Macworld Expo is nigh.
It turns out that Macworld is spelled "Macworld" and not "MacWorld." This was a Very Important Issue brought up by our support guy, Drew, many times in the last week, as we attempted to modify our store and/or issue press releases.
Mike and Tim set up our booth today at Macworld; they're very proud of it. It's made of real wood! If you can find a booth with more wood in it at Macworld SF, I encourage you to buy their products!
I won't personally be at Macworld this year; I don't really like to travel much, so WWDC and O'Reilly are enough for me. Mike loves it, so he's down there with Tim, our new engineer. Stop by and say hi if you're there. They're good people. Also, they are both twelve years old. Seriously, you won't find a booth with younger people in it. Offer Mike or Tim a drink: it's funny.
Tim kicked some serious booty on 1.1, and I'm pretty proud of the release. 1.5 will be the big international release that a lot of people are waiting for, but I think 1.1 was pretty good for the amount of time we had to get it together. We got some new features, we got some speed-ups, and we got some bug fixes, all for FREE FREE FREE.
Sales are actually increasing every week, for the last four weeks. That hasn't happened on any product I've ever been a part of. Usually sales gradually fall off from the introductory week, which is like 50% of your sales for the whole year. We had a HUGE intro week, but after two weeks of falling after that, sales started going up again and haven't stopped.
I'm not sure what to do with this new data. At heart, I'm a pessimist, so when I run projections on this new company I think, "Naw, that's CRAZY TALK." I always assume we'll be broke and homeless in a couple months. The idea of making more money than I've ever made before scares the crud out of me.
We're going to work really hard on 1.5, and our HOPEFUL date for it is February 15th. The big, big goal for this release is: you should be able to scan an item you bought anywhere in the world, and if it's in some Amazon database somewhere, it'll be found automatically. We'll see if we can do it.
After that, we're starting on 2.0, with lots of AMAZING features that will COMPLETELY DESTROY YOUR SENSE OF EQUILIBRIUM. Also, Mike's very eager to start research on our new project, which is SUPER-SECRET except that WE'VE TOLD LIKE FORTY PEOPLE WHAT IT IS SO FAR. If you think can beat the secret out of my mom or John Geylense you're welcome to it: I've got to tell you that I suspect John would crack under torture long before my mom would.
I honestly don't know if this new project will even prove to be technically feasible. That's exciting for me. It's like when I started writing the video barcode scanning code: no one had ever done it before, and I had no idea if it was even possible, much less something that I, personally, could do.
Turned out it was. There aren't a lot of times in programming you get to do that kind of thing. I'm glad I'm partnered up with Mike, who has no concept of what's possible and what's not, so I can continue to be challenged. (And I'm thankful to all of our customers for supporting us to the point that we can do risky things and not worry about losing our houses.)
And, while I'm at it, I'm glad we have Tim -- he's a smart guy and is the most freakishly fast typist I've ever seen. (He never copy-and-pastes because it's actually faster for him to type stuff!) And I'm happy we have Drew, who is completely pedantic to the point that I smack him several times a day, but, honestly, what more could you ask in a support guy?
I've honestly never been so happy in my work situation. I hope it shows in my work.
Mike and Tim set up our booth today at Macworld; they're very proud of it. It's made of real wood! If you can find a booth with more wood in it at Macworld SF, I encourage you to buy their products!
I won't personally be at Macworld this year; I don't really like to travel much, so WWDC and O'Reilly are enough for me. Mike loves it, so he's down there with Tim, our new engineer. Stop by and say hi if you're there. They're good people. Also, they are both twelve years old. Seriously, you won't find a booth with younger people in it. Offer Mike or Tim a drink: it's funny.
Tim kicked some serious booty on 1.1, and I'm pretty proud of the release. 1.5 will be the big international release that a lot of people are waiting for, but I think 1.1 was pretty good for the amount of time we had to get it together. We got some new features, we got some speed-ups, and we got some bug fixes, all for FREE FREE FREE.
Sales are actually increasing every week, for the last four weeks. That hasn't happened on any product I've ever been a part of. Usually sales gradually fall off from the introductory week, which is like 50% of your sales for the whole year. We had a HUGE intro week, but after two weeks of falling after that, sales started going up again and haven't stopped.
