To solve the early stages, I use:
http://www.MockupMagnets.com
Very fun magnetic UI widgets for prototyping on a whiteboard. You should try them!

Eelis from Finland

I’d recommend trying Git, it’s awesome, and Github.com makes the experience even better! 🙂

From splitting up your development into chunks (with the ability to instantly revert to any commit), to branching, to just getting your code into a public repo within 5 seconds, it’s an invaluable tool!

Giles is completely right, this is insane.

Your approach is totally inefficient and dangerous, but now that you’ve seen the light just go for it and use a source control system. After that everything in your life will be better, you’ll sleep like a baby, your teeth will be whitening, etc etc 😉

The truth is that I do use source control, just implemented in a kind of stupid and inefficient way. About once every day or so I copy of the source directory to a backup directory on my hard drive and give it a date. That way I can roll back to a previous date if I need to. Is it the best way to do things? No, of course not and I fully acknowledge that. Setting up an SVN, GIT or Mecurial repository has been on my to-do list for quite a while now, it’s just that I’ve been procrastinating about it for so long that I’ve kind of gotten used to it. Would I ever suggest that someone else follow this approach? No, absolutely not. I just got very lazy about it. I mean at the end of the day I have a copy of the code on the dev server, the staging server and the production server (all off-site) and I have a backup of every day of code on my hard drive and on a thumb drive, so I’m fairly secure. It’s just that it’s sort of a low-tech, inefficient method. Now if I didn’t know what source control was, or had never used it, or didn’t understand it or if I ever recommended that someone else not use it, then I would be an idiot. But that’s not the case here.

But just so you know I’ve already installed TortoiseSVN and I’m in the process of getting a hosted repository set up (Beanstalk), so I’m on the road to salvation! 😉 After Justin’s rant on this topic in the previous show I figured that if I didn’t get something going then I’d have to listen to him rant about it all over again which would be really boring.

Anyway, I hope my confession on the show hasn’t completely put you off to podcast because we have some really cool stuff coming up that I think you’d enjoy. Plus, I’ll be fully version controlled by then. 😉

Sorry, I don’t mean to sound quite so angry, it’s just I’m kinda stunned. The rest of the podcast was very interesting to listen to and I enjoyed it.

Been following Balsamiq and Mockups since day one (or very, very near to day one), and it’s been very inspiring watching it go from a small product which I’d recommend to people once in a while (although I still haven’t brought a license…I’m a student, I don’t have much money to buy software…feel free to send me a free license Peldi! :P), to it exploding into something 37signals interviews on their blog!

Well done Peldi (and co.), and good luck with the future (…not that you’ll need it!)

All in all a good interview, thanks & looking forward to more 🙂

The Four Pillars of Organic Growth: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20080101/how-hard-could-it-be-the-four-pillars-of-organic-growth.html

Here’s some links that I mentioned in the podcast:

Preparing for Launch: http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/2008/04/18/preparing-for-launch/

Marketing Advice: http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/2008/08/05/startup-marketing-advice-from-balsamiq-studios/

Atlassian Values: http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/2008/11/26/why-i-love-atlassian-an-inspirational-video/