What is Likeable Software

Software should serve you. It should help you with your work, encourage your creativity, be polite, be knowledgeable, have a good memory, and be ever-ready.

But, typically, the reverse is true. We, the users, are required to find the files, to repeatedly answer the same questions (YES I'm sure), to remember unintuitive commands, and then to be rudely told that we have made errors!

Likeable Software is working to make computers better servants to us, the users, by focusing on human/computer interaction and usability at all levels of software.

We research, design and develop our own likeable software (see Products) as well as for others (see Contracting).

What's new

24 October 2006: Likeable Software has just delivered the final software of Microbric Bric Works. Microbric Bric Works is a program that enables easy graphical programming of Microbric robots (starting with Ai2), downloading programs (and new firmware) to the robot, and an assembler interface to the firmware on the robot.

Likeable Software is proud to be associated with this project, as it will give a whole new generation a taste of programming and robotics, while still being fun and interesting for the older hands among us.

The software was developed under Linux for both Linux and Windows. It utilises the cross platform technologies of Python and wxWidgets (through wxPython) and, being released under the GNU General Public License, can be moved to other platforms easily.

The official launch of the Microbric robot (called Ai2) is planned for the near future. Check out the Microbric web site at www.microbric.com for details, and after the launch, for the software!

16 June 2006: As well as Associate, I am now working on an exciting new contract -- combining GUIs and robots. See today's blog entry for more details.

16 May 2006: Continuing development of Associate, though other commitments (I have been working on some very interesting proposals lately) have made progress slower then I would like. This is especially true as the GUI prototype has suggested some very interesting additions to the requirements -- prototypes are great for usability testing (though external testing hasn't happened yet).

Another exciting area for Associate is the peer-to-peer sharing of data. An administrator will be able to configure a network of machines to share data, after which it will be Associate's responsibility to share queries and data over that network, to replicate data to multiple machines, and to restore data on machine replacements, all automatically. Of course the challenges of data coherency, integrity, and a host of other issues are all non-trivial, which is all the more reason why users shouldn't be directly responsible for them. It's time for software to actually help us!