Fruity treats, customization, and supersonics: FogBugz 7 is here | Hacker News Reader

Fruity treats, customization, and supersonics: FogBugz 7 is here

joelonsoftware.com

38 pointstwampss16 comments

I'm convinced one of the most valuable tricks Joel picked up in his long career is that of producing "truly engaging writing."

Vision statements are common sources of yawns, but Joel doesn't ever let that happen.

I agree; How does one go about learning how to do that?

Practice.

Clear thinking is neccessary for clear writing. For stylistic help, read "On Writing Well" or "The Elements of Style." The best advice in there is to simplify, which is the opposite strategy of the dreaded "business-speak" style.

It also helps to have some personality and humor. You get that by reading funny writers, laughing, and loosening up.

A big part of learning to write well is just doing a lot of it. For me it came in two parts:

- A history of long mails with my best friend (literally totaling several thousand pages)

- Blogging – and not the boring vanilla blogging, but actually building up essays

Being able to write well is really an ace in the hole. I mean, think about it – we know who people like Joel Spolsky and Paul Graham are because of their writing, not because of their software. The software just lends them some credibility when they decide to write about it.

Everyone who replied to you recommended practicing by writing. I would say practice by SPEAKING. Writing is clarity of though + inner voice. "Pitch" your goals to friends and family, one at a time, and run to the keyboard that moment when everything clicks and you have your most powerful tone. You would be surprised by the quality of your writing then.

I even use casual associates; I call them out of the blue months later to catch up, and when it's time for me to answer the "so what you been up to" question, fireworks happen.

- You need clarity and good english. A decent source of this is BBC radio 4.

- Humour which is just a case of reading/watching a lot of funnies and generally understanding humour.

- Self-deprecation, grow thick skin and loosen up. ;)

- But most importantly you need some STRONG opinions.

Creative inspiration is required to write the best stuff and strong opinions will mean you are more inspired to write about particular topics. Find those topics, use all of the above skills and then suck for about 5 years until you get good at it! :)

I have to say, this feels like an example of how not to write a changelog. I skimmed it looking for what was actually improved and only noticed something about the CLR. The signal to noise ratio was quite low. I remember something about fruit and supersonic, but have no idea what those are supposed to mean.

This is the actual "What's New in 7.0" doc: http://www.fogcreek.com/FogBugz/WhatsNew.html

Congratulations Fogcreek! I liked what I saw at the demo site. Might have to consider it over Redmine or Bugzilla + MediaWiki if the price is right.

For tiny teams (2 people) FogBugz on Demand is free. It kicks ass, I was pleasantly surprised yesterday to find the new version. We're currently using both FogBugz and Redmine (two separate projects). FogBugz makes a lot more sense to me: it is polished, frictionless, has great time tracking features and killer graphs (for evidence based scheduling).

I was expecting a less painful way to try FogBugz.

I wanted to get a feeling of the app but filling a form with loads of inputs is definitly not what I want to undergo before a quick overview.

Some access to the real interface one or two clicks away from the main page would be great.

Interesting. We actually put a lot of work into making this easier in FogBugz 7. Now all we need is your name, email address, and a password. That was still too much?

Short answer: Yes.

Throw me into a fresh install propagated with dummy data for a fake company. Make starting the demo a one click operation. When getting people to try things, you really need as few barriers to entry as possible.

What I'm suggesting comes from the same school of thought that motivates Wikipedia to allow edits without signing in, or StackOverflow to allow questions without an associated account.

See Twiddla's sandbox http://www.twiddla.com/ for an example of what I mean.

Throw me into a fresh install propagated with dummy data for a fake company.

You wont be able to see how the field names you have provided correspond with things on the screen. I tried this with our user accounts' "home" areas, and people are not as interested in seeing someone else login area. Seeing your name in small font "[Hello, mahmud] [help] [logout]" etc, makes a lot of difference. My dummy data populator actually takes stuff from your geo location and is very use specific.

+1 - Demo or screencast with 1 click with dummy data.

Note: I know how hard this is and RescueTime should do this too (we're working on it).

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