After 8 weeks working from the basement, one starts to lose their social skills.—I just realized my last real post was a month ago and I owe you folks some updates! It’s easy to blog when things are going well and you are feeling optimistic and omniscient, but much harder when you feel behind. –Partly because it’s hard to justify the time spent to write, but mostly because my personal tendency is not to Anyway, the kids don’t have swimming lessons today so it’s a great time to catch you all up. It’s going pretty slowly as I work alone, and hence, serially, but pretty well If I step back. Here’s what’s been accomplished:
- We have a new logo (see the top of the blog) It’s snazzy (imho) and clean yet hopefully playful and family friendly. A tall order to ask from an Adobe Illustrator file, but we’re happy with it, for now anyway. (btw: Did you see the little ‘F’ in the leaf, or did I just waste half a day learning to do that with a graphics tablet? -On second thought, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know) Anyway, it probably needs a little tweaking from a pro, but is a good starting point.
- We have the start of a Style Guide. All of our subsequent apps will have the same clean (but not sterile) look, with the same sort of orange/green UI elements against white, fonts, icons, and other styling. This is one of the reasons the first design is taking so long. –Getting the styling close for all other apps. It’s something we can easily change in the actual product by using CSS, but the closer things are when you start designing the user experience (Ux) the better feel you have for whether the app flow works. (You don’t make assumptions this uncertain feeling you have will go away when someone else pretties this up…)
- We chose a backend architecture. LAMP +RubyOnRails on Amazon Web Services (AWS). We have an AWS/EC2 account and played around with putting images up and tearing them down. Very slick stuff, and a great sandbox to play in where you don’t have to commit to a server stack day one to even start playing around. I highly recommend going the AWS route for anyone starting out. To get this far the last time I started a business, I had to spend about $10-15k. With AWS, I’m still in the free Micro-tier and can experiment for zero cost. We may switch to node.js and forego LAMP long term, hard to say right now, but again, the beauty of virtualization in AWS-we can play with both and run A/B tests and cut-over with relatively little pain. When we have more experience on the ins and outs of configuring AWS, I’ll blog about it.
- We have 90% of the design of the first app done. This should mean that the actual coding will go smoothly, because by doing *every* screen and permutation, I caught most of our Ux issues before they ever made it into code on phones. Whenever I am in doubt, I call Margaret down, and walk through the app by touching my monitor like I’m using the product on a smartphone and turn Photoshop layers on/off to simulate the app flow. If she looks confused or underwhelmed, I know it’s too complex. If I find myself wishing the screen were wider, or switching to a smaller font, it’s too complex. If I get up to get coffee, and come back, and I don’t intuitively know what to do as a user of the app by what I'm staring at, it’s not the right design. (More on the design process I've been using in another post soon, I promise.). Once I have some near final comps, I can hand jpegs over to Margaret to start writing the promotional materials for the app (screenshots for AppStore, the corp website, family-oriented media publications, etc.)
- I did deep dives on Photoshop, Illustrator and HTML5. I am now using the first two pretty effectively and we’ll find out about the HTML5 soon. FWIW I highly recommend Safari BooksOnline to anyone that does dev or design. I have saved at least $400 on the materials I would have needed to spin up. Totally worth the $18/month. And taking the time to do full video tutorials was totally worth it. I’ve easily recouped that time by not fumbling around CS4.
Sooo, am I happy with the progress? Sorta, but it’s hard to be more than halfway through the 14 weeks and not be coding yet. I feel a lot better when I subtract the time spent spinning up on tools and technology. I will say it's very rewarding though to see the screenshots on my iPhone and show others and they laugh and instantly get the app and 100% of parents so far WANT the app and to be in the beta. (Will share with you all soon, I promise, still have the patent issues to sort out...) and I do think taking the time to do the full design in Photoshop first is going to pay off long term since I’ve scrapped a lot of screens and started over that would have just been wasted time and code.
But I am very antsy and just about every day have the urge to just start coding. None of the progress matters if I run out of money before the app is done.. The good news is that it looks like I can put together some short term consulting gigs to keep throwing down pavement at the end of the runway, but even that is a slippery slope that devolves into full time consulting as I know from the last time I started a company.
Actually, reading this I do feel a lot better about the progress and should do this (blog) more often to get perspective back. For one guy in a basement, this isn’t a bad 7 weeks when you consider I have also been looking for full time work and consulting gigs as well.
But still, none of it matters if I don't finish. Tomorrow we're taking the day to head out to the tulips and Deception Pass as a family to unwind, and then I'll get back at it Monday 5am.
I promise to do a better job bringing you all along with us for the second half.
-Chris
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