A customer convinced me to throw another one on the barbie, as it were.  Here’s whats coming in version 1.04.

• A fresh new look (stock icons and changing the preview card to more accurately reflect the actual printed card).
• Choice of fonts.
• Choice of word wrap (or not).
• Choice of where to position the printed card on the page (not sure this will make it in).
• Printing calling cards.
• Column headings (Doubtful that this will make it in in time but we’ll see.)
• Card titles (Doubtful that this will make it in in time but we’ll see.)
• Some minor improvements under the hood.

One of the features on this list took 4 solid hours to implement.  Another took 5 minutes.  Any guesses which was which?

Sorry, just nearly had a laughing fit at work:

There is a recent fad for Japanese schoolgirls to send each other messages in basically Japanese schoolgirld l33tsp34k.  The problem is that, despite this being very trendy, its very annoying difficult to do well on a cellphone.  Enter a web service which, if you send it a mail, will l33tify it for your friend without having to do any work.  They then charge your phone bill about 5 cents.  (Figure on 2 cents going to the phone company, incidentally).

Sounds like a complete waste of time, right?  Yeah, probably… unless you process 20 million messages a month.  Which apparently one of these companies is doing.  For a service which is, approximately, a 15 line Perl script and a 100 line Japanese-to-gibberish table of rules.

I was *particularly* impressed by the for-pay option to decrypt what your friend was trying to say to you in case you were in no mood to parse it yourself.

Roughly a month and a half after I first, foolishly, promised to have an OS X version of Bingo Card Creator, I’m actually close to releasing one.  Two major factors propelled me towards this:

I have one extremely dedicated customer who absolutely had to have Bingo Card Creator to teach her son reading.  She asked me whether I would have the Mac version done soon and I told her “Well, I certainly hope so”.  And then she went ahead and bought it, sight unseen.  I tried to refund her money because I can’t take money for a product which doesn’t officially exist yet but she would have none of it, so I quickly cobbled together a distribution which would work on a Mac (which basically meant zipping up my install directory and including instructions on how to double-click a JAR file) and rushed it out to her.  Apparently it worked pretty well, aside from a few niggles (not being associated with the file types it creates — the Windows version isn’t, either, as thats been somewhat low on the totem pole), and she sends me updates on how her son is loving reading and math nowadays.

So, given that I’m about to release v1.04, I thought it was as good a time as any to officially roll out the Mac version.  This is problematic because I wanted Bingo Card Creator to function as a native program does (i.e. no “find the coffee cup icon, then double click!” business).  I could accomplish that in about an hour of research and tinkering with the Mac Java SDK but, whoops, no Mac to actually use.  So I decided to outsource.

Enter RentACoder.  I offered the project up at $25 to port Bingo Card Creator (where “port” means “spend five minutes creating a native wrapper”).  It got accepted by somebody in Western Europe (I was sure it was going to be Eastern Europe or India at that price, as even if it is 10 minutes of work its not enough money to wake a programmer up in the West), and he’s busily working on it now.  He even managed to figure out how to do it such that I can do the update from v1.04 to 1.05, etc, on a Windows PC, which is great because it saves me money having to request the same service again (and will earn him a bonus).

Is there a market for Bingo Card Creator on the Mac?  Well, even if there wasn’t, I’ve got one customer who bought it already and so I’m rather committed. :)  Roughly 2% of my site’s visitors are using Macs, and every once in a (long) while I get a Mac specific search string.  I know a good portion of teachers and parents use Macs, although I suspect their share in that market is falling over time, so we’ll see if it generates any significant amount of sales.

Side note: Number of lines of codes changed for the Mac version?  Erm, zero.  I like being a Java Success Story (TM).  I will need to change my download page, though — probably use Javascript to detect whether its a Mac or PC and then redirect to the distribution as appropriate.

Version 1.04 is otherwise humming along.  I’ve got roughly 3 of my 5 slated features completed, and added 3 word lists (US presidents, states, and state capitals).  If anybody has suggestions for more word lists which aren’t math related (thats features 4 and 5), feel free to post them in the comments or drop me a line.  I’m thinking of including about 10 new ones concentrated outside of math/reading since my program should have those two fairly well covered.

