I’ve just re-planted our VMWareFB OpenStep display driver to Github, and I’ve updated our existing web page accordingly. Precompiled, compressed configs are now available in the downloads section of the new Github project page.

Special thanks to Andreas Grabher and other folks over at www.nextcomputers.org for solving the chronic problem of running at resolutions higher than 1024×768. Andreas has provided an updated source tree and config file, so after 8 years we’re moving from 1.0.0 to 1.1.0.

It’s been almost 8 years since Bill Bereza first wrote this SVGA driver for our customers over at Valley City Linen and we’ve hardly tinkered with it since. Lots of people have found and used it over the years, and are still using it today. It’s a pleasant surprise that it continues to work reasonably well for people out there in NeXT land.

Now that the code is out where people can freely update and re-release it, I hope to pull in a few interested members of the NeXT/OpenStep community and let them take it from here. I know a few people have privately hacked or updated the driver to work better for their own installations; I’d love to have them fold those updates back into the public source.

(Thanks to Marissa Christy for the cool logo sketches!)

On September 22nd, Atomic Object co-founder and president Carl Erickson will be the guest speaker at the Lakeshore Advantage e2e Series. Erickson, who served as a professor of computer science at GVSU for 10 years prior to founding Atomic Object in 2001 will be presenting "When a professor has to start a company: the story of Atomic Object."

Since its 2001 inception, Atomic Object has continued to grow. Posting a consistent yearly revenue growth, and now employing 24 full-time employees, Atomic Object serves as a model for software startups. By focusing on maintaining a diverse clientele, quality, and the needs of customers, Atomic Object has achieved success and earned a national reputation for excellence.



The e2e Series, which stands for "entrepreneur to entrepreneur", focuses on connecting business leaders of today with the entrepreneurs of tomorrow. Erickson's story and success will undoubtedly inspire and motivate his audience, comprised largely of young professionals, to take a bold step of their own.

The free event starts at 5:30PM (refreshments provided) and is hosted courtesy of Lakeshore Advantage, a full service startup incubator. For more information, please refer to the event website.

Pomegranate Studios, the masterminds behind the international ArtPrize contest, worked closely with Atomic Object to develop an application to let voters use their iPhone to participate in the event.

ArtPrize is a radically open competition where the winner is decided by public voting. Starting on September 23rd, the contest will run for two weeks with the final winner announced on October 8th.



The ArtPrize app allows users to locate artists' installations throughout downtown Grand Rapids, utilizing Google Maps on the iPhone. Once you've registered to vote, you can easily vote for your favorite artists using the app. The app also encourages users to engage with others via Facebook and Twitter, allowing audiences to express their opinions and observations in real-time. Mlive, a statewide Michigan news site, praised the ArtPrize app for its usefulness--particularly for the ability to preview artists' works and locate venues.

Atomic Object is pleased to be a part of something so creative, innovative and beneficial for the community of Grand Rapids.

The ArtPrize app is available the App Store now. Click the button below to see it in iTunes or just search for "artprize" on your iPhone.

One of the many perks of being an Atomic Object employee is the community snack table. AO keeps a variety of snacks (as well as coffee, of course) stocked and on-hand at all times. This not only benefits Atomic Object employees, it also benefits AO’s clients for a number of reasons.

The table provides employees with a snack break and a chance to clear the mind, but it also is a community area where employees can gather and converse. While typical talk of the weekend or politics can be heard at times, employees have just as often found themselves engaged in spontaneous problem-solving sessions.

Employees engaged with other projects can provide valuable insight and advice based on past experience that can ultimately lead to a solution for the issue at hand. Conversation around the snack table provides a chance to gather input and advice from other employees who may have had prior experience with similar projects or situations. This translates to more value for the client and increased productivity and efficiency for AO.

The snack table also builds community among AO employees. The kitchen surrounding the table is set up much like a typical home kitchen, creating an inviting and warm atmosphere for employees and visitors. Employees bond over conversation and snacks, which leads to a tighter relationships and a stronger workplace camaraderie. The table benefits Atomic Object, its employees and their clients in substantial ways, making the snack table an integral part of Atomic Object’s vibrant culture.

It may seem a bit odd for a software company to sponsor a bicycle race, but Atomic Object has been doing just that for the past two years. The Fisk Knob Time Trial, an annual 17-mile race that pits some 150+ cyclists against the clock, has become an integral part of AO culture. It may not be obvious why a software company would sponsor a bicycle race, but we’ve found a few solid benefits over the past few years.

