Greaterscope

Great progress was made this week. At the start of the week there were four big coding tasks lingering. Worked on “simple pricing” and now there is one less. (See my Nov 25 post about this). More things left to do:

1. Integration with a payment processor. I’ve done this before on other projects so there’s not much risk involved.
2. Integration with shipping carriers (almost done with USPS). It’s a simple concept and one that I have experience with. But I have to go about getting my own developer account and making sure it works. When you have bad support and are given access to a testing environment with a different API version than production, it confuses things. Ugh.
3. Sample storefronts that look like real storefronts. Much web design leg-work is needed here, and I’m not excited about it.
4. Image resizing for uploaded images

On the non-development front, there is plenty to do.

1. Get an SSL Certificate
2. Integrate with a payment processor (Paypal?) to enable purchasing the software I’m working so hard on
3. Start on the first software license. I’d love to be different and make this minimally legalese, but maybe there’s a reason people don’t do that.
4. Put up screenshots
5. Put up a demo
6. Start “getting out there”. Have to start investigating freelance community sites. Curious about how I’d begin to tell them about what I’m doing without sounding like an advertisement.

I don’t really mind that it happens this way. Having insights bubble up to the surface when I’m trying to sleep is well worth it. About half of the insights aren’t nearly as significant in the morning, but that leaves a considerable amount that are. And I always write them down because if I don’t, they keep popping up and down as if to say “don’t forget me, don’t forget me!” I gave in to this a long time ago and now keep pen and paper close by.

This time I had some insights around “simple pricing”. That’s a vague term, I know. Later I’ll choose a better phrase, and once I have screenshots to point to it’ll be easier to explain. However, it refers to the alternative of complex pricing. I designed the system to handle the advanced case first, where each combination of product options (size, color, texture, etc) can have its own price. The next logical step was figuring out how to do the simple case, where the product only has 1 price, regardless of the options that are selected. The general solution came to me a few nights ago and I’ve finally implemented it. Turns out to be a pretty good solution, and it’s even robust enough that it doesn’t leave the system in an unstable state when switching between complex and simple pricing.

So now the current system handles the extremes quite well. There is plenty of room to make the in-between painless, but I shouldn’t spend time on that until I get feedback on the current setup.

So what happens when you’re impatient? In this case, nothing. Thought I’d start the ball rolling a bit by announcing on Hacker News that I’d like feature feedback on the Greaterscope UserVoice account. I announced this after lunch, which apparently isn’t a good time. Or maybe I didn’t write a title that was enticing enough. No upvotes or comments.

Then I thought about announcing something more striking, which is that I’m looking for beta testers. But then again, I’m not convinced that I’m ready to have beta testers. Some portions of the code haven’t even been designed yet, so I can’t have someone doing customizations when lots of things are still up in the air. Time to muster up some more patience.

Balsamiq has advisors. And he was a “Senior Software Engineering Lead” at Adobe. WTF? I got encouraged when I read they hit $100,000 in revenue in 5 months. But Balsamiq isn’t very much like Greaterscope at all, so now I’m feeling a bit deflated. Oh well, I’m pressing on.

Back in 2002 I thought of “Intentional Software” as a company name. It was supposed to imply that we wouldn’t be creating haphazardly designed products. But then again, I’d only been coding for a year or two at the time, which doesn’t seem like enough time to be doing anything other than haphazard development.

All of that is beside the point, because Charles Simonyi came along a few years later and started a company of the same name. He was born well before me so he had a killer head-start. Plus, as the originator of “hungarian notation”, he knew how to not program all willy-nilly.

My ideas for a company name progressed, especially once I stopped using the space bar. Out came “Greaterscope” as a possibility. The encapsulation of optimistic, forward-looking, expansive … a chord was struck. Or rather, a saw was wobbled to make a sound. But don’t worry, the saw’s teeth are clean. (Yeah, that was a stretch, but I had to reference Scope mouthwash somewhere, since you probably thought of it upon seeing our company name).

For some reason we’ve decided to join Twitter. If you’re interested in following the little things, Follow Us.

The old site design was adapted from a WordPress theme, but was a bit too limiting. Lesson learned: blog themes don’t work well for company websites.

Our intent was to have screenshots of our storefront software ready by the end of October, which was two days ago. It’s tough to present something to the public that you’re not quite happy with. We’re aiming for a User Interface design that’s noticably better than the alternatives. Certain forms aren’t as simple or well-organized as they could be, so please bear with us. *Growl*