Alex Hardy

Panic and the Iconfactory released CandyBar 3 this week, and must be excited by the prospect of all the licenses they are going to sell. It has been widely remarked that the new icons in Mac OS X Leopard leave much to be desired, so they are well placed with this excellent app.

They also appear to be redesigning their website, one product microsite at a time…

Combining the feature sets of CandyBar (an icon customisation utility) and Pixadex (“iPhoto for icons”), CandyBar 3 makes great use of Leopard features like Quick Look and 512 pixel icons.

It even allows you to customise your dock. Some might argue that being able to replace the silly reflective dock with a “simple” version is worth the $29 all by itself.

I think Panic epitomise what is best about the Mac software market. They build thoughtfully designed, useful apps that do their job well and aren’t bloated out of all proportion. Coda is a viable alternative to Dreamweaver and will save you hundreds of dollars and megabytes of disk space.

They embarrass the efforts of much larger companies and do it all with a sense of fun and none of the arrogance of web app developer 37signals, who are really starting to believe their own press.

Heaven help Adobe if they ever decided to create an image editor or Flash IDE.

There’s a chill in the air. Slade and Wizard are once again helping to sell sofas and toys. Yessir, “summer 2007” has come and gone with no sign of the Refresh project.

It should be obvious by now that Refresh is on indefinite hiatus. I don’t give space to unfulfilled ideas, so I intend to remove it from my portfolio. I’ll add a featured project panel in its place. I’ll try to relate my reasons for this change of direction.

I did quite a lot of research and development work on Refresh but as I did, certain things became more apparent. What else became apparent is that those realisations would apply to anything at all that I might choose to do:

Development

I would need to develop solutions for a great number of interface elements and internal processes in order to build Refresh. Handling payment transactions was going to be a project by itself.

Time is Money

The free time I have for independent work is limited, because it naturally competes with my personal life and other interests. When I sit down at my computer, I assign a real and specific value to my time – my freelance rate of £30 per hour. Time that I can justify spending on a project that doesn’t pay is in short supply.

I believe I have the staying power to work my way through a dip before a project rewards itself, but the time and energy it would have taken to make Refresh a reality was simply too much at this stage in my life.

Marketing

Shipping a product to no existing audience or buzz isn’t wise. A key reason for releasing the free version of simpleContact first was to patiently build a user base before the commercial release.

Anyone can buy attention through advertising, and I certainly will do so. What’s far more important is the kind that you can’t buy. Users have been generous and helpful in their comments. I will be able to make some announcements on this front soon.

What next?

My attention is now focused on other specific projects. Working this way allows me to break these challenges down into tasks that I can tackle within my available time.

Refresh has become an endgame, a byword for the Big Project that I’ll undertake at some point. Maybe the future of my career. The project I’ll be ready for when I have some smaller successes under my belt. It may bear no resemblance to the original idea (which I kept a bit of a secret) in form or function, but the fun is in the journey!

Via Iconfactory: A Flickr photoset by the very talented Linzie Hunter. Experiments with hand lettering in an ongoing series based on spam subject lines.

Update: Prints are available at Thumbtack Press.

While watching Kitchen Nightmares I’ve been thinking about writing a post. I think a lot of the advice Ramsay dispenses applies not only to businesses generally, but particularly well to web design and application development.

37signals have beaten me to it. They list some mistakes chefs and restaurateurs make, and draw parallels with our own field. I’ve abbreviated their list, so go read it there and come back for my two cents worth!

Everything to no one

Over-stuffed menu syndrome. Too many dishes, done poorly. You might compare this to the kitchen-sink approach that many developers adopt. A simple concept executed with flair is often the best.

Cook what you know

Or eat your own dog food. If you don’t use your product and others of its kind, how would you know what characterises an excellent product? When I started using simpleContact I soon realised that messages ought not to come from the admin address, because I was sending replies to myself. Version 1.1 corrected that.

Passion for your environment

If you don’t take pride in your work, or are unwilling to invest in a continual learning process, then you need to leave the industry to us professionals.

Here are a couple more that occurred to me and Kevin as we discussed it:

Seek user feedback

Sadly, this is done too rarely. Criticism is more useful than praise! It’s nice to think that a silent majority is happily using your product, but your dealings with users who have a problem or unsatisfied requirement are most valuable.

Is your product the equivalent of a sushi restaurant in a small Yorkshire village? A wise individual said: Just because there’s a gap in the market doesn’t mean there’s a market in the gap. Perhaps yours doesn’t exist?

Mistakes made in the kitchen, should stay in the kitchen

Test your work rigourously. This goes double for fixed media like CD-ROMs. You can’t un-burn a thousand discs because you fucked up (I had to use the F-word once, considering the subject!). Experience has taught me to stick to my guns here. My work is done when I say it is, irrespective of some arbitrary deadline.

Still, errors may slip through and this is when your recovery is all that matters. A swift and honest response may come in the form of an update, but often feels like more than 9/10 companies can manage in this life.

… but there’s nothing he can teach us about swearing

The Foundry’s recent run of Flash sites continues with Daisy and Friends. Daisy is a cow who would you believe, loves nothing more than making toasted sandwiches. She and her friends live on a farm where you can download recipes, wallpapers and play the “Crazy Daisy Challenge” game. The range of products starts with a rather cute toastie maker with cow print on it.

I think it’s fair to say that I’ve not posted much this last month. This is mainly because I’ve been very busy. Busy at work, with a significant update to Symphony and with projects for d3creative and MC2. Yessir, I’ve had rather a lot on.

I’ve managed to clear the decks of freelance work, so I’m able to focus on personal projects. I’ve fought down the urge to buy one of these (for now). My immediate task is to back up all my stuff because I’m going to give my trusty iMac G5 a fresh start on Mac OS X Leopard. After that I’ll start work on simpleContact 1.2.

Version 1.2 will include admin account editing and inbox paging in addition to a raft of compatibility and interface improvements.

I will endeavour to get back to regular posts from here on. I think a report on the status of the Refresh project is long overdue.