Archive for February, 2008

Almost there…. first (very private) public beta

Friday, February 29th, 2008

ok.. so its almost there.

almost no broken links.

almost everything makes sense,

almost all the layout is acceptable.

obviously, we expect people to have constructive criticism - things are never perfect from the beginning.

There’s still a lot more to do, but our very first password-protected beta will tell us a lot about what we need to think about.

snow day

Saturday, February 23rd, 2008

Continuation of murphy’s law..

today was going to be a big design day - finalizing graphics and some menus for our Flash player.

Turned out we got the first snow of the winter, so some of us didn’t make it to the office.

Telecommuting works sometimes but less well for ‘look and feel’ type of work.

We’ll regroup for next couple weeks.

Murphy’s law or Zeno’s paradox?

Wednesday, February 20th, 2008

Our office DSL connection went down yesterday and part of today.

It’s back up now, so keep our fingers crossed. Murphy’s Law?

We have a recurring joke around the office, that Zeno’s paradox is afflicting us - the milestones are the tortoise, and Achilles is us (ha!). Of course we never catch the tortoise if the paradox is true.

So maybe we can slay Zeno’s paradox and bury Murphy at the same time?

Let’s hope so!

Nothing comes for free

Monday, February 18th, 2008

Sometimes, it’s best to defer certain development decisions to later (when we better know the structure/capabilities/user priorities). Other times, it’s better to resolve things right away.

One thing is for sure, and that is at some point, if there’s any decision that a typical Web company needs to make, we will need to make it too. We’re no different from anybody else.  And if we haven’t put the thought into a certain part of our application, back-end, or front-end, it’s highly unlikely that ‘magically’ something will be correct or optimal, or even desirable. And this is also the case with company internal issues like workflow, QA, user testing,  etc.

So hat’s off to all those great working Web services out there. We know how hard you worked to get things to an acceptable state for end-users. Nothing comes for free.

Pushing towards Pre-Beta release

Friday, February 15th, 2008

We’re here on a Friday night pushing towards our pre-beta release. We finally have a home page that looks reasonable. It’s amazing how many details there are and how long everything takes to pull together.

But as Bruce is fond of saying, ‘iterate and test’. If we can get that first draft up, we can start iterating, and it should get easier once our foundation is in place.

inaugural kickfly post!

Thursday, February 14th, 2008

hi kickflyers!

Well this is an exciting moment in the life of kickfly. Our first blog post.

It means that we’ve gotten far enough that we’ve even had time to set up Wordpress.

Still a ton to do, since we are not in yet in our private beta. But way further along than we were 3 months ago. A lot of potential and we think our service will start to fly in the next few months.

So keep our fingers crossed and keep looking! more later..


AJAXed with AWP