Seize the storm

One week from tomorrow I’ll be taking off for an inventor’s conference to debut the new program to replace Photo Ops.  The program will also be entered in a contest as well.  So conference aside, there is still a bunch of stuff to do.  The website is probably 90-95% done – I’ve left some parts fairly skimpy to work on later.  After the website stuff, there’s still a little interfacing between the program and the website to finish up and also a pass through the user interface to put in the new logo.  Then that leaves for last minute bug fixes and small developments.  It’s going to be down to the wire, that’s for sure.  It’s still lacking some thorough testing, but my wife is thankfully available all week to do some of my errands and testing for me.

P.S. Go Ravens, go!

My apologies on not getting this out sooner.  I have ramped efforts now that I have the new logo and name of the program that will replace Photo Ops 2.0.  I’ve been busily working on the new website.  I’m not a website designer – so it will be very simplistic and use a lot of common components and layouts that I’ve scavenged from all over the internet.  Perhaps later, I’ll have someone professionally redo the website.  The website is probably 40-60% complete.

The program itself has been sitting for a while.  There is list of to-do’s that I need to work on after I’ve got the website done.  Now I have some flexibility on what I want to work on for each day.  I haven’t respun the user interface with the new logo and name yet.  Hopefully that will be done by the end of the week.

Finally, I’m still trying to get ahold of the lawyer to set up the business.  He said he’d be available after Thanksgiving, but I’ve not gotten a response yet.  I have a target release date in mind, but with it quickly approaching, I am unsure if everything will actually be done by then.  Thankfully, I have Christmas coming up so there will be some time off from work.

So the beta testers have had their first taste of the program.  It wasn’t without a few bugs and a crash or two, but here are some of the comments they had:

• Freakin’ AWESOME!!!
• this is slick!
• The  [feature is] very very nice! A great addition to the program…
• Hats off ed. When I started playing around with the [feature], i saw immediately how powerful this app is. You have done a superb job of making a very complicated set of features accessible to a average user.
• This is one amazing piece of software Ed. I am very impressed with the organization and relative simplicity of the interface. I can foresee lots of grateful users getting a lot of use out of this.

So we can have one of those “Reading Rainbow” moments where, “you don’t have to take my word for it.”  Seriously though, there is a lot of work that has gone into the program.  Things are progressing and I am really tenacious about getting these bugs fixed.  One might say I’m trying to drive the beta testers almost too hard (maybe to the nagging point).  They are a great group and I’ll have a lot of credit due them once I get the product released.

In other news, I’m pretty sure I’ve settled on a name.  I have someone working on the logo ideas right now.  Near the end of the month, I’ll also have the business set up as an LLC.  But I get ahead of myself, I have many bugs to focus on and it seems some of these bugs don’t want to go away.  So I’m off to do some bug squashing…