Blog*spark

I did some screenshots of Note*spark today (which you can do by holding down the home key and pressing the sleep/wake button.. who knew?). I’ll eventually add them to the real website, but for now, I thought I’d post them here for those who are interested.

In preparation for launching Note*spark, we’re turning on all the web-based stuff. The web app is at http://notespark.net and the forums are at http://forums.notespark.net.

Have a look around if you are curious.

[update] — whoops.. forgot to migrate the database. it’s not up quite yet!
[update] — ok. it’s up….. I think.

Photo by Justin Marty via Creative Commons

Both Mike and I have run beta programs before, but never for a two person effort. In the past, my typical engineering team has been around ten software engineers and ten QA engineers for about 15 months, but I’ve been responsible for teams with as many as 25 software engineers + 25 QA engineers for 2+ years, and as small as 2 engineers + 1 QA.

For Note*spark, we had a team of two engineers + 0 dedicated QA engineers, which is similar to the smallest sized team I’ve ever worked with. But instead of taking a year to develop, we sprinted the whole way, working long hours for about two months to finish the server, web and iPhone pieces.

Once we were done with feature development, we almost decided not to do a beta at all, on the theory that two months of engineering was small enough for us for us to QA ourselves. And besides, we had written a bunch of unit tests, so there probably weren’t that many bugs left, right? Boy, were we wrong! By running a “real” beta, we found a ton of bugs that we never would have found ourselves.

Along the way, we made some decisions about how we thought we should run a small beta. We also learned some things specific to running betas for the iPhone. None of this is rocket science, but I thought I’d post what we learned in case it’s helpful to anyone.

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As I wrote on my personal blog, I am working on an iPhone app named Note*spark with a guy named Mike Schiff. We’ve decided to call ourselves Meta*spark, which is a name that only a programmer could love (which reminds me of a story that Andy Hertzfeld used to tell, in which Bill Atkinson supposedly loved the name “General Magic” because it could be used no matter what the company ended up doing).

Anyway, we have a new blog for our new company/entity/thingy called Blog*spark. Mike and I will be posting somewhat frequently about Note*spark and any other things we end up doing. Among other things, we’ll try to post about things we’ve learned while developing an iPhone app that others might find useful. In the meantime, I’ll still continue to post infrequently about other stuff over at my personal blog. And while the transition happens, I will cross-post interesting things between the two.

As we have been developing Note*spark, I’ve been downplaying Note*spark to friends and family as “the smallest iPhone application we could think of that would actually be somewhat useful.” Because iPhone development is so new, we frankly don’t know if we’ll end up making $5/month or $5000/month on this piece of software, which is why we wanted to start small.

That having been said, it is very exciting to be so close to releasing our first piece of software. If you are interested in following our news in detail, subscribe to blog.metaspark.com. And if you’re not, feel free to just read kuwamoto.org, where I will try to cross-post the interesting bits.