On Tue, 17 Apr 2012, Anita Lewis wrote:
# No problem, Roberto! We used to be a fairly active list, but now we
# have very few posts. Your posts to us were welcome! I'm glad you found
# the code.
At peek, I was having to answer abotu 200 emails _a day_ for
Shadow; it was a little (lot!) rough, and I had pulled in a few peopel to
help nearly...
If you work out the arithmetic there, you'll notice it was about
50,000 emails _per year_ just for Shadow ;)
I enjoyed the chatty lot that we were, *damn* :)
Shadow was a pretty good success, and I'm proud that I never went
too far .. I didn't charge for upgrades and nickle and dime everyone,.
though I probably should have ;) We had a big vibrant community, I got
people involved, we had user group meetings here and there.. it was
amazing.
As to giving out the code to someone, its just not practical; the
early PDA/phone days were very tight on resources, and the coding had to
be done in extremly painful ways; few coders wanted to get into the
trouble we had to do to work around system limitations, and none of that
is transferrable to modern architectures; the Palm OS APIs and
methodlogies are completely out the window, and at the time the logic and
the presentation and the storage and so forth was very much intertwined by
necessity, to get the performance we did. (And Shadow was one of the
higher performant apps around.)
The desktop code has some life in it still, possibly, mind.
No, I'm often tempted to get back into the Outliner arena, but its
a very different landscape; you're not making an app for a handle, or a
desktop.. now you're making an app that has to win on an unlikely chance
(its tough out there), and also has to have a significant web present,
possibly desktop applications.. and Shadow is not some simple $1 app tyhat
atkes a matter of days or weeks to build; somethign like Shadow was very
tightly designed and fairly powerful .. the estiamt for an app like that
in Android or iOS is in the order of $100-200K to get it off the ground.
Now, mind, I coudl start real;ly small, which is how I did Shadow
.. keep costs low, keep agile so you can switch directions very quickly,
all that.. but its a different game; most apps are simple these days,
whereas in the old days we wanted desdktop power in a handheld.. now
they're just different apps, yet mostly simple.. but coming into a
estabnlished ecology means you have to look better and have better
features, and in Outliners to get enterprise markets.. you nees strong web
presence, partnerships with al;l the big mind mapeprs and existing
outliners.. its a tall order.
Its not to say I won't do it.. I'm a pretty scrappy guy, I don't
mind fighting the good fight; but thats a tough one.
I am trying to wrap up and and let go of a buncxh of other
projects right now, close the door on a number of pursuits, and then its
time to figure out whats next. Got 3 kids now keeping me busy, but you
never know wher eI go. I have a problem sitting still :)
jeff
--
If everyone would put barbecue sauce on their food, there would be no war.