The Agile Micro ISV Blog

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

It’s been a frustrating week. I was all keyed up to release last
Friday, everything was ready to go live except for one, rather crucial
component; namely the licensing agreement for the OCR component, without which, Home Document Manager is just a pretty face.

It’s only a short term delay, but it’s annoying.

But – I harnassed my annoyance, and turned it into motivation. And
I’m bloody glad I did, as it’s also been quite a creative week for me.

The first thing – I broke off a piece of Home Document Manager and
have packaged it as a stand alone development component. There was only
a little rework to productise it, I’ve had the logo done on 99Designs
and I’m doing the web site over the weekend. Although I swore I would
never release anything for developers, this seemed like it might be low
maintenance, so I’ll give it a whirl. I’ll announce when the last
remaining ‘issue’ slots into place.

I also had an interesting idea about providing a non software related service for micro ISVs. Can’t say any more at the minute, but should be able to in the next couple of days.

Image via Wikipedia

For the last month, it feels like I’ve done nothing but drive and
work. I get up at 5.30, leave the house at 5.45, drive 60 miles, get to
work at 7, leave at 3, drive 60 miles, eat, put the kids to bed, then
work til about 12. Then I go to sleep, and repeat ad infinitum.

This weekend, a combination of sweltering heat and chronic tiredness
finally caught up with me. I usually work Friday and Saturday nights
until the sun comes up, but this weekend it was just too much. So I had
the weekend off. And I needed it.

I’ve dragged myself to within reaching distance of the 1.0 that has thus far proved elusive. I’m 3 days past code freeze,
and the code isn’t even chilled. I’ve got three days left, and I know
that something’s got to give. So I’ve made the sensible decision to
make August 1st’s release a public beta.
This means I can bump the licensing and ecommerce stuff into next
month. It also means I will have a better RTM version come September
1st.

It’s been an odd week. I’ve received emails of encouragement from
the oddest of quarters. From the PaperPort user group, from a Supreme
Court Associate Justice, from a photographer….

The slog continues…

Over the weekend, I had to radically change the way Home Document
Manager stores its data internally. Turns out Lucene doesn’t support
in-place alterations of documents, so you have to delete then re-add
documents to the index. With OCR’d documents, this brought unpleasant
choices of either storing the OCR’d text for no reason other than to
support this, or re-OCRing the documents when something as simple as
moving a document to another folder occured.

So, in the end, I split the index in two – a content index, and a
metadata index. This should speed up navigating as the number of
documents increases, and it also means that removing and re-adding
documents is a lot quicker, as it’s only ever the metadata that changes.

The logo contest over at 99designs is
coming to an end. Would love to hear people’s thoughts. The logo above
isn’t necessarily my favourite. It’s just that Zemanta doesn’t appear
to be there today….and I like pictures.