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Issue 3.5

FEATURE

Postmortem: Redlien Account Executive

Tackling the Business World with RB

Issue: 3.5 (May/June 2005)
Author: Corey Redlien
Author Bio: Corey Redlien is an independent Macintosh software producer, and creator of Redlien Account Executive, a full-featured contact and sales relationship management system for Mac OS X. Contrary to what many might think, his mighty ego is only a small part of why everything is named "Redlien", as it's more of a combination of no decent .com URL's left and a complete and utter lack of imagination when it comes to naming products. He resides in Stamford, CT, working full-time on RAE with his faithful assistant Ruby the English Coonhound at his side. You can even find a picture of her in RAE if you look hard enough! He can be contacted at corey@redlien.com or by visiting his site at http://www.redlien.com.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 23,254
Starting Page Number: 11
Article Number: 3508
Related Web Link(s):

http://www.redlien.com
http://www.redlien.com

Excerpt of article text...

During the spring of 2002, I started working with a partner in the graphic design and marketing services field. As a newly formed service company without any established clients or a marketing budget to speak of, we naturally had to go out and find our clients the old fashioned way. This involved lots of leg work, cold calls, letters, and other traditional sales tools to generate project work. The most important of those, at least at this early stage, was the phone call. Having no marketing budget to blanket Manhattan with our advertisements, the cheapest and most effective method to drum up business was to call our prospective clients and try to set up an introductory meeting.

As anyone involved in even the most basic of sales workflow knows, quantity counts almost as much as the quality of your sales pitch. For every 100 phone calls you make, you may get 10 meetings. From those 10 meetings you may get 1 sale. Because of this basic tenet, sales people will generally have lists of hundreds, or even thousands, of potential contacts, and keeping well organized and good records on those contacts is a definite must. This issue of basic sales contact "house keeping" prompted me to start developing Redlien Account Executive, and having discovered REALbasic a few months prior, it seemed like an attainable goal. I figured I could whip something together in 3-5 months.

Unfortunately for my self-imposed deadline, the last time I had programmed anything beyond simple HTML was back in college, and RB was quite a departure from the non-GUI and procedural-style FORTRAN and Pascal I was used to. Nevertheless, I dove right into REALbasic, working on my project whenever I could, and soon rediscovered my love of programming. Combining nights and weekends with a 1 hour commute to and from New York City every day, I started to build a pretty good framework in a relatively short amount of time.

The User Interface

I decided to start my application where a user would likely spend the most time; the contact information input window. Going through several iterations of a user interface, I experimented with Tabpanels, single view windows, and even having different windows for different functions, finally settling on the multi-panel single window that's in the current version. Although this wasn't the most simple or efficient form of a contact window I could think of, I felt that my target audience would feel most at home here, coming from similar models in ACT! Goldmine, Salesforce.com, and other popular CRM / Sales Contact Management tools. From this basic conceptual design, I started laying out the actual window in RB.

Unfortunately, at this point, REALbasic started to give me some issues. From a technical standpoint, I had identified about 20-30 data points I wished to capture, represented by approximately 80 display elements, grouped into 8 different panels using a PagePanel control. This proved to be an issue with the then-current REALbasic 4.5x. Almost every time I modified, added, or removed an element in the IDE, controls would disappear or mysteriously move around to other panels. Searching through the list archives, I discovered this was a known issue at the time, and with no reliable workarounds.

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