NBD Tech News

New Sites, New Blogs

I'm changing the "structure" of my online presence, at the beginning I used this blog for everything, but I'm trying to separate things so it's easier for people to follow the various things I'm involved with. NirDobovizki.com - what's I'm doing right now and generally the hub of everything I do online. NirRobotics.com - my new blog about 3D printing, IoT and embedded programing WPF post and announcements about Nbd-Tech products will continue to be published on this blog.

Plans for 2014

The last post was about what happened in 2013, now let’s talk about the plans for 2014: yaTimer Time Tracking Software yaTimer is still my flagship product and will continue to be in very active development. Hopefully the great big update – version 3.0 – will finally be released this year. Giraffe Upload Photo Backup Software I will continue to support and fix bugs in Giraffe Upload but I don’t expect any major upgrades in 2014. I really like Giraffe Upload and use it myself but I have to admit that it is unlikely...

What happened in 2013?

Every year I write a post summarizing what I did in the last year and my plans for the next year, I’m not going to break this tradition now. The short story – I worked in the data security field (specifically, on-line fraud prevention), this was super intensive and left me completely burned out, I stopped working in this field and I’m not going to do anything like that again. I’ve been out of the security field for a few month but haven't completely recovered from my “burn-out” yet – but I’m getting better quickly. So, how...

2012 Summery and Plans for 2013

2012 was a very eventful year for me, at the beginning of the year I completely stopped doing client work and concentrated full time on products – then in the second half of the year I had to take too much client work and couldn’t spend nearly as much time as I wanted on the products. There are some changes in my personal life that are going on at the moment (all good – don’t worry) that will again free up my time to work on the product. Like every year here are my summaries and plans for...

Are you a freelancer or a consultant?

Are you a freelancer or a consultant? do your clients pay on time? do you have a good system for remembering to send friendly reminders to clients that tend to pay late or some less friendly reminders to client who are late? If you do have a system to get your clients to pay on timer tell me about it (preferably via a comment on this post – but you can send me an e-mail if you want to keep it private), if you don’t go to http://InvoiceSquirrel.com Invoice Squirrel is a system that track outstanding invoices and...

5 hours of downtime

My server had 5 hours of downtime today, it was completely my fault and I’m very sorry. I don’t take this lightly, I care very much about uptime, in most months my uptime is above 99.9% and even in “bad” months I keep it above 99% – such a long downtime happened only once since I stopped using shared hosting (and that time was my fault too, I’ve learned from it and didn’t make that mistake again). This is the story of what happened, this is not an excuse but just what happened. I had a lot...

mystery time management product (for FREE)

I’m preparing for a new time management related product and I’m going to give it away for FREE (yes, that’s right, for nothing) in exchange for your feedback, if you’re interested go to http://eepurl.com/jPVwP and enter your e-mail address. I will only make this product if enough people show interest, so register now or the new product will never be made. Also, this offer is open to everyone so by getting friends that need time management help to register you can increase the chance that the product will be made. Here’s the link again: http://eepurl.com/jPVwP The...

Why I’ve started a photography blog

So what possessed me to start a new photography blog, especially when I already barely have time for all the projects I already have? Quick answer: the two following pictures where taken at the same location, one after the other, with the same off-white wall as the background (click image for the blog post about how it was taken): They both only had minor color corrections (less than one minute work using free software) and I got the black and white background only by changing camera settings and the position of the flash. They are...

Plans for 2012

In the last blog post I’ve talked about what happened in 2011, in this post I’ll talk about plans for 2012, but first a disclaimer: A year is a long time for a software company, this post outlines the current plans for the year but those plans will change as the business and technology environments change during the year So now that we got that out of the way here are the plans for the various products: yaTimer time tracking software and yaTimer Central yaTimer and yaTimer Central will continue to be developed based on customer...

2011–the year that nothing went according to the plans

Again this is the time of year for summarizing the passing year and making plans for the next one. Businesswise nothing went according to plan in 2011, some things went worse than the plan and some things were way better. The bad parts are mostly traced to several months I was so swamped with other work I had nearly no time to work on my products, here are the 2011 plans and how they turned out: yaTimer time tracking software was supposed to have a major upgrade – in reality it had many...

Introducing www.usefulphototips.com

I just want to tell everyone about my new photography blog useful photo tips. Every week I’ll write about one photography challenge (how to photograph mirrors, how to create motion blur, etc.) or one photography concept – the posts will be practical, easy to follow and with lots and lots of example photos.

What’s going on here at Nbd-Tech

I haven’t written here in over a month, probably the longest time in the history of this blog, you may be asking yourself why – but, if you are like most internet users you are bombarded by so much new information every day you probably didn’t even notice the lack of posts here. The reason is that I was involved in a project I hated – and it just sucked all the creativity out of me, I just couldn’t bring myself to write here. But now this project is finally over and I’m back – and busier than...