I posted earlier this week about how I took advantage of icons-icons’s August sale to get a pile of stock icons for $29.95. I just wanted to post why I’m thrilled with my purchase. Here are two screenshots from my program. The first is version 1.03, which is the newest version which is officially available. The second is a sneak peek of version 1.04, which I hope to have out sometime next week. This is the screenshot which directly sells my program more than any other (with the possible exception of the printed output scan): its my interface looking at its best and brightest and it hints to the teachers exactly how much use they can get out of my program. Accordingly, its placed prominently on my website (above the fold on my main page).

Here’s the old version (click to enlarge):

And here’s the new version (thumbnail):

Now doesn’t that look more colorful and vibrant?

Incidentally, the change to whites in the card preview is a side-effect of changing that to more accurately reflect what things will look like when they are printed. I hope to have a Print Preview feature ready for 1.04’s actual release, but will keep that interface element because it makes my program look more substantial and because it greatly simplifies the workflow if you’re making your own word list.

A few weeks ago a mail ended up in my spam box.  It ended up sandwitched between one “Mr. Wiggly”-type spam and one “Hot Japanese girls are looking for you!”.  Odd how my spam seems to come in complimentary themes.  Anyhow, I fished it out because it had a business proposal which, on reflection, actually interested me.  The email was a pretty good example of selling to someone you’ve never met before, incidentally, and if the writer gives me permission I’d gladly step through it with the reasons why it didn’t get the delete key.

Anyhow, here was the business proposition in a nutshell: “We run Bits du Jour, the woot of software, and we’d like to feature Bingo Card Creator as part of our back-to-school week”.  Now, I’ll be perfectly honest, I had no clue what woot meant aside from something my roommate used to say after putting an AWP round through someone’s head in CounterStrike.  Apparently woot is a website which essentially sells overstocked items.  The catch is that they sell exactly one item at a time, for a 24 hour period, and the supply is sharply limited.  So it creates basically a one-day “event” sort of sale… which repeats every day.   As I write this the sale is $145 for a kick-booty video card (sold out, sorry!).  And apparently they make piles and piles of money.

Bits du Jour takes the same basic structure and applies it to software, minus the scarcity angle.  They feature one piece of software a day, sold at a deep discount (40% is their minimum), and sell as many copies as humanly possible.  Or rather, they help the author sell copies — they rather strongly pitched that I wouldn’t have to change a thing about my existing shopping cart, which would have been a deal-breaker for me.  In return for driving the traffic to you, they get a commission similar to an affiliate site’s.  As I recall they said their standard was 30% but they’re not at full-scale operations yet (having only been open for a few months) and so were willing to go down to 20% for me.   Doing the math, that means on a discounted $14.95 sale of Bingo Card Creator that would net them $2.99 (and me a hair above $11.50).

Now, frankly, I had no plans to do anything with affiliates.  Here is the rationale: I have a $23.93 incentive to sell one marginal copy of my software ($24.95 – Paypal’s cut).  Any given affiliate has, say, a $5 incentive.  $5 doesn’t motivate someone to put any investment or thought into actually getting my software in front of people who need it: it just gets them to list my software on a spammy site with 100,000 other products competing for attention.  And in return for this I get to deal with more hands in the pot and having to track affiliates, send out commissions, and what have you.  Thanks, but no thanks.  I’d much rather spend the affiliate’s commission on AdWords, where I have total control of the experience from beginning to end and only have to deal with myself.

I was about to write the same to Bits Du Jour but, well, that letter was darn persuasive.  I would have to do very vanishingly little work (it turned out to take less than 10 minutes of my time to set up, all told — I created a new product on e-junkie, set up an affiliate system for it, and mailed her the proper link) and they said they would trust me to do the math on the affiliate stuff rather than having to go through any involved setup.  It turns out the setup wasn’t too involved, but as I’ve mentioned previously in regards to customer service, nothing motivates people like the words “I trust you”.  Particularly when its “I trust that we will have such a successful relationship that you will choose to pay me at the end of it”.

Am I expecting great things to come out of my day in the sun?  Not exactly.  As opposed to most of the products Bits du Jour sells (which seem to trend towards generic system utilities), I sell to a niche among niches.  I don’t know what their traffic is like on any given day, but unless it includes hundreds of teachers or parents of elementary school children I don’t see myself making a gigantic amount of sales.  (I’m personally betting on 2, which means about $23 for me and $6 to Bits du Jour — I actually mentioned that to them and they said they were happy to experiment).  And, hey, its not going to cost me any sales I was going to make already or take more than ten minutes of my time.