I'm not sure what to do with this new data. At heart, I'm a pessimist, so when I run projections on this new company I think, "Naw, that's CRAZY TALK." I always assume we'll be broke and homeless in a couple months. The idea of making more money than I've ever made before scares the crud out of me.
We're going to work really hard on 1.5, and our HOPEFUL date for it is February 15th. The big, big goal for this release is: you should be able to scan an item you bought anywhere in the world, and if it's in some Amazon database somewhere, it'll be found automatically. We'll see if we can do it.
After that, we're starting on 2.0, with lots of AMAZING features that will COMPLETELY DESTROY YOUR SENSE OF EQUILIBRIUM. Also, Mike's very eager to start research on our new project, which is SUPER-SECRET except that WE'VE TOLD LIKE FORTY PEOPLE WHAT IT IS SO FAR. If you think can beat the secret out of my mom or John Geylense you're welcome to it: I've got to tell you that I suspect John would crack under torture long before my mom would.
I honestly don't know if this new project will even prove to be technically feasible. That's exciting for me. It's like when I started writing the video barcode scanning code: no one had ever done it before, and I had no idea if it was even possible, much less something that I, personally, could do.
Turned out it was. There aren't a lot of times in programming you get to do that kind of thing. I'm glad I'm partnered up with Mike, who has no concept of what's possible and what's not, so I can continue to be challenged. (And I'm thankful to all of our customers for supporting us to the point that we can do risky things and not worry about losing our houses.)
And, while I'm at it, I'm glad we have Tim -- he's a smart guy and is the most freakishly fast typist I've ever seen. (He never copy-and-pastes because it's actually faster for him to type stuff!) And I'm happy we have Drew, who is completely pedantic to the point that I smack him several times a day, but, honestly, what more could you ask in a support guy?
I've honestly never been so happy in my work situation. I hope it shows in my work.
posted by Wil Shipley at 2:27 AM
7 Comments:
Guys - you totally rock.
Being fairly new to you deeeelicious software I was pleased to find that my hard earned bucks are going to such a great little company. Big up for the little guys with the way cool 'ware.
Good job all, and I wish I could get over there to San Fran to shake you by the paws.
Flea
I'm a little scared for you guys. I wouldn't want to see you go the way of Arlo Rose, and have your product copied by Apple or anything (They would call it a release of features built into their OS...).
quote
you should be able to scan an item you bought anywhere in the world, and if it's in some Amazon database somewhere, it'll be found automatically. We'll see if we can do it.
/quote
This would be fantastic. Being Canadian, it seems alot of what I own originates in the UK. I get many "lookup failed" messages when scanning my library. I also get alot of those when scanning DVD's that come from Blockbuster - even popular movies like The Lord of the Rings...
Congratulations on a great product. I look forward to future releases.
I'm a little concerned about all this talk of version 2. Sure, go ahead and work on it but there is still a whole lot more to do with version 1. After months of deliberation I decided the other day to buy Delicious Library using the Chronopath Library upgrade offer, also Sterling was doing well against the Dollar that day.
So being that I'm a previous Library user I'm still a little frustrated that a) the upgrade path for us wasn't slightly cheaper. But whatever. More importantly was b) some of the same issues still remain in this new product - poor international support and certain bugs/annoyances. OK, you're working on better international support and I figure you'll fix any bugs you hear about, it's just I don't want to go through the same thing again with DL as I had with Chronopath's Library. Works great up to a point but things progress poorly from then on. Also guys it doesn't help when you feel the need to jump to higher point upgrades like you just have. Fine if you didn't tell us first it was going to be 1.0.7 then decide to jump to 1.1 like that. It makes you look like the kind of developers who like to knock out much needed updates, jump up the version number so you can moves as quickly to another paid for version there still remain many outstanding issues.
If 1.5 is only about international support then I'm going to be very disappointed. There are many outstanding annoyances currently that warrant a fix as soon as possible. I'll give you a few examples: the Genre feature is a mess. They are way to big and require an option to minimise them to a single line so as to not take up too much space.
They also need better editing so as to allow the Amazon captured data to be easily replaced by the user's own genre description. (I really don't need to have my new DVDs marked as Used when the data is captured from Amazon!)
And if a custom genre setting is used it should be remembered in a list so it can be applied to other items with ease, either single items or groups of items.
When editing certain details, such as a book format, the options should be made available. So for example changing a book from paperback to hardback should not require having to type it each time. The user should be able to select it from a list. Small but a glaring omission.
