Blue Sky On Mars

Remarkably, all of the timings fell into place for me to begin shipping the TurboGears Ultimate DVD (and the assorted other fun stuff I’ve got) today as planned. Producing the DVD was a painful experience that was fraught with peril (but mostly fraught with an extraordinary variety of technical complications). It was a good feeling to get it off to manufacturing.

The DVDs arrived on schedule at the warehouse on Wednesday, and I received a few yesterday. It looks fantastic, except… I had wanted the G-gear on a shiny disc instead of on white. Remarkably, duplication company’s software lets you specify (and pay for) the shiny “feature” and yet still have it turned off for the production process. Hmm… two variables representing the same information… what could possibly go wrong?

Sadly, you can’t just twiddle the color flag on a physical product. I was actually close to being sold out of discs anyhow, so I turned it into a win for everyone. I got discount on the white discs and a batch of shiny discs will be zooming to the warehouse soon.

I really want to give preorder supporters first dibs on the cooler, shiny discs. So, I’m planning to start shipping the preorders next week when the shiny ones arrive at the warehouse. If you’d rather not wait the extra couple of days, just send me an email (kid -at- blazingthings.com), and I’ll send you a white one right away.

It’ll likely be a week before I get my hands on a physical copy of the TurboGears Ultimate DVD, but I did receive my tin Toolboxes and MarbleGears today. The fulfillment service did a great job packaging it up and shipping it along. (The owner of the company has a great attitude: he insists on not making “boxing stuff up and sending it out” any more complex than it really is.)

Both products look great. The tin Toolbox is just what you’d expect: a little tin toolbox with the TurboGears logo (the full-word logo, not the G-gear) on the top near the handle. It’s a nice size for a desk accessory for holding pens, calculator and whatnot.

I haven’t broken it out to play with yet, but the MarbleGears is awesome. The TG logo stands out quite boldly on the yellow cross piece, and the pieces are larger than I had expected.

By the way, starting right now you can order the tin Toolboxes from the Ultimate page. They had previously only been available as part of the DVD+logo in credits package. Since the DVD is off to manufacturing already, you can’t get your logo in the credits any more. But, you can get a Toolbox.

Preorder pricing (everything is cheaper right now) ends on Friday, when I expect to start shipping DVDs.

Press Release
For Immediate Release: May 10, 2006

Blazing Things LLC and Appropriate Solutions, Inc. to co-develop Zesty News

PETERBOROUGH, NH May 10, 2006 Blazing Things LLC (BT) and Appropriate Solutions, Inc. (ASI) have entered into a partnership to further develop Zesty News — Blazing Things’ on-line news and information aggregator. Under the new, multi-year arrangement, ASI will pick up development of Zesty News from the basis created by BT. ASI will also provide documentation and technical support services for the product. BT will continue the marketing and product management of Zesty News.

Zesty News is an intelligent aggregator of on-line news and information, designed to pull up-to-date data from the millions of sites that support RSS and Atom formatted feeds. To help users deal with the massive influx of new information, Zesty News pinpoints the stories that are most relevant and interesting to the user, based on the user’s past reading history.

Zesty News runs on your own computer, allowing you to take your news with you. It is compatible with Windows and Mac computers, and is tested with Internet Explorer 6, Firefox, and Safari web browsers. The first general-availability release under this agreement between BT and ASI will be Zesty News Lite, a free version of the product. Zesty News Lite is expected in the second half of 2006.

“Appropriate Solutions is the perfect partner for this project. They have a desire to produce the best possible Zesty News, and we’re all going to have an almost shamefully good time building it,” said Kevin Dangoor, President of Blazing Things LLC.

“We’re excited to be working with Blazing Things” said Ray Cote, President of Appropriate Solutions, Inc., “Building Zesty with TurboGears is fun!”

ABOUT BLAZING THINGS
Blazing Things LLC was founded in January 2005 by Kevin Dangoor to build a news reading product with a focus on handling a barrage of new information. Following the alpha test release of Zesty News in August 2005, BT released the TurboGears open source web development framework. TurboGears has been very successful, and BT is pursuing
business opportunities surrounding TurboGears.