I believe D-Day is September 8th.  As usual, I’ll be sharing the results of the experiment.  The kind folks at Bits du Jour said they would be perfectly happy with that, which is the sort of transparency that many Internet companies brag about but few actually achieve.

Oddly enough right before I went on vacation I ended up on Slashdot for my recent musing on crippling trial versions. It being Slashdot, many people were shocked and amazed that someone would have the gumption to actually sell a program of the complexity of Bingo Card Creator. There was also, shall we say, a weeeee bit of animosity. Similarly, if you go to the Business of Software forums, every time the subject of OSS (open source software — to sidestep a debate which is essentially religious, OSS can be most easily understood as “software which you can use and modify for free”) comes up some folks have a weeeeee bit of animosity towards it. And when I say a weeeeee bit of animosity, its like saying that Israelis and Arabs don’t quite see eye-to-eye on that little land dispute they’ve had running for a few years.

Now, personally, I don’t understand quite why this is. Open source coexists quite readily with uISVs (micro independent software vendors = people, like me, who sell software without the backing of a “really big company”) and will continue to do so indefinitely. I say this as someone who both has contributed to OSS software (namely, I did bugfixing and optimizations for the best online version of the classic Battletech boardgame in existence), use OSS constantly in both my day job and my uISV, and sell proprietary software. So when I hear myths like the following I get a good chuckle.

OSS backers are crazy Commies. Most people who have installed Firefox are, in fact, not Communists. Most of the folks who, for lack of a better term, find themselves politically or spiritually fulfilled by the OSS movement (as opposed to a particular piece of OSS software), are in fact not Communists. Many of them do have irrational takes on the actual economics of software (c.f. Richard Stallman’s GNU Manifesto, which suggests at one point that all computer users be taxed to fund software development, an idea which would lead to overpriced computers, a crushing undersupply of new software, and a gigantic transnational boondoggle of a government agency to administer the tax, and thats just for starters). However, the movement is too fractured, too corporatized (see below), and too lacking in bullets-in-the-back-of-the-head-for-all-who-oppose-us to be fairly called Communist. Of course, its entirely possible that some OSS developers are honest-to-badness Commies, but thats far from universal.

OSS software is written by tiny developers working in their spare time out of the goodness of their hearts. This is every bit as much a lie as the Commie bit. Here’s a dirty little secret: most big-name OSS projects (including Linux, Firefox, Eclipse, take your pick) are produced primarily by programmers at large corporations working at the direction of their bosses in exchange for cash money. “Anyone can contribute to Linux!” is, if not a lie, a gross misstatement of the facts: getting a patch into the Linux kernel requires getting it past a series of gatekeepers who are getting paid for their time. And thats probably a good thing. Why IBM et al spend billions of dollars (in money and donated labor) on funding the Apache Software Foundation, Mozilla, et al are outside the scope of this post, but they do. And they’re hardly alone — more than half of the developers working on Sourceforge at the behest of the people signing their paychecks.

OSS will reach every niche in the software world and there will be no space for proprietary software. O rly? Allow me to give a +5 insightful to guy on Slashdot who said “If that was true, why hasn’t OSS produced something of quality comparable to Bingo Card Creator?” Oh, there are a lot of answers to that one.

Have you ever noticed that programmers seem to be able to find almost anything they need on Sourceforge and that everybody else really has to hunt for it? This is a reflection of the most fundamental truth of software development: you can’t program if you’re not a programmer. Programmers are very good at producing software for their own needs… and a lot less good at producing software for other’s needs. But the rest of the world keeps needing software to run their chimney sweep operations, make bingo cards, plan their weddings, and write their aquisition forms for a new laptop to replace the one that just exploded. And so there is a market for software development expertise, where people who don’t have it pay people who do money so that they can get back to doing the things they do best. Like sweeping chimneys, teaching children, looking at overly expensive wedding dresses, and blogging.

