What should a development company look for in real estate? What makes for a good team room? In Episode 8, Allen, Mike and Ed Grannon discuss current and past searches for office space, what to expect when negotiating a lease, and some of the requirements for good team rooms.

An article on Joel Spolsky’s Fog Creek office space Mike mentions: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html

If you have experience designing agile team rooms or looking for real estate for software development, we would love to hear about it. You can provide feedback through comments at improvingpodcasts.com or send e-mail to feedback at improvingpodcasts.com.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 51:33 — 23.7MB)

Episode 7 takes Allen and Mike on a bit of a detour. With Snow Leopard just released and the Windows 7 release available to partners, we take a tour of the new features of each with fellow Improver Leo Sakhvoruk. The feature lists are long and so is this episode.

Find it interesting? Have a topic we should be discussing? Contact us in the comments on the podcast’s web site (http://improvingpodcasts.com) or send e-mail to feedback at improvingpodcasts.com.

Topics:

- Snow Leopard Features
- Snow Leopard and Win 7 compared
- Windows 7 Features

Links to sources:

Snow Leopard
- Photoshop problems: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/512/cpsid_51229.html
- Apple’s info on SL changes: http://www.apple.com/macosx/refinements/
- A bit of detail on the services menu changes and how to take advantage of them: http://www.macosxautomation.com/services/
- A very long Ars Technica review of SL: http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.ars

Windows 7
- MS’s feature list: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/products/features
- Notes on enterprise adoption (BitLocker info): http://searchenterprisedesktop.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid192_gci1360566,00.html
- Info on video memory: http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=645&pgno=3
- A (somewhat old) article on backward compatibility promises: http://gizmodo.com/5070219/giz-explains-why-windows-7-will-smash-vista

Contacts:

- Leo: http://improvingworks.com
- Mike A. (@mikeabney): http://practicallyagile.com
- Allen (@allenhurst): http://ahurst.com

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:39:40 — 45.7MB)