We’re doing some upgrades to Xero this coming weekend, 8-9 November. During the upgrade Xero will be unavailable for approximately 24 hours beginning at 12:00am Sunday 9 November NZT (click here for your local times).

The upgrade includes some great improvements to credit notes, plus it lays the foundation for many upcoming features, including multi-currency.

We’re sorry if this causes any inconvenience.

You might regard it as a welcome holiday from your accounting!

Our Xero network continues to grow and one of the interesting parts of my job at Xero is identifying new opportunities and industries to work with.

We have a number of tourism operators using Xero which led me to think about what system would these tourism operators be using for their online bookings, and how could we make their lives even easier?

BookIt is the premier online booking processing service for the tourism industry, providing solutions for many of New Zealand’s leading tourism companies including Tourism Holdings, New Zealand Tourism Online and Christchurch Airport. Suppliers of tourism products including accommodation, activities, tours and transport can benefit from the increased exposure that BookIt offers through the reseller network or use the BookIt system on their own website to take direct bookings.

The BookIt system automates many routine tasks including payments, settlements, vouchering, cancellations, amendments and invoicing. We are working with the team at BookIt to take this one step further by integrating with Xero. If you would like to participate in trialling this integration then we’d love to hear from you - please contact us on network@xero.com.

Is Xero the first accounting system in the world to work on Google’s new Chrome browser? We think/hope so:)

As Google Chrome is based on Webkit, the core engine under Safari, it seems to work fine. The browser detection objects we used haven’t been updated yet so we had to do some tweaking to allow users to log in from Chrome. We’ve updated BrowserHawk settings to pass Chrome through as Safari 3.1.  (You can check your browser here:  http://help.xero.com/browser)

We thought that some of our geek fans would be all over Chrome today and want to test it with an application that uses ajax and javascript heavily.  Let us know what you think of performance and any issues you find. 

I’ll be over in Sydney in September running my rapid prototyping workshop as part of the Oz-IA conference. For people in the online business, the full conference program features a fantastic line up of topics and people covering design and usability issues. The other workshops look pretty choice, too.

As I’ve mentioned before, in my workshop I show several prototypes from the very early days of Xero and a few more recent ones. Rapid prototyping in Flash is essential to how we do things at Xero.

What?
Oz-IA design conference and workshops

When?
18-21 September

Where?
Sydney, Australia

How much does it cost?
That depends what you sign up for, but lucky for you I’ve been given a promo code PF0601 to get you a big fat discount.

See you there?

This year Tech Ed NZ 2008 takes place in Auckland from 1-3 September. This is the big event for nearly everyone interested or involved with IT in New Zealand.

Before Tech Ed however, a few of our dev boys are participating in Auckland Code Camp happening Sunday 31 August, 9am - 6pm. This is being put on by the .NET User Group, thanks in part to our own Senior Developer Kirk Jackson, who is one of the organisers. It’s entirely free, thanks to sponsors like Datacom and Intergen, so tell all your coder friends to go for the free lunch, some giveaways and good times.

One of the speakers this year is another Xero, software developer Owen Evans. Owen will be presenting on a new framework for creating web based applications that Microsoft has been hard at work on, called the ASP.NET MVC framework. Owen will discuss what it is, why a new framework is necessary, all the benefits and why you should be paying close attention to it.

Next week I’m doing a workshop on Rapid Prototyping in Flash (no experience with Flash necessary). In addition to the hands-on work, I also show a lot of different prototypes that I’ve built over the years, including several from the very early days of Xero and a few more recent ones. As I’ve said in the past, rapid prototyping is essential to how we do things at Xero.

The next workshop is happening Wednesday 20 August. Here’s a brief summary of the what the workshop provides:

• Hands-on lessons for building prototypes in Flash (no experience in Flash necessary)
• Insights into the process of design iterations
• Insights into working with developers, investors and other stakeholders
• Receive a design template with a library of design elements

When I did this workshop last month there was a great mix of designers, developers and biz dev people who all stuck around for an extra hour! Be sure to register ASAP, because it sold out last time and registration is limited to 10 people to make sure everyone has quality hands-on time.

