A notable exception to this is Steve McLeod and his Poker Co-pilot who did go to release and who has managed to create a pretty successful product and business as reward for his efforts.  Congrat’s to Steve!

You may also remember that in November last year, after struggling with the terrible and bug ridden implementation of COM inside Delphi I switched to .Net and Visual Studio.  Since then CodeGear have a .Net version of Delphi that looks reasonably good, but I’ve decided to stick with VB.Net and C#.  Yes, both and yes it works very well for me.

Since November 2007 we’ve had a lot of issues with nature (bushfires), a bit of surgery that made my right hand temporarily useless and of course recoding everything into .Net takes a lot of time, given I was a .Net newbie at the time I started.  On the upside I released PerforMixer which I might add is yet to make a sale on the internet, as predicted by me so no surprise there, but encouragingly it’s now had 17 separate IP addresses searching for serials, working codes and torrents.  That’s encouraging because 17 people feel strongly enough about it to steal it and so far, at least for those 17, it’s resisted attempts at tampering.  Will be interesting to see how the Partial Key Verification system survives in the less than opaque environment of .Net compiled code.  In addition to this we put CDROO online this week and while it’s still working it’s way up in the search engines we have had several sales to date – and thank you to those ISV’s who purchased so early on in the sites career!!

In the meantime we’ve been doing a heck of a lot of background work in MixAction.  To say it is an altogether different product to the one shown here last June is an understatement.  It’s even undergone some changes since earlier this year.  But I’m pleased to be able to say I’m now confident I can get it out into full beta (again!!) by the end of July 2009.

To Keep Me On Track

Because I found the whole June 2007 thing enjoyable and the regular daily blog posts a great tool for staying focussed I’ve decided to try to do the same thing starting Monday 15th of June 2009 through to July 29th 2009.  If I fail to do so this time, given the enormous lead up I’ve had, I’m going to be pretty peeved and invite one and all to let me have it in the comments section of this blog! 

No, I still honestly believe time periods of 30 days etc are generally bad news for development cycles.  In this instance I’m literally bringing the pieces together into the UI and connecting them with glue and code.  So I’m not reversing my stand on this.  Rather I’m simply forcing myself to stop iterating without a release.  It’s way past time I did that. So here goes… 

So, barring hospitalization for Swine Flu, or something equally bizarre, my goal is July 29th which was the day I hatched out some, almost, 46 years ago.  A present to me, in a sense I guess.

Let’s see if I can do it.

On a final note, Automatic have released WordPress 2.8 update.  So far I’ve updated all my sites, except this one.  Sunday evening I’ve set aside an hour to ensure I get the update done, experience so far has shown it’s fairly painless with one or two recalcitrant plug-ins here or there.  I’ve left this blog till last as it’s my busiest site and for some reason weekends have been more busy on it recently than weekdays.  So Sunday night (early morning in the USA, arfternoon in Eurpope) this blog will be offline for a short time, hopefully no longer than around five minutes, if the other sites are anything to go by.

Scott Kane

Quote of the day:
Never judge a book by its movie. – J. W. Eagan

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