Open source means all bugs are get fixed and all features get implemented… in some dreamworld where all open source projects are under active development. Back in the real world, the overwhelming majority of open source projects are inactive. Development has ceased, the original maintainer (and the only person who knows how the code works) cannot be contacted, and mails/forum posts go unanswered. Take a look at the closest OSS competitor to my program, bingo-cards: it hasn’t seen a patch since 2004. (And its more active than 75% of the projects on SourceForge.) This is despite some minor usability niggles such as the fact that if you try to install it on a Windows PC it will crash.

Here’s another myth held by many in the uISV community: OSS developers will instantly clone any successful application because they’re crazy zealots. I’m sure any competent C developer could take the bingo-cards codebase and make it the equal of Bingo Card Creator in less than a man-week. I’m equally sure that they won’t. Sure, lots of the folks on Slashdot said variations of “Oh, I’d clone your program just to spite you”, but I have the strong suspicion that, as the Texas saying has it, they have a lot of hat but no cattle. And most uISVs produce programs with vastly higher barriers to entry than Bingo Card Creator — I shudder to think at how much I’d have to learn about chimney sweeping to outdo ChimneySoft, and there’s probably an order of magnitude more code to write there.

IBM is no more interested in bankrolling bingo-cards than they are interested in rolling out their own Proprietary Bingo Solution (TM) because the niche is just too tiny. Most teachers are incapable of coding and don’t have a week to spend doing it at any rate. Most one-man OSS teams don’t exactly have their intrinsic motivation fire lit by doing the unchallenging, boring coding tasks like making sure that bingo cards are printed correctly. Enter the uISV, who has the skills and the motivation ($$$) to solve this task, and everyone profits. Little kids learn to read, teachers spend more time teaching and less time preparing, I earn money to fund my cocoa habit, OSS developers write software they’ll actually enjoy writing.

Oh, while we’re at it, here’s another myth both OSS backers and many uISVs suffer under: Most of the work done in producing a quality piece of software happens in an IDE. If a tree falls in a forest, does it make any sound? If the perfect solution to the problem facing you can’t be found on a Google search, does it matter that it exists? Most successful uISVs have long since learned the lesson that writing the program is about 10% of the battle: you’ve then got to get it in front of prospective users, write documentation, help them with their problems, market market and market some more, etc. These take time and money, and most OSS developers hate them. With a burning passion. Intrinsic motivation only takes the typical OSS developer as far as closing the IDE.

bingo-cards, for example, gets about 5% of my downloads primarily because I spent time making a website which attracts teachers who have a problem like “I need to play sight word bingo with my first graders tomorrow but don’t want to spend hours making cards” and gives me the opportunity to tell them “Yep, install my software and you’ll be done in five minutes”. One way of several is I just got charged $90 by Goooogle for clicks on contextual advertising. Probably 99.9999% of OSS has an advertising budget of nothing. The developers also don’t typically take even rudimentary, free steps such as writing a description of their software which explains to real, honest-to-God users what their program actually allows them to accomplish. Not to pick on bingo-cards, but let me quote literally the entirety of what you can learn about their software without downloading it:

GPL bingo card printing program (numeric, letter bingo and picture bingo). Also prints a calling sequence (equivalent to the output from a barrel full of balls). XML output for later linking to multimedia engine.

Thats full of scary acronyms, irrelevant information, and about three words which are actually of use to an elementary school teacher. You can’t tell from that description that bingo-cards will even allow you to print Dolch sight word bingo cards (it will, incidentally, although you’ll have to supply the list yourself).

Compare this to a random three sentence snippet from a page on my website about Dolch sight word bingo:

This is a page of free resources for teaching how to read Dolch sight words which we put together as a resource to educators. You’ll probably want to have a set of sight words bingo cards ready to go to use these activities. If you don’t have one, you can make one in under five minutes if you download the free trial of Bingo Card Creator, which comes complete with all five Dolch sight word lists (pre-primer, primer, first grade, second grade, and third grade).

Only one of these two pages is responsive to the needs of our busy first grade teacher, and only one of them gets hit by Google searchers about 200 times per week.

[Edit: “Boondoggle” is a very hard word to spell.  I have no clue where “misunderstatement” came from, but I do love the charming Dubyaesque quality of that coinage.  Sadly, I was forced to rectify it to avoid enraging my readers who are English teachers.]