Six Software Products in One Year

Development progress

I’d say I’m about 30% of the way to a SyncDroid release. It’s frighteningly small, but I know that boring stuff like testing, installers, licensing, graphics and documentation is going to eat up a lot of time.

I keep detailed lists for this stuff. Some people say it’s obsessive-compulsive; I say it’s damned well essential because there is just so much to do. If I don’t write it down, I’ll keep worrying about it until it’s done, and that’s a huge energy sink.

I’m at a point in development where I can finally say I understand how the whole application is going to fit together. It’s very reassuring - there was always this uncertainty as to how the different modules were going to connect (in particular, how asynchronous events were going to move around.) Now that I have a model I’m happy with, it’s just a matter of ‘colouring in’ what’s left.

Typing

I’ve had some level of hand pain for probably a decade. It’s mostly been quite ignorable and always went away after a few days. I blame it on the 1996-1999 period where I trained on Quake variants for anything up to 8 hours per day instead of studying.

Lately, though, it’s been getting worse. Much of this is that I’m doing a lot more typing now that I’m not rotting away in meetings. Short-term, I did an eleven-hour-long adrenaline-fueled hack-fest (on client work, no less). I didn’t type much for the following two days due to the pain. After some encouragement from my officemates, I bought a Kinesis keyboard.

I’ve seen them before, but ignored them due to the high price. Now, with the low US dollar, my improved financial situation, increased frequency of pain and likely expense of surgery, it seems like a bargain. I’m learning Dvorak on it too. It’s intensely frustrating to not be able to bang out 100+WPM without thinking about it, but so far I’m seeing major reductions in pain. I see daily improvements in speed and accuracy, so I’ll almost certainly stick it out.

Logos and icons

I can imagine what I want in graphics, but can’t express it (in words or images). I need some icons for SyncDroid and some logos for the website(s), so I went to a <$40 logo design place.

Lesson 1. If you say you want the logo to look like something, they’ll give you exactly that, copyright law be damned.

Lesson 2. If you let them pick a colour scheme, they’ll pick something ugly.

Lesson 3. If you specify colours, they’ll use them in the most ugly way possible.

Lesson 4. If you specify “simple, no detail”, they’ll add superfluous detail that would suck even if you had the resolution to display it correctly.

I’ve got ‘unlimited revisions’, but that doesn’t mean anything if they can’t design anything that looks good. So I walked a few doors down to an art supplies store, had a nice chat with the hottie at the counter, and bought a nice soft clutch pencil. I’ve sketched out some designs that don’t completely suck. I did have a quick go at implementing them in Inkscape but lost patience quickly.

I’ve looked at a lot of icon sets on the web and can see a pretty strong correlation between price and quality. Damnit.

Tuba

There’s a guy outside playing Mario Brothers and Star Wars tunes on the street corner. Newtown is by far the most fun location that I’ve ever worked in.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 at 5:44 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.