First Public Beta, Finally!
posted on august 6, 2003, tag: xpad
So I've been running myself ragged over the past few weeks, but I finally released the first public build of xPad to a group of beta testers last night. It was nerve-wracking. I'm always extremely obsessed with detail and with making sure things work before I send them, and it's a big step going from me and Shawn to a handful of, well, strangers. Who knows what kinds of bugs they might find? Will they hate it? Will they love it?
I don't know yet. If anything, this experience has been a ton of learning and work. I've been working on xPad since March 28 of this year, and I went from my first line of Cocoa code (copied directly from a tutorial in a book), to my 2,000th line. In the beginning, fixing major bugs was crazy. I remember the first real bug I encountered, about 2 weeks into development, almost made me quit. I couldn't figure out how to fix it, I just didn't understand enough. Now I'm finally to the point where bug-fixing is second nature. I'm getting much better at all of this.
And it's been fun. Now it's all about getting this sucker to 1.0. I'm damned close, and with the help of these beta testers I should get enough feedback to finally get to a release. If I'm nervous now, I can't imagine how I'll feel when I really release. Scary.
Comments
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Jonathan on 08/06/2003:
Can't wait to go home and download the beta. My friend Jake is going to help beta test as well.
I can only imagine how you feel about writing this in Cocoa. I've had an idea for a website I want to build using MySQL and php but I've never really used either. They are installed on my Mac and I downloaded CocoaMySQL to help with the database, but I'm boggled at where to begin. Such a task to learn these and there are several books to choose from. Too many choices.