After what seems like forever, I’m proud to finally be able to unveil Today 2 to the world. Today 2 adds support for creating events or tasks globally, showing events in the future and sports a sexy new user interface. I am incredibly proud of all the work that went into it and even more relieved that the release has been pretty smooth and positively received.
I actually started working on Today 2 way back in April of 2009, but a variety of distractions and complex updates pushed the release to take several months longer than I had hoped or planned. During the course of developing Today 2, I learned quite a few lessons to take forward in future projects. Hopefully you can also learn from my mistakes.
- Developer ADD is a bitch: One of the perks of being “Indie” is the ability to set your own schedule. This can also be a major detriment as I found out. At once time I had three different major releases marinating, Today 2 included. As this has shipped, I am now at Ship 0, but it took over 6 months to get myself out of the mess I setup. Focus on one thing, finish it and then move on.
- Don’t bite off so much: Gus Mueller mentioned to me in email a while back that shipping a 2.0 may be harder than a 1.0. I’m inclined to agree. There were so many things that I wanted to add into the release that I felt were missing in 1.0. So I added them. And then added more. And then updated for Snow Leopard/64-bit. Keep a better development schedule and stick to it.
- Refactor small, often: Besides adding in new features and functionality, I also decided Today 2 would be a fantastic time to completely rewrite the underpinnings of the application to take advantage of things I learned in my journey from a Cocoa Orange Belt to Green Belt. While I can sleep a bit better at night knowing that the architecture is no longer powered by a single, giant controller, it delayed shipping the app by at least a month. The better route would have been to adjust small pieces over the course of several maintenance releases.
Now that I’m caught up on the mess I started in early 2009, let’s start shipping software more often in 2010. Deal?
