When I was a young lad, I worked summers for my dad, a general contractor. It remains a long-standing source of irritation that I was never actually taught any transferable skills during my tenure with his company, but I did master the arts of digging, sweeping and carrying stuff.

In the years since, my Dad and I have found we have a lot in common. As business owners, we both deal with clients. But I think a lot of people wouldn’t recognize the similarity in our businesses: my Dad, a contractor, deals in “real things”, whereas my wares are purely virtual. When someone pays to have an addition put on their home, they can see the lumber and drywall that they’re paying for; these are physical goods that were clearly manufactured, shipped and assembled. Most people see the direct relationship between the money they pay, and the goods they receive.

When things get virtual, the relationship between money and goods becomes more tenuous. Where my dad makes something from nothing, I, well, make nothing from nothing. Web sites, logo designs, magazine articles and the rest of it are nothing more than bits on a computer. One has only to look at the proliferation of music and software theft on the Internet to appreciate the value that many people place on virtual goods.

But the truth is, my business is incredibly similar to my dad’s. Through the use of labour and materials, we both produce finished products to our customers’ requirements. And — here’s the key point — when changes are required, there’s always a cost.

Change management is a broad topic, and one that’s loaded with pitfalls. Here’s my best rule of thumb regarding change management:

The later in the project you request a change, the more expensive it’ll be to implement.

Simple! Here’s an example from a world most people readily get. Say you have an addition put on your house. You initially decide the fireplace will go on the north wall. But let’s say that later you change your mind and you want it on the west wall. When is it the cheapest to make that decision? Before a single brick is laid, naturally; and clearly, it’ll be most expensive when the job is done, and the whole addition has to be torn apart to change it.

So too with my work. But, while the construction example is laughable in its obviousness, the same isn’t true for me. When the physical result of my work is nothing, then it should be easy to get a new nothing, right?

Some people suggest that change requests are a good thing, since they increase the size of a project; ultimately, they put more money in my pocket. And this is true! Change requests happen for many reasons, many of them legitimate. For example, one client, for whom I was building a loan approval application, landed a huge client in the middle of our development process, and wanted the application changed to suit their needs.

But there are times when whim, misunderstanding or simple indecision become the culprits. When that happens, I sometimes can’t convince the client that a real change is occurring; ultimately I either have to give up a chunk of my compensation for the change request, or damage the good will that I ultimately value more than anything among my clients. Unfortunately, I can’t point to a fireplace and explain how tearing it out of a wall would add a lot of work!

Even so, I actually feel a bit sorry for my dad, because while most people can appreciate the costs involved in changing their mind, he still has clients who freely do so without regard for the cost. In my business, it’s getting easier and easier to accommodate change requests, because the tools for building web applications and designing graphics are getting dramatically better. Meanwhile, it’s always going to cost the same to move a hole five meters to the left.

I’ve done it, believe me.

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Among my peer group, I’m considered something of a freak of nature: not really the coolest guy to be around, but handy to have when something goes wrong with a gadget. My sister was just joking with me about how I could take care of any problem that was gadget-related (and let’s face it, there’s no shortage of those!). Heck, she quipped, she could attach an iPod to a toilet, and I’d suddenly be imbued with the power to unclog it.

But there has always been one corner of the technological universe that has remained hidden from me: application development. I’ve burrowed fairly deeply into web application scripting, but this is a far cry from real, honest-to-goodness programming.

Nowhere is that more true than on the Macintosh. Programming the Mac is nothing like any other environment. The Mac makes use of an object-oriented language called Objective-C. And once you get your head around the rules of that language, you have to figure out the incredibly extensive Cocoa frameworks, which connect your instructions to actual operations on the system. Eyes glazed over yet? Yes, mine too.

But I have spent a lot of time in the past year knuckling down on this topic. I’ve pored through books, attended C4, and now, I’m in the later stages of developing my first actual Mac application. It’s a great time to be alive, isn’t it?

But it’s too early to tell you what it is. Instead, I’ll throw cryptic hints, like these two:

• The application’s code name is Quantum.
• It does stuff to your files.

I’m also working with a fine icon designer, Jordan Langille of One Toad Design, and I’m hoping that we’ll have a finished icon to show off in the near future!

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