For a long time after starting Atomic Bird I had only one app-- Macaroni. It did well for me and became my main professional focus. I continued to tinker with it and it continued to support me.
So what's wrong with this picture? Two things.
First, with nothing else needing my attention as a developer, I developed a severe case of second system effect. I had big plans for Macaroni, and they just kept on getting bigger. I think at some point I must have seemed like a mad scientist set on having his creation take over the world. That made it difficult to actually get anything new into people's hands, because I was too busy building up my baby into a monster.
Second, as this went on, I eventually started to get bored with it. It was the same project, day after day, and at some point I found it hard to keep going. I couldn't bear to look at the Macaroni source code any more, and I had to put it aside.
This is why I haven't released a version 3.0 of Macaroni yet.
I needed something else I could work on, to keep things interesting, to avoid the problem of having it be the same thing day after day. Early last year I found it. March 2006 was the first Iron Coder competition. Iron Coder is a friendly competition between Mac developers that's loosely modeled on Iron Chef. You get 48 hours to write an application of some kind, but you don't find out what kind until the competition starts.
I didn't win. But what I did do was write something called FFMinator. Not catchy, really, but I didn't have a lot of time to think about good names. The cool thing about it was that, as I got near to finishing it, I started to really enjoy using it. This wasn't just something that met the requirements of the competition, it was something I wanted to keep using afterwards.
I also realized that FFMinator was really just scratching the surface of what it could be doing. After Iron Coder I continued to develop it, adding features and polishing it. Then I renamed it MondoMouse and released it to the world. So far it's the only Iron Coder entry to be released in this way.
It hasn't quite set the world on fire, but it did get a positive review in MacWorld and it does have a dedicated and growing following. More importantly it's given me something else to work on, so that it's not exclusively one project all the time. A few months later I released Chimey, which is not a huge project but a nice addition to the mix.
As a result of this I found I was able to go back to Macaroni with fresh eyes and a renewed spirit. After a hiatus it's definitely back in play for me. This time I've worked up a detailed plan for version 3.0 that's going to be way cool while (I think) avoiding the problems of overdesign that I ran into previously. I've even got a specific timetable for it, something I hardly ever do.
And of course, if I get a little tired of it, I have something else to work on.
Thu, 01/17/2008 - 17:45
Pretty much every developer has gone through this. For the past few years I generally bounced from one project to another to another, which kept things interesting...however I never got much done for any one particular project since I spread out my time and energy too thinly. In 2007 I began to focus more intently on two major projects, with a few brief interruptions of other projects (perhaps a few days here or there). But with one (yet unreleased) project, after working on it every day for several months straight, I was itching to get back to one of my other projects, especially when there were some "no-so-fun" elements to deal with.
Sat, 01/26/2008 - 18:54
I expect most independent developers do go through it, if they manage to stay independent long enough. Some of us don't realize we're going to go through it, though. With luck this will help out someone else.
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