Status report, 28 Dec 2007
Another day, another status update.
I’m getting a lot done. What’s amazing me is the sheer volume of work that needs to be completed. I feel like I could keep someone busy just writing material and investigating sales opportunities and gathering requirements and so on.
Yesterday and today, I:
- Bought domains for my filesystem and file synchronizer.
- Set up WordPress on integrifs.com and syncdroid.com.
- Came up with something to share a single WordPress installation between multiple sites. Instead of WordPress-MU (which assumes you’re hosting all sites under the same domain) I put a switch statement in index.php to change database names based on the hostname in use. This is a whole lot easier, especially when the time comes to upgrade WordPress.
- Wrote a bunch of marketing material for IntegriFS: overview, how it works, download and a few drafts.
- Cranked out a dozen pages that I have to write for SyncDroid. I’m just putting the titles into WordPress right now and leaving the pages themselves as drafts, so I can log in whenever and wherever and fill them in.
- Ditto for IntegriFS. There’s a lot of writing to do.
- Set up some Google AdWords for SyncDroid. There’s still a lot more work to be done there.
- Finally found a use for all of those random news aggregators: finding potential customers! I’ve been tracking interesting discussions and gathering a lot of useful information.
- Made some good progress on a WordPress theme that I’ll share across all of my sites. Each site will have its own colour scheme to differentiate it.
- Explored a bunch of competitors to SyncDroid. Without exception, they look complicated. They have fancy conflict resolution screens. Complexity is what I want to avoid with SyncDroid. I want it to be as automatic as possible. I want to put in an Undo feature so that if it does make a mistake, you can back it out anyway.
- Importantly, got a lot of the IntegriFS design and strategy out of my head and onto paper. This is the crux of Getting Things Done: get it out of your head. For the last week or so I’ve been buzzing with ideas and thoughts, and my mind is finally clear to look at other things that are important in the short(er) term. I need to get some bigger pieces of paper, because at the moment it looks something like this:
Note that I’ve written no code at all in the last two days. This would have surprised me a week ago. Right now, my focus is to get a bit of attention from people. This should help me work out what sort of demand there is, whether my marketing efforts are working and hopefully even get a bit of feedback from potential users. If it turns out that I’m on the wrong track or there’s no interest at all, I won’t waste time writing code.
There are a few different directions I could push in for SyncDroid. The base technology - detecting, logging and propagating file changes - is useful to several applications. The first ones that come to mind are:
- Automated real-time backups
- Synchronization via USB drives
- Time Machine (snapshotting and rewinding a filesystem)
I wanted to implement all of these, but at this stage I’m focusing on laptop-desktop synchronization. With the new office, however, my own use case has changed. I’m synchronizing over the Internet using Unison, but if I need to move any large amounts of data around that’ll need to go over a USB drive. Hence, using a USB drive as the go-between becomes attractive. Another nifty idea relating to this is to use a mobile phone (connected via Bluetooth) instead of a USB drive.
The Time Machine opportunity is interesting. It’s a very early market with few competitors. There are no compelling implementations for Windows, yet. I have no doubt that there will be an effective free one in time. With the base technology already in place, though, it’s not a big technical challenge to toss another UI over the top. There’s still a huge marketing effort to do, but I’m getting better at that all the time.