Man, what a week!
It feels great to have finally gone public with FeedLounge. As the alpha launch drew near, I was spending more and more time on it and getting very excited about it – it was hard not to talk about it here. I’m very glad it’s out, and I’m glad other people seem excited about it too.
The last week has been late night after late night – not only getting the product ready to go but also getting the web site set up, the FAQs and tutorial written, the forums set up, the beta tester sign up form, etc. It’s nice to have help on this one. 🙂
Working with Scott again has been a real joy. I’m sure you’ve all worked with certain people that really stand out above the crowd – Scott is one of those. We worked at the same company, though not together, in the late 90’s and then we worked closely together for a year at another company before I moved out to Denver and went solo in 2004. Scott and I have very complimentary skillsets. I’ve got the front-end experience while he has an amazing breadth and depth of back-end skills. Most importantly, we both have the drive to make something exceptional rather than just making it work.
Though we’ve been working remotely on this project, things have gone very smoothly. I attribute this to two things:
- Clear, natural division of responsibilities
- Past experience working together
I think the second of these is huge, we trust each other and know how to communicate with each other. While I’ve enjoyed developing products on my own, it’s also nice to be working with other people on a project again. Of course, being able to pick who you work with makes a big difference.
While I’ve been working on FeedLounge almost exclusively for the last couple weeks, that doesn’t mean my other products are gathering dust. FeedLounge is definitely the shiney new toy, but I’ve also been working on some new features for Tasks Pro™ and Tasks for an upcoming point release. Now that the push to get FeedLounge public is over, I’ll be splitting my time during the week so I can wrap those up and going into a beta cycle. I’ve got features mapped for a few more point releases as well, before moving on to the features for the next major release.
Tasks Pro™ and Tasks are now evolutionary products (though Tasks has been using AJAX since back in 2002) with a large code base while FeedLounge is brand new and I’ve been able to do some experimenting for it – experimenting that I’ve been wanting to do for quite a while. There are a few features and techniques from FeedLounge that I plan to bring back to the Tasks line.
Unfortunately, Photos has been pretty much neglected this past year. I’ve got a long list of features I want to add, but just haven’t had time to get to them. I’d originally planned to spend some time on Photos after the Tasks Pro&trade 1.5/Tasks 2.5 releases, but FeedLounge has been more exciting to work on. 😉 I still plan to get back to it, I’m just not exactly sure when.
I wish I could function better on short sleep – there just isn’t enough time in the day.
This post is part of the following projects: Tasks Pro™, FeedLounge. View the project timelines for more context on this post.