ABOUT APPROPRIATE SOLUTIONS
Appropriate Solutions, Inc. (ASI) provides custom software development services for desktop, client-server, and web applications. ASI’s in-house development staff is experienced in a wide range of platforms and development tools.

I am very happy to report that development of Zesty News is now restarting. After quite a bit of discussion with different people, followed by a bit of contract hammering, I’ve just signed a contract with Appropriate Solutions, Inc. (ASI) to continue the development of Zesty News. I will continue wearing the product manager, marketing and sales hats. I’ve really enjoyed talking with Ray Cote of ASI these past couple of months, and think they’ll be a great partner on this.

I’m also really excited to have the development pick back up. Even after a few months of stagnation, Zesty News still has unique features and aspects to it, and we’re going to push even further on those in the coming months as we see the product through to completion.

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).

After I first announced Zesty News, I mentioned that it was an RSS reader, and I talked a bit about making it browser-based and cross-platform, while still including reasonable support for things expected on Macs and PCs.

I hadn’t talked about what makes Zesty News special, and that’s just as well since I ended up delaying things a bit. Now that the alpha is out and available to testers, I have put more information about Zesty News up on the Blazing Things site.

The things that are talked about on the Blazing Things site are features right now. They’re not vaporware. There’s a bit more to add before Zesty News Lite 1.0 beta is done.

Last week, Ian Landsman wrote about leaving features out in order to get a product out the door, and I promised to write about delaying a product to make it stronger.

One thing about writing a blog is that, as long as you’re honest, you give yourself an automatic history. Something you can look back and reflect on. For example, on May 10th, I wrote that the Zesty News alpha was feature complete, and that there was only bug fixing and interface cleanup to go. And that was true, at that instant. Rich Sheridan is fond of saying “last minute change is a competitive advantage”. If change is necessary to succeed, changing at the last minute is better than not changing at all.

So, a funny thing happened on the way to the alpha release: I decided to make some changes. Two things kicked off what I’m calling my Summer of Refactoring (aka, Thank God for Automated Tests): a desire for better perceived performance and an acknowledgement that plugins are more important to Zesty News than I had first thought.

I’ve been actively using Zesty News for months now. One thing that had bothered me a little bit, but not enough to take immediate action, was that the UI would sometimes pause for a second or two if feeds were being updated while I was reading. On one hand, it was a minor niggle… what’s a second or two, right? But, on the other hand, it breaks the flow of reading and lessens the total experience.

So, I started looking at my options. I ended up concluding that the sqlite database was just not the right database for Zesty News. It’s a great database for a large number of desktop applications. But, Zesty News is almost like a multiuser application in that the feed updating happens right alongside the user’s reading. sqlite is very fast, but Zesty News has a fair bit of bookkeeping to do to work its magic.

At about the same time I came to that conclusion, I also looked at the field of competitors at the time and knew that plugins are going to be an important part of what Zesty News can offer. I’ve been planning all along that the difference between Zesty News Lite, the free version, and the full Zesty News would be completely implemented in plugins. That will greatly ease my maintenance burden, and it will also ensure that others who want to make plugins have a powerful facility to do so.

With a decision to change the database engine already there, I decided that I would open my mind to other changes that would make things easier for people who want to write plugins.

The first couple of weeks of June were lost to a false start on the database change. I liked many aspects of the change, but there was a different performance problem introduced there. One that was just not acceptable to me. Once I discovered that the Firebird database was actually a viable option, I was all set and could proceed forward.

The next step was to put in the best pieces for plugin writers, so that I could make writing plugins easier. I changed around a whole bunch of infrastructure parts that I had chosen. The shape of the Zesty News code changed around the edges, and everything was streamlined a bit and became more pleasant to work with.

The Zesty News of today no longer has the concurrency problem that it had on May 10th. The main interface looks much better (thanks, Kirsten!), there is a smattering of new features, and the infrastructure is fun to work with. I’m exceedingly happy to have changed course, because I know that the Zesty News of today is going to be much better for what comes next: real users.

