Today is a day that I’ve been looking forward to for quite a while. Creating a piece of software and releasing it into the wild is about as stressful as anything. What did I miss? Will anybody like it? Will anyone buy it?
I tried to limit my stress by following my pre-release release plan, and it worked. There are quite a few users of StoryBox already and I’ve seen some nice comments about it in various places. They’ve posted a large number of problems to me, and I’ve been pretty diligent about fixing them as they came up.
There are still issues with it, I’m sure. The more people using it, the more oddball problems will be found. I’ll fix these as soon as they crop up. The release strategy has worked all this time, and I see no reason to change it. You will continue to get updates frequently.
I have a list of features to add to StoryBox that includes 26 items. Some are small, and some are rather large, and perhaps difficult to do. There are some I’ve committed to doing, like printing and exporting of synopsis and notes, and others that I haven’t yet committed myself to doing (not spilling those beans yet since I don’t know if I will do them).
You may be asking yourself, if I’ve got a list of features that long, why am I releasing 1.0 right now? With software, there are always features that could be added. StoryBox, as it stands today, does everything I wanted it to do when I first started out, and more. Could I have added the features on my list to 1.0? Sure, but it would be another year before I could release it, which would mean a year of people looking at it and saying to themselves, “It’s pre-release, it’s not done.” Software is never done. Versions releases are only a pause in the development, a point at which the developer decides the software has reached a milestone.
And thus, today is the birthday of StoryBox. Thank you to everyone that has helped or purchased a copy during the pre-release period. I can’t wait to get started on my list.