The disappearing February newsletter

I didn't send the February edition of the yaTimer newsletter, it was completely my fault - I planned something special for the newsletter, didn't finish it in time and had no backup plan with normal content I could use. If you are following this blog you may have noticed I didn't post all that much the last few months (and even this post should have probably been posted two weeks ago when the newsletter was supposed to be sent) - this is because I've been so busy I just didn't get around to blogging (or doing the newsletter) -...

2010 Summery and Plans for 2011

2010 was an eventful year for me, it's a little strange looking at my plans for 2010 blog post and see how much things turned out different then I planned them. Here is a quick look at all of my products, what happened to them in 2010 and what's planned for 2011 (disclaimer: you can expect the same accuracy in the plans for 2011 as there was in the plans for 2010 - that is, things will change) yaTimer time tracking software There were two major updates planned for 2010, version 2.6 and version 3.0. Version 2.6...

Server Upgrade

The VPS holding this site was just upgraded, now it has lots and lots of extra capacity to support more users for both of my web applications: yaTimer Central (sync and collaboration tools for the yaTimer time tracking software) and Squirrel Clock (employee time and attendance tracking software). Everything is supposed to keep working just as before, but if you see anything wrong please contact me.

Blogging Software Updated

I’ve just finished upgrading my blogging software to the latest version, you shouldn’t notice any difference. If you see any problems with the blog or the rest of the web site please e-mail me (the address is in the page footer) or use the contact form. Thanks

Status Updates and Plans for 2010

I’ve been so busy lately I didn’t have time to blog so I’m writing this post to summarize everything I’m working on and my plans for the future. The most important thing for 2010 is the decision to retire StartMenuSearch and focus on time tracking and time management related products, this will let me expand the Nbd-Tech product line in a way that makes sense from a marketing perspective. I’ve released the second time tracking product - Squirrel Clock – and I have 4 (yes four) other time management products in various stages of planning and development. ...

Retiring StartMenuSearch

I tend to have a lot of software installed on my computer this obviously means I have a lot of items in my start menu, on my old XP computer the start menu was so big it didn’t fit on my screen. The Vista version of the start menu solved my problem, the menu layout was changed to accommodate more programs and the search feature made finding the program you want to run easy. But I was still working on some XP computers – and so StartMenuSearch for Windows XP was born (I was actually using it before...

Most Popular Posts of 2009

2009 is coming to as end and it’s time to look back on what we did this year. Here is the list of 10 most popular posts of 2009 on this blog: WPF XAML Data Binding Cheat Sheet Getting a WPF application to pick up the correct regional settings WPF Printing Part 2 – The Fixed Document WPF Printing Part 1 – Printing Visuals WPF Data Binding Cheat Sheet Update - The Internationalization Fix ...

Moving Servers

I’m moving this blog, the Nbd-Tech web site, e-mail and everything else to a brand new web server. I’m trying to complete this move with no interruptions – buts its likely there will be some intermediate problems while services switch over. I apologize in advance for any problems that ay happen – and if you can’t use this site or send me e-mail just wait a little and try again.

Post to Twitter

I’ve just added a small feature to this blog, every post now has a “Post to Twitter” link at the bottom (near the date and the comment count). Now every twitter user can tell everyone about any post in this blog with just one mouse click. This feature was inspired by How to Use Twitter as a Twool by Guy Kawasaki , currently those links are available only on the web-site and not in the RSS feed.

Silly Marketing Trick 1 – FreeTimeTracking.org

December is a slow month for time tracking software sales, so this year I’ve turned off my advertizing and I’m going to dedicate this month to all sort of ways to increase awareness for yaTimer. My first project, a little early (since it’s not December yet) is www.FreeTimeTracking.org – a list of free time tracking tools with ads for yaTimer, yes, I’m giving people a list of my free competitors and displaying ads for people looking for free stuff, two things that can be considered stupid – but I’ll try it anyway. The list is open for everyone, if you know of...

StartMenuSearch Discount

Starting today you can buy StartMenuSearch for just 9.99$. This is your chance to get the software that will make the XP start menu usable again for less then what it’ll cost me to buy a nice sandwich. This is part of an experiment to find the right price point for this product, so I can raise the price at any moment – don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Updating the Blog Design

If the blog looks strange you might need to refresh the page. The old blog design was a very advanced, simple, semantic-markup, pure xhtml/css design – the result of this very web-savvy design paradigm is that the very advanced layout didn't display correctly on, well, all browsers, but each browser displayed it incorrectly in a different way. I'm going to stop now so this doesn't become a rant about the poor state of web design and just introduce you to this new poorly coded not advanced at all design that both looks nice and actually works on all browsers. The blog is just...

Hello, World

Hello everyone, my name is Nir and I’m the owner, CEO, developer, tested and janitor of NBD Tech ltd. I was inspired by many people to start my own software company (I’ll link to them later) and to blog about it. I’m currently working on a very impressive product – that I’m not going to talk about yet. The reason is not that I want to keep my mystery product secret, I don’t think secrecy is a good marketing method, I’m just not sure when it will be ready and I don’t want to over-promise or to sell vapor-ware. Until my big product...