Sounds like a good time to start the alpha for real! And that’s what I’m doing.

I’ve been very quiet about Zesty News the past few weeks. The reason for this is simple: I don’t like pitching vaporware. When I announced Zesty News at the end of April, I had a specific distinct bug list that I was going to tackle before release of the alpha, so I felt fine in announcing it. I don’t regret having done so, because I also wanted to put the name out there.

I’ve worked with some people who liked to emphasize that “plan is a verb”. You don’t make a plan and then stick to it rigidly, even as the world around you changes. In May, I made a couple of choices that have delayed the Zesty News software a bit. I’ll write more about that later.

I’m going to remain generally quiet about Zesty News at this point, until I ship the alpha.

I had, until very recently, been aiming for releasing the first alpha release of Zesty News Lite on May 31st. I do believe in “release early, release often” as a way to make great progress on a project, even a closed-source one. However, I also believe in not wasting the time of the people testing my product. That means balancing the desire to get features out there with a bit of stability.

The point of the alpha release of Zesty News is to get the foundation out there, showing off the basic concepts, and then build features based on my plan and feedback I get. The foundation should be solid, so that I can react fairly quickly without spending too much time retooling.

A couple of days ago, I decided that I needed to do some retooling to handle concurrency better. Though I could have done this work between the alpha and beta releases, I decided that it’s a better idea to get this done before I release at all. There are other benefits to this change, as well: my code will be easier to test and more code will be covered by automated tests as a result, the distributed package has shrunk by about 10%, and programming for the web interfaces will be easier going forward.

When I’m done with the change, I’ll write more technical details about it.

Odds are that this change will take about a week, which is not too bad. After that week is over, I’ll spend the following week or so working on what I had originally planned to do this week and ongoing testing of the big change I’m making now.

Dare Obasanjo and Dave Winer are both talking about the problem with Outlook-style (3-pane) aggregators. I believe that Dave is generally right about the River of News: clicking on each feed and then clicking on each item is a drag. Thankfully, most aggregators seem to have moved past this. Even the built-in aggregator in Safari lets you view all of your feeds together.

And yet, even though the aggregators offer other views that are more River of News-like, that’s not the default view. Imagine for a moment a newspaper that had a front page like this:

The Daily Press Gazette Morning News

• Stories by DPGMN reports — page A2
• Associated Press stories — page A3
• UPI stories — page A4
• Stock information from Bloomberg — page B1
• Comics from King Features — page C1
• Comics from Joe Random Syndicator — page C2

So, you flip to page A2. And you see this:

• Area man charged in robbery — page A9
• Girl sells “best cookies in town” — page A10

This is essentially the presentation you’re getting in an Outlook-style aggregator. Granted, it’s quicker to click something on the screen than flip a page, but you get my point. Readers are more interested in the story itself than they are in the source of the story. Sure, the source of the story makes a difference in credibility and likelihood that the story is something interesting to you, but driving the user experience based on the source just seems wrong.

When I went to his conference last year, Edward Tufte talked about quality newspapers have been doing their thing for 100 years and more. Though the internet certainly changes things, that doesn’t mean that the lessons of the print papers are invalid.

After that, you won’t be surprised to hear that Zesty News is a River of News-syle aggregator. My early mockups were very newspaper-like: multiple columns, bigger headlines for bigger stories, etc. After some experience using the software that way, though, I realized that software has a big advantage over a print newspaper: unlimited space. Print newspapers use the format they do partly for readability and compactness. When moving to feeds on the screen, however, multiple columns are a lot harder to scan through than a single column.

I can prove it, too. Go to Google News and first scan down the column on the left, looking at the headlines as you go. Then, go back up and try to scan both columns. With a single column, your eyes can move just a little bit to read the text. With two columns, your eyes have to dart left and right to scan. It may be a better workout for your eyes, but it’s not an easy way to get through a couple hundred items in a day.

I’ve got more to say about getting through those couple hundred items, but I’ll save that for another day.