Well, I’ve been maintaining this site for a while and I’m still not inclined to modify my robots.txt file so that search engines can actually see it. Why not? Because I still haven’t got a single piece of software available for download. And why is that? Because I keep changing the software instead of just getting rid of the bugs and releasing it.

I have a real problem with locking-off changes, because so often a change seems like a simple matter, and once I’ve thought of some great new feature it just seems stupid not to support it. But that leaves me in perpetual non-finished state, with the risk of bloat (see "Feature Creep" below). Programming to me is probably a little too much of a hobby and not enough of a business.

Did I mention that I currently have no other income? Most shareware seems to be written be people with "day jobs", or at the very least some sort of alternative income source (eg contract work). That kind of annoys me because I see this software that people have written, and I dont see why they shouldn’t be able to make a living from it. Software is a unique type of product because it can be distributed to an unlimited number of people virtually for free (via the internet). Very rich companies make huge profits from software. Surely then, an individual who writes decent software should be able to cover his expenses and maybe a little besides? Maybe my perceptions about other shareware authors are false, but it’s hard to know for sure, because shareware providers generally seem to be a little shy about letting on just how big their operations are.

So anyway, what sort of state of completeness is my software?

• - My favourite text editor, very reliable with very nice features for a programmer type (with more being added everyday - naughty me). Some roughness with setting user preferences (no interface to do so yet). Needs more testing after recent overhaul.

• - The program I’m using to maintain this site… I’m using it right now. It’s very cool with some great features but is not terribly user friendly, because most features are there for me to do things in a specific way. Because of it’s unique behaviour, it is harder to determine how ‘finished’ it is (harder to decide what is acceptable functionality)

• - Is finished, at least version 1 is. Why dont I put it online then? Good question. Because I’m a scaredy cat I guess. It’s a program for storing secret data… what happens if an unforseen bug makes it eat secret data instead? Angry users!

• - Basically finished version 1. Should be online, isn’t. See previous excuse, only this time the program doesn’t involve secret data.

• - have mentioned before, I should be pouring every ounce of my strength into finishing this one, instead I have hardly touched it in 6 months. Why? Because I have hardly used it. I only seem to be able to work on products which I am actually interested in using, and since I haven’t got any ebooks I want to read right now (too busy programming!) poor old BookReader molders on the back-burner.

• - Another releasable product, which I use every day. This one’s not pretty, being command line based, but then it’s not supposed to be pretty. It just does a bunch of stuff. Actually tehre is a problem with this one, and that is that some functionality doesn’t work under Win95/98 thanks to a poor implementation of the SendTo folder. Differences between OS Versions are really annoying !

• - This is a tricky one… it basically works (again, I use it all the time)it could be a really great program, but the few bugs and issues it has need fixing. So fix them? I’d love to but Fragt was the first windows program I ever wrote, so I’m not so keen to dive in there and start messing around (it does things in unusual ways). It should probably be replaced with something more like eLibrary.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 8th, 2002 at 10:12 pm and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.