Community – Employees are encouraged, but not required to participate in the event. Despite this, AO still finds over half of its staff participating in the event—some 10-12 riders, partly of their own volition and partly from good-natured pressure from other staff members. Employees often train with each other outside of work, building relationships, and keep each other on track for their race-day goals.

Health – A healthy staff is a happy staff. Not only does a healthy staff lower medical expenses, a healthy staff is also more productive and energetic. Employees who may not otherwise exercise much have found themselves goaded into participating, only to develop a love for cycling.

Culture – AO has had employees riding to work on a daily basis almost since formation of the company in 2001. Employees encouraged each other to ride, to the point where an office “bike culture” developed, leading to the installation of bicycle racks and a helmet reimbursement program, in which employees can be reimbursed for the purchase and use of a bicycle helmet to encourage safety and commuting via bicycle. Many AO employees regularly participate in year-round cycling events and races outside of Fisk Knob, but for many, Fisk Knob is a foray into the world of cycling.

Exposure – Atomic Object’s commitment to Fisk Knob as a positive local event gives AO a strong community presence, and a chance to give back to the community that has supported them since 2001. The sponsorship makes AO highly visible within the local community, and develops the AO brand as one interested in building that community.

AO’s sponsorship of Fisk Knob may be hard to link directly to increased business or revenue, but symbolically and internally the benefits are clear. It is a chance to both invest in something the majority of AO’s employees value, and the community surrounding and supporting AO. It encourages a healthy lifestyle and creates relationships within the office that extend far past the walls of 941 Wealthy St.

Rapid Growth TV created a video about Carl Erickson and Atomic Object. Check it out on the Rapid Growth Media site.

http://www.rapidgrowthmedia.com/features/rgtvatomicobject.aspx

Over the last 18 months, Atomic has made significant growth in our product development services. We now kickoff most projects with an initial discovery and design phase. In this phase we grow our understanding of the client's domain and their vision of the software they want to build. We create artifacts like financial models, personas, wireframes, visual mockups, prototypes and release plans. Eventually, we create a backlog of estimated stories that the development team can start implementing in the development phase.

A few developers at Atomic have shifted into a UX role. We've been growing the company's awareness of UX and product development practices. Last Thursday and Friday Atomic held an in-house UX workshop led by Lane Halley and Jeff Patton. The workshop exercises focused on a speculative development opportunity Atomic has been considering.

Thursday morning started by Lane and Jeff asking what we wanted to get out of the the workshop. They built a backlog of objectives for the workshop and included what we wanted to learn.

Once the schedule was set, we started by talking to the project's stakeholders about their general ideas for the project. Lane and Jeff gave a sample stakeholder interview with one of the stakeholders. We were taught some interview techniques and had the opportunity to practice interviewing with partners. We had some interview candidates lined up for the afternoon so we put together an outline of interview questions.

After Thursday's lunch we slimmed down to a smaller group. This group refined and organized the interview outlines. We conducted four interviews as pairs while the rest of the group observed. We had a retrospective after each interview where we compared notes and critiqued the interviewers.

On Friday the whole company came back together and the interviewers shared their notes. The notes were taken on cards. The cards were laid out and grouped together based on observational similarity. We constructed provisional personas (obviously real personas would require more research) from our notes. Each persona had a name, attributes, objectives and values. We broke out into teams and constructed context scenarios for each persona.

After Friday's lunch, Jeff had our product stakeholders define their high level business goals. We discussed what would constitute success. The discussion gave us insight into what kind of metrics the software may need to provide.

Then Jeff asked how we define a user story. This was a rich discussion that gave us insight into how much we have internalized user stories and how the simple definition of a story has changed over time

After our user story discussion, we extracted activities from our context scenarios. Jeff led us through an exercise where we created a story map. We organized our activities and derived stories from the activities. We looked to the project stakeholders for story validation. We then engaged the stakeholders in release planning using the story map. The exercise showed a great way to prioritize high level stories before fully defining the details required of a finer grained story to be entered into a development backlog.

The workshop ended with a retrospective where the entire company asked questions and shared thoughts.

I'm very excited to see Atomic continue to grow in our UX and product development practices. We've stayed at the forefront of agile development and management for some time. While there, we saw that our clients needed help in formalizing what their project was, who it was for and what business value it would provide. That need and our drive for excellence has pushed us forward to better help our clients. We are enjoying the ability to provide the necessary up front services that ensure we are developing successful products.

