One of the things that has had to change with the change in what I want to do with Druware has been the level of completeness and finish applications get before they are released. When this was just a place to put things that I had done but didn't intend to sell or support, there wasn't much emphasis on the fit and finish of something. Once it worked, it got posted.
That's not true anymore. Now it's all about the details, the fit and finish if you will. It's frustrating to take so long to release some things, but it is the correct thing to do. Nowhere is it more true than the work that is going on right now. We have one product that is ready to ship in terms of the product itself. The problem is that the back end, the business side of selling the application is not. So for the last week, and probably for the next three weeks, we are in the process of building the business side of the process. Putting together a real customer, issue, and sales tracking process so that we can not only sell the product, but also support it.
For us, much of this is new, since all of our work to date has either been given away, or directly billed to contract customers, most of which has been time and materials.
After a lot of digging at off the shelf solutions, we quickly recognized that for the model we are taking, they didn't work, at least not long term, so here we are. Building the process by hand. Initially, we are going to be doing some it manually rather than automatically. So be it, in the long run, we will have a tool that suits our needs, but also one that helps us finish applications.
The reason it helps us finish applications is simple. We are eating our own food, using the very tools we are selling in our mission critical line of business tools. This gives us enormous incentive to fix those little issues that wouldn't be fixed if we weren't using the tools.
Then there is the other side. Yesterday, Apple's FileMaker group released Bento. We downloaded a copy to play with, and it's interesting to see how they approached an end user oriented database application. A lot of Database people will revile it for it's simplicity, do yourself a favor and ignore them. Bento is the right tool for the single user, and validates many of the ideas we have been working on for PostgreSQL and a simple to use multi-user front end, as many of the concepts and ideas we have been working with and testing exist in Bento. If you haven't taken a look at it, it is definitely worth the time to download and review.