I’m one of the developers working in the engine room at Xero. Recently, I’ve been doing some work on the Xero Network, which is our API (Application Programming Interface) that lets different software solutions exchange data with Xero. For instance, a project management system can exchange data with your Xero account so your contacts are all in sync, your account codes come across and the invoices you create will automatically appear in Xero.

These software connections help make your life easier, it automatically keeps your accounts up-to-date, and it eliminates data-entry errors.

For software developers, we currently publish information on how to use the API with Microsoft’s .Net programming language. However, I wanted to build something in Ruby, another popular programming language. So I spent a day coming up with a few examples of using Ruby to connect with Xero.

I’ve posted my Ruby examples over on my personal blog. Have a play with it and please let us know how you’d like to use the API. We’re always looking for useful ways to connect Xero with other software.

As Chief Technology Officer at Xero I spend a lot of time on the performance and scalability of the Xero application. Most of my work has been at optimizing our database and production infrastructure, but for quite a while now I’ve spent a lot of time on the user experience and the next release of Xero will highlight the fruits of that labour.

In the spirit of sharing what I’ve learnt with the development community I thought it was about time I presented at the Wellington .NET User Group meeting run by our very own Kirk Jackson. It’s been one of those things I’ve been meaning to do for a while, and was great to be able to present on some of the challenges and solutions we came up with to speed up the user experience for our customers. Thanks to everyone that was there.

You can view my presentation below. For people that were there it’s slightly different since a lot of it requires me babbling on so I’ve added some extra bits here and there to make it clearer for people viewing it for the first time.

I’ve had some great feedback on the presentation so if you’re interested in me doing it again to a more general audience then let me know and I’ll gauge the interest. It’s a topic I love evangelizing and it’s useful for anyone doing web development no matter what the technology.

As a .mac user I recently received an email from Apple regarding their new MobileMe service (described here). The email states that MobileMe is happy on any Mac or PC. Any PC not running Internet Explorer 6 that is:

“To use the new web applications, make sure you have one of these browsers: Safari 3, Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox 2 or later”.

We’ve been pushing our IE6 users to upgrade for some time now, but as you can see from our own statistics below even though the number of you using IE6 is falling it still represents a significant portion of usage:

Now it seems others are picking up Apple’s lead and are discontinuing IE6 support. 37 Signals announced last week that they would be phasing out support for IE6 from August 15 2008. Their main reason for doing this is because they believe they cannot deliver the user experience their customers deserve while still supporting IE6. Even though we agree with this wholeheartedly we feel they’ve missed the biggest reason about why you should not be using IE6: security.

As of June, 2008, Secunia, a company that publishes vulnerability and virus information on products, reports over 130 vulnerabilities in IE6, and 24 of them still aren’t fixed! Compare that to other browsers:

As you can see, anything is more secure than IE6 and we believe it’s our duty to get our users using the most secure browser they can, especially when it’s their own financial data that might be at risk.

Before we make a final decision on our own phase out of IE6 support we want to know what you guys think – would you mind if we stopped supporting IE6?

All of us at Xero want to say a big thank you and good luck to our two Summer of Code students, Balsam and Ryan. They’ve both been valuable members of the development team and I’m sure we’ll see more of them in the future.

Summer of Code is a great programme and it shows in the calibre of the students on offer. It’s not just about a summer job - it’s about getting some real world work experience and we hope to see Balsam and Ryan back next summer as graduates as well as a couple of Summer of Code newbies.

Ryan’s come a long way from having to rewrite his first project to presenting to the dev team all the stuff he’s done. One of Ryan’s claims to fame is the New Zealand map made up entirely of old Xero business cards.

Balsam’s been a great resource for the product team and has done a bunch of work on testing and analysis for the application and also for the service delivery team.

Balsam will be around for a bit longer - she’s doing her thesis on Xero with a presentation to the team at the end of this year.

We want to wish you good luck for 2008 at uni, and thanks for being part of the Xero team!