the internal beta except for 1 piece of code that should go in Monday.

So early next week - customer beta! And if you would like to see a preview - click here.

We made NBC News (sort of)

NBC News aired this segment two nights ago about people breaking in to Hollywood by posting their videos. One of the main examples are Barats & Beretta with parts of the Cubicle War clip shown. No mention of Windward per-se but it is parts of our clip shown a couple of times.

It's amazing the mileage this keeps producing. If only all our marketing could deliver this much bang for the buck.