Blue Sky On Mars

As those who have been following my blog for a while know, I’ve been working on a product called Zesty News. Zesty News is an RSS/Atom feed reader… that means, it brings the news to you. No need to manually track dozens of sites on your own. Not only will Zesty News bring the news to you, it tries to figure out which stories are the most interesting to you, and puts those at the top. This is important, because it’s entirely possible that you’ll have lots of new content to look at every day. Probably more than you have time for, which means that you really want to get to the good stuff that comes in.

Zesty News works. It runs on Windows and Mac. It keeps a local database of articles (so it can be used offline). It integrates with Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. But it’s not done. There are some bugs, and some important missing features. There are many great ideas that I have for it that have yet to be implemented.

Those who have followed Blue Sky On Mars will also know that TurboGears sprang out of my work on Zesty News. There’s only so much time in the day, and the TurboGears juggernaut is consuming nearly all of it. I have so many irons in the fire on the TurboGears front, there has just not been time to finish up Zesty News.
Zesty News is the beginnings a great product in a hot area. I’m looking for a genuine partner to work with me to bring Zesty News to market. I’ll continue doing marketing and sales work on the product, and my partner will be responsible for the software itself. This is not a paid job that I’m offering: it’s a chance to get a winning product off the ground in exchange for a share of equity and profits. My intention would be to start a new LLC to support this new phase in Zesty News’ life.

If you’re a software developer with the time and inclination to work on this product and help it be a success, please send me email (kid @at@ blazingthings .dot. com) and we’ll talk further.

Update: For those who haven’t been following my blog and are not coming here from TurboGears-land: Zesty News is built in Python. Using py2exe on Windows and py2app on the Mac, it provides a “native-feeling” experience when running the app, but the main user interface is in the browser (which I actually think is a great way to do UI for an app like an RSS reader).