All in all I like the app - it fulfills the need in me to catalogue my book and DVD collection, it just that it falls short it some fundamental areas. What is also especially galling for me is the fact I remember mentioning the many shortcomings of Library to its developer when we were told it was being developed and updated to DL. I don't want to have to go through all this again.
Regards
Simon
I love Delicious Library, and I'm happy to hear that it's selling well... but I'm really hoping that a few more of the bugs in 1.x are worked out before I have to pay for 2.x. Here's a few things I've found (plus some suggestions for whatever version):
* The program is getting used values on Amazon, but they really aren't reflective of the used prices. For example, it says one of my paperback books is worth $275. Actually, no, that's for a first-edition hardcover. Is there some way to throw out the highest and lowest values, or go off the "Condition" ratings on Amazon (so if mine says "Good" it only gets the price for a used copy that is rated the same?). Until this is fixed the numbers are meaningless.
* I'm sorely missing the ability to get a total value on all the items that are currently selected. It's necessary for insurance purposes, which is really what an inventory program is all about, isn't it?
* What's up with the caches? I have less than 500 items in my library, but the Plain Covers folder contains over 4,000 items, 3,553 of which I don't own. That's a lot of wasted space.
* An ability to search for duplicates would be handy as sometimes items double-scan.
* Are we always going to be limited to using Amazon? What about IMDB for movies?
* The ability to export as something other than a very ugly tab-delimited file. How about a PDF with pictures? HTML goes without saying.
Anyway, keep up the good work and I'll pay for version 2. ;)
Mike and I agree with you: the genres thing is a mess, and we're trying to sort it out in time for 1.5. We get kind of cruddy data from Amazon XML 3.0, and it appears better in 4.0, but it's still too much data and we're still working out how to make it useful and automatic. We changed genres very late in the 1.0 release because the old way didn't work at all, but it's still not the way we want it.
I had always planned to have a combo-box type widget for genres and physical media type (casette tape vs. album vs. cd), but I ran out of time. You're right, it's an obvious addition, and would make the program much more usable. Right now, most users never try changing the media description and seeing the item redraw in front of them -- it's fun to demo that feature, even though it kind of shows a flaw in our interface.
1.5 is going to be mostly about internationalization, yes. Possibly, you might be disappointed. I'm sorry for this. I worked really hard on the app, and if you feel that it's not up to what you wanted, I am happy to refund your money. There's only so much I can do in the time I have; if I had infinite time I'd make sure every user's wishes were totally done before any release went out, but I just don't.
I don't want to sound uncaring -- I do sincerely apologize if there are bugs that are preventing you from enjoying the app. But I'm as busy as I can be writing code, and I physically can't do any more, so I'm trying to say, honestly, I'm not going to fix every annoyance every user has in version 1.5.
There is no code shared between Chronopath Library and Delicious Library. There is no relationship between our companies. Andrew K. was a consultant on our project early on, but the code is all ours. Since Andrew is continuing to develop Chronopath Library, I think it would be incorrect to call our program an upgrade of his. We certainly didn't see any of the money you gave Andrew in the past for his software, and we in fact paid him some of our money to consult on our project, so you'll understand that we didn't feel obligated to make our upgrade price too sweet for someone else's customers.
We pick version numbers to indicate how much we think you'll want to upgrade to a particular release. 1.1 had a really important fix to the updating mechanism and we really wanted everyone to get it.
[quote]Wil Shipley said...
There is no code shared between Chronopath Library and Delicious Library. There is no relationship between our companies. Andrew K. was a consultant on our project early on, but the code is all ours. Since Andrew is continuing to develop Chronopath Library, I think it would be incorrect to call our program an upgrade of his. We certainly didn't see any of the money you gave Andrew in the past for his software, and we in fact paid him some of our money to consult on our project, so you'll understand that we didn't feel obligated to make our upgrade price too sweet for someone else's customers.[/quote]
In that case fair enough. This wasn't so clear from reading the info on the site. I hope, and am more inclined to believe this will be the case, that DL will develop more fully than Chronopath's Library did. DL is almost there - a few more fixes, features and re-thinking of certain parts and it will be a very fine app indeed. Ready for whatever cool new things you have planned.
Regards
Simon
So how fast can Tim type? I don't think he can type as fast as me to be honest.
I want video proof.
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