Mock Draft Central was just written up in the Wall Street Journal. That’s what happens when your technology beats out huge competitors like CBS Sports for two Fantasy Sports Trade Association annual awards. Congratulations to Jason and Jeff at Mock Draft Central for recognition of their work.

Mock Draft Central was Atomic’s first Flash project, and first speculative equity investment.

Just today someone told us he heard you can’t do real development in Ruby. Funny – the AGI Goldratt Institute paid us a whole bunch of money for nothing then. It must be that their brand new, multi-platform, JRuby-based desktop simulation app doesn’t exist. Pity.

Based on our search traffic, the posts by Shawn and Matt on desktop development in JRuby are our most popular:

• Desktop Application Development in JRuby
• Rolling a JRuby desktop application

Now that the AGI app we couldn’t name in those previous posts is done, we can talk much more about how we put it together. The most exciting point is that Ruby can be used successfully for large-scale desktop development.

UPDATE (February 4, 2009): Added demo movie goodness provided by AGI.

Read the rest of this entry

I’ve become a local history nerd. My first big project is now online—a comprehensive look at Atomic Object’s historic building and the surrounding neighborhood. It’s fascinating stuff. Though I admit I’m fairly well biased here.

UPDATE (January 7, 2009): The local history department of the Grand Rapids Public Library featured our history project on their blog.

It’s been a long time coming. Funny how real work can get in the way.

• Unity – Unit Test Framework for C
• CMock – Mock Object Generation Framework for C
• CException – Exception Handling in C

Unity and CMock began life as quick and dirty little tools Atomic Object used internally for our first client embedded projects. CException was born in our most recent X-Rite work. Our colleague at X-Rite, Mark Vander Voord, made significant contributions to all three – especially CException since he wrote the whole darn thing.

More client news:

The idea came to Rick DeVos while he listened to church leaders describe how they were going to use email to help people get involved in church activities.

“It seemed like a nightmare of useless emails filling up everyone’s mailboxes, and an administrative nightmare,” DeVos says. The more he thought about it, the more he realized there was no online tool to help organizations connect people in need with the people who could help.

So DeVos talked to Ben Gott and the two created TheCommon.org, an online site that helps people lend a helping hand.

Grand Rapids innovators develop online ‘helping hand’

Client news:

So far the 2-year-old firm based out of Franklin has three full-time employees and has raised more than $1.3 million in seed money from venture capital firms and angel investors.

CircleBuilder, which offers Yahoo Groups-like services to churches, is about to bring in another “big chunk of change” as it prepares to close another round of seed money investing. The firm hopes to open its site to the general public this summer and hire 15-20 people by the end of next year.

“I am trying to do all of my business in Michigan,” Brown says. “My lawyers, CPA and technology firm [that’s us! -ed.] are in Michigan. You have got to start something in this state because we’re too reliant on the auto industry.”

CircleBuilder paces its growth, looks to add 15-20 jobs in two years

I resisted the urge for a pun about meeting the "Atoms Family" or some cringe-inducing line.

We've had some new Atoms join the Molecule (Nate Lokers & Eric Hass). And, we decided it was time to update everybody's bios on our website. We get really positive feedback from customers and potential customers about our bios. The visibility into our company and culture via the bios seems to really connect well with the outside world. So much so that we give periodic attention to them and always feature them as a link on our website's front page.

So, feel free to poke around and meet the Atomic Object Molecule.

We continue to look for good people to hire. If you're interested, start the process.

UPDATED (Aug. 10, 2008): Links removed from Nate & Eric as they no longer work for us.

The Molecule needs more good Atoms. We’re looking for solid generalist developers and especially those with strong working knowledge of web programming.

Atomic Object people are more than technical wizards; they’re also proficient in writing, managing changing requirements, working directly with clients, and satisfying customers. They care about good code, create tools to make tasks easier, are skilled at problem solving, think testing is essential and not optional, and know how to learn the things they don’t know.

If you’re comfortable with anything from web to desktop to systems programming, have a good working knowledge of databases, already know several languages and enjoy learning new ones, and are handy with more than one operating system, then you might just be the kind of proficient generalist we’re looking for.

If you can analyze web applications down to the HTTP protocol, think in terms of interaction design, and roll your eyes when you see HTML listed as a programming language, you might be the kind of web-savvy developer in whom we’re interested. We look for depth in our developers – much more than only a resume dripping with a web-flavored alphabet soup of acronyms.

Poke around our site and this blog to learn about us.

» Start the Hiring process.