CAUTION: Meandering editorial follows…

I’ve been trying for a week to write a post about the recent demo/Android talk I did (along with Mike Koss and Alberto Fonseca) with the Google Technical Users Group in Seattle (huge thanks to Mike Koss for setting this up!) earlier this month.  There’s a comment I made in this talk that has been hounding me ever since.  Since then I’ve wanted to expand on it and make it clear what my position is.  At about 1:08 into the video, I made it sound like getting something out the door is more important than making sure it’s polished.  I strongly believe in the release early and release often mentality.  I have been on far to many projects that have belabored releasing because of some assumed polish that needed to be done.  Whether it was that one more magical feature, or that one more must fix bug, there was always something holding back the release date.  I certainly respect those companies that have the resources and skills to pull the “make sure it’s polished” standard…one of these companies is of course Apple.  They have an awesome sense for design and what customers want, and they have the resources to develop in house and behind closed doors….I don’t…I don’t even have the resources to hire a decent graphic designer or QA person, and if I spent all my time worrying if a certain icon looked pleasing or if that one bug was a show stopper, I’d never, ever get anything out the door.  So as a single developer trying to make the simplest product, I gotta just put it out there and see how it does.  Maybe it’ll suck?  Or, maybe for whatever reason it won’t gain traction.  But wallowing in “does it have enough polish” land doesn’t answer anything, so I choose to get it out the door, and the Android platform allows me to quickly do this.

Maybe I’ll stumble upon that one app that is an overnight success and is so nicely polished that everyone wants to pay me 99 cents for it, but I’m not betting on it…and that statement doesn’t make me feel any less talented then the person who does make that overnight success app.  That person was just luckier to came across (for whatever reason) that one idea that they stuck with and where able to pull off!  And I hugely congratulate them on their success!

Hope you enjoy the little talk we had at Startpad….here’s the link if the embed doesn’t work

I’m a huge fan of David Heinemeier Hansson and 37signals, he was recently at Stanford’s Entrepreneur Thought Leaders Seminar Series doing a talk called “Unlearning Your MBA”. There’s a load of wisdom for entrepreneurs and it’s also very entertaining.

Well here’s my very first YouTube video…it’s a demo of MediaDroid. Certainly not perfect, but I think it gets the job done and I’m stick’n with it!

Here’s the link in case the embed doesn’t work

Just released a brand new version of MediaDroid.  Thanks to some reverse engineering of the Android Image Gallery, I’ve been able to greatly increase the performance and stability of the app.  Hopefully I’ll be able to get into the specific changes (for all the Android developers out there) in a later post when I get a little more time.  Also, improved the button icons thanks to my son’s (OK…they where mine first) Crayons (TM).

Already have plans for some more features (filtering the image buckets shown in the Image Gallery) and with this re-write out of the way I think I’ll be able to get the next version out sooner.

Cheers, and thanks for all the support from the current users of MediaDroid, it’s great to hear all your feedback…good and bad!!

As I’ve been alluding to in my Twitter feed, I’m on the cusp of deploying a new version of MediaDroid, huge re-write to image gallery, but hopefully I’ll get a post about that out later.  Anyway, the previous way I was marking the images to be included in the albums was to have a combo view with a check box and a thumbnail of the image.  Although this works, it takes up a lot of screen real estate and isn’t terribly efficient.  The next version of the image gallery I wrote extended the Android ImageView class and although this solution isn’t much more efficient (the solution for that is in my newest version), it certainly increases the number of images viewed at a time.

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