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May 2008

May 1st 2008

Still no sales. I get an email from Worldpay whenever some one buys the product. Every day(hour) I check the mail and so far - denada, rien, nichts.

Still, keep smiling keep working. Its very early days yet - and I always new it would take time. Still I can not but admit that I clung on to the fantasy that Datawasp would take the world by storm. The website server would smoke as word spread like wildfire...

Saw a 5 star review (I think) on pcwin - Just the stars though nothing to indicate that anyone actually used the product or assessed it. I suspect that these sites give everyone 5 stars to encourage them to pay for more promotions.

I have decided to do a promotional tree based note pad see notes for 28th April above. I have started work on the design.

May 6th 2008

Been developing Promo Tree - that's the working title for my tree pad.

Snagged a load of code from Datawasp and previous incarnations of tree pad.

Ditched ghosts as per Ab's urging. Ab is my girl friend. Ghosts was a feature which allowed a paragraph to appear in more than one place in the tree. Its a good feature but I really must get this out fast and simple. Spent the whole day doing the selection system

May 7th 2008

Created a 'Zen and the art of Office Data Management' blog at http://ZenDataManagement.blogspt.com its a nice idea but I don't know if I can sustain the effort of writing it. I into philosophy and my sister said I have to have a blog to provide a high page rank to my web site so it will get a mention in the 1st hundred pages of a Google search for Databases or information management.

Got something working on Promo tree for the 1st time. That's always a nice time.

Still no sales :(

May 8th 2008

Decided to ditch the Zen data blog and instead start a blog about my experiences with Datawasp instead. I can still load it with philosophy and data management stuff. Also I have been making daily notes of my activities since he launch of Datawasp and found it quite interesting so I feel I can keep it up.

Maybe I will copy it over to the Zen site just to create an external link. That way it will go out on an atom feed if people want to track what goes on.

The advantage of doing it at my own site is that the changes will register with spider bots and keep the site fresh in their listings.

Spent the whole day transcribing my notes into blog format on my site

May 9th 2008

Spent the whole day working on Promo Tree. Its looking good. I keep getting tempted to throw in loads of features and charge for it but that would be to completely miss the point.

I got the text rendering and expand/collapse working today. They are both big ticket items. Because trees are recursive those two features mean I could already show a massively big and deep document with each bit collapsing and controlling under user control. Also I have spent a lot of time thinking thru how other stuff is going to work so there should be not black holes down the road.

I am getting a load of benefit from cutting and pasting code from previous projects.

May 13th 2008

Finally actually put of this blog at the ISP.

Then  I worked on the promo pad.

I downloaded a couple of existing note pads for comparison.  I have done this before but its always a sobering exorcise..   The main free existing notes application is called 'Keynote' this is one of many notes apps using a twin panel interface where you have a contents tree on the left and content on the right which shows the node content of the node selected in the left hand panel.  A bit like Datawasp, in fact, tho very different behaviours and features.

Promo-pad - that I am developing - is different because the tree structure is built right into the content.   There is no need for an index. The document itself is collapsible.  Is this better? Who knows. It is certainly more cute   

I have been using a prototype myself for a while now and I find it really good. Most of the things I want to store  are list of stuff like Tests URLS contacts, companies, passwords  etc I would rather store these as part of the tree than as a separate document.  Even when I am just jotting notes for ideas they tend to fall into a tree like structure.

Will others share my views?  I don't  know maybe in time.  It might attract some attention just because it is a bit different.

May 16th 2008

Still plugging away at promo-pad. I am getting a bit worried that it is going to take longer than a few weeks.    Having a tree structure with word wrap that can be edited like a word document is a lot harder than it sounds.

I actually tried something like this 10 years ago and it was a disaster.  I was using C, had very little idea of the final features set and I was a hell of a lot less sophisticated but still, it gives me nightmares thinking about it.

Its nagging at me that I should maybe take a break from promo pad and spend the time getting a second version of Datawasp done which is designed to get maximum rating on Tucows and Download.com then I could pay a few hundred quid to get those sites to review it.  It is occurring to me that this is the entrepreneur way of doing things instead of the comfortable 'developer' way of doing things.

8 pages of hits on Google.  At least that is gradually going up. But my site still does not have a page ranking.

I went into this knowing it was for the long haul but OMG.....

May 26th 2008

Time sure has a way of getting behind you.

Every morning I sit down and think "Today I will add something to the blog,  but 1st some programming...."   then I get into the programming and the blog gets forgotten.  Similarly the tax and any promotional stuff I know I should be doing.

Well today I get a grip.  Blog tax then program.  

The program (Promopad) is going well.  You can now edit text, indent/un-indent nodes. Delete nodes and  delete text across multiple nodes.  This last is a huge effort to program - but its done now and the code is still very coherent  I am teetering on the verge of cutting features to get it out quickly and move on.   Currently I plan to allow the user to insert "check boxes" into the text which can then be checked or unchecked with a single  mouse click and sorted with.  This feature makes the application a more useful manager of lists.   I could extend this principle a lot - for instance to allow the insertion of drop down selectors, or I could cut it all together and introduce it later.

On the whole I think I will keep it in its most basic form.

There is a real dilemma here because it costs money every time you want to expedite a product update on TuCows. Continually putting out upgrades is expensive.  I never realized that all this free promotion was so expensive.  TANSTAFL I guess.

Well lets see if I have any sales yet....

Still no sales... I have started asking my friends for advice.  Its now more than 30 days (the length of the trial period) since I launched Datawasp so I guess there are people out there who downloaded the software and didn't like it enough  to buy it.

I would give my right hand to know why.  I am contemplating some kind of feedback mechanism in the uninstaller so people could indicate one of a few options explaining why they didn't buy.

not enough confidence in the company

lacks features they need

too hard to understand

too expensive

I could also record how many times they used the software and what features they used.

Maybe I could offer them a chance to get on a mailing list for future information.

My mind is a mass of ideas and stuff I could try but it all takes time.