Points of Interest

Kitchen rendering created using interiorcad

After months of many additional office hours, we finally made extrablocks.com officially available. While interiorcad mainly is a set of plugins for Vectorworks, extrablocks is a platform for sharing contents like symbols, textures, but also manuals and other stuff for Vectorworks.

The initial content mainly addresses the needs of kitchen builders and interiorcad users, but this will change soon. extrablocks.com will become a common platform for Vectorworks users, and there will be frequent updates providing fresh contents.

To avoid the manual download, extraction and installation hassle, extrablocks is capable to feed its contents (youtube video) straight to the right places in interiorcad. For non-interiorcad users, a plugin will be available which will provide similar ease-of-use for users of Vectorworks Architect, Landmark, and Designer.

An intense week passed by. Though we focussed on many (insert arbitrary factor here) details, we failed miserably and screwed up the first cut of the german interiorcad DVDs. At the very end it just does not matter what we did well and how much we focused on so many details. It also does not matter how hard we worked to get things done. The only thing that counts is whether we get our bits and bytes to our customers.

It is my job to shield my colleagues who do the actual work behind the scenes. If there’s failure, it is my job to step forward and to get bashed for it. Fortunately I’m in the lucky position to have a great leader and a crew of excellent colleagues. If they fail, I just didn’t coach them good enough. I apologize.

So we spent some extra hours in the office today (not to mention the past days and weeks). What about 8/5? Frankly, I do not care. My work is not duty, but passion. As it is for my colleagues. So what?

Due to external circumstances which are out of our control, we are more than late with the release. I’d like to grab the occasion to thank my colleagues for the hard work and our sales department for the patience and understanding. I really expected being bothered much more.

I’m glad we finally got all of the new features out of the door. Due to the delay, we had some extra time to stabilize the new features, so interiorcad 2010 finally became a very nice product. Hope our customers will enjoy it.

Am I pleased? Yes and no. Learn more. Work harder. Do it better. And enjoy the journey!

Today we put interiorcad 2010 into production stage. During the next couple of days, we will iron out the last glitches while already testing the installers, on both Macintosh and Windows platforms.

I will post details about its cool new features on the interiorcad support page. Of course the main intention is just to wet your appetite :) .

We hope to get it finished before december (yeah, 2009 of course). But don’t quote me on that.

Enthiosys shares an interesting article concerning agile product managers and product owners. Of course they are painting a somewhat »ideal world«™ or at least a product manager under ideal circumstances. Real life, however, is much more complex as their article admits.

(more…)

After two weeks of vacation, I spent the first day back in the office. I immediately was back to 120% CPU load, doing what my job is: Helping others getting their things done better and more efficiently.

Everything was just as I never had been away. Even the coffee machine noticed me being back and begged for maintenance :) .

Frankly, I enjoyed it. Thanks to the crowd, and special thanks for obviously keeping as much of work as possible away from my desk while I was unavailable.