Seize the storm

I didn’t get as much as I hoped for in this last month of development.  Sickness and reorganizing the office stripped some time away from me.  I have gotten a lot done though.  The program is performing much better.  I have some ideas on further fine-tuning the performance.  I’ve finished up the big portion that has taken the last two months.  As I stare at my to-do board, I have seven things left to do.  Some of them are big and others I should be able to finish in a weekend of hard work.  I still haven’t settled on a new name for Photo Ops.  I still slip and call it that among my friends.  Never fear though, work is progressing.  I continue to stick with two months out as my target.  It would be really nice to finish up before the summer. 

I have had a few emails asking to download Photo Ops.  I still have the link disabled.  I understand all the wants and needs for freeware.  I love it myself - I’ve even thought of going with open source.  From my perspective though - only two people have donated.  Time is money and in my view, if I’m saving you (eventually) hours of time, I think it’s worth a donation.  No one has ever sent me feedback that says the program sucks.  I have had plenty of feedback that says it’s quite the opposite or if it just had this one more feature, they would even drop their expensive photo editing program.  I’m not really trying to compete or bring another competitor down.  I plainly just want to save people some time.  Yes, I would like to make some money in the process - and as I’ve priced it so far (in my head), I really don’t believe I’m breaking the bank at all.  There are people who have told me what they’ve seen is worth hundreds of dollars.  As excited as I am about that, I won’t go that direction.  I want the program to be available to everyone, not just prosumers & professionals.

Here’s my nice dream statement:  Just you wait, I’m going to redefine photo organization.

I hope I live up to it.  Now I should get back to work.

At 255 hours now, I am anxious to get (Better than Photo Ops) out the door.  Unfortunately, I still have a lot of work to do.  I would guess at least another month or two.  This feature I’m working on right now has taken a lot of the wind out of my sails.  It’s not so much difficult (as it was in the beginning) but now just eats up a lot of time.  Some of the design decisions I made early on caused me to go back and have to refactor how I do some things.  Fortunately, it wasn’t across the entire program.  I’ve slowly been fixing a few bugs as I’ve found them - even finding a bug in my licensing code!  That definitely was not fun to find, nor fix.  I can’t reveal the new name yet - I’m waiting to debut it with a logo.  As always, I’ll continue to keep you updated!

I’ve had a stupendous month of development - I’m up to 218 hours at the end of January.  I’ve pretty much finished up the last part of the big feature that I was working on.  There’s a little bit of cleanup yet to be done.  I’ve also got the icons in for the most part.  So it’s looking a little more professional now.  I believe we’ve also settled on the new name of the program, formerly known as Photo Ops.  By next month’s update, I hope to debut the new name (maybe) and possibly even a couple logo choices.  The beta team is getting going as well.  They haven’t started testing yet.  They’ve only seen some screenshots.  Oh, and please don’t bug them if you know who they are - they’re locked up tight under an Non-Disclosure Agreement(NDA).

So where am I at now - I’ve got 3 big things left to do.  I’m hoping to be done with one or two of them in the next week or two.  Then there will be some more little features that I’ve been meaning to put in and I bet there will be some feature creep as well.  After the development is (relatively) over, I’ll begin work on the new website.  Then the licensing and all that will be official.  I’ll have to do a little bit more front-end, purchasing code for Paypal.  That’s pretty much all the update you’re going to get for now.  The end is a little more in sight.  Hopefully I’ll have a huge update for you all next month.