LEAN3: Updates After 1 Year

Updates After 1 Year

There has been about 1 year since my last blog about The Lean Startup in April 2012. What happens during this year?

• My majority responsibility changed from desktop software side to cloud services. It is perfect to start to working on new technologies. The bad thing is, I'm really busy and exhausted, and din't have time to take care of PomodoroApp. I spent a lot of time learning the new technologies, programming languages, existing design for the system on the new division. Everything on PomodoroApp has been stopped for 8 months until the last Christmas.
• My baby was born. Kelly and I are very happy to have our first baby. Kelly spent a lot of time on taking care of the baby, and didn't have enough time on marketing/customer services/ux design.
• The traffic of the website of PomodoroApp is increasing every month with a very stable speed. You can see the traffic report by google analytics below:

• I'm getting more and more familiar with JavaScript and cloud technologies. I'm now confident with cloud technologies.

By the end of 2012, I can have 2 weeks vacation. I decided to leverage the 2 full weeks for a brand new version of PomodoroApp, with following majority changes:

• Programming Language and Libraries: The version 1.x and 2.x are built based on Qt, a C++ library. I used the old but mature UI technology, CSS style, to create beautiful UI controls. Qt and C++ are powerful and fast on every platform. I also write some code with Objective-C on Mac and COM interface on Windows to handle some OS specific features, e.g. dockbar icon. With the recently experience, I'll shift to TideSDK and ExtJS. With TideSDK I can create beautiful and unique desktop apps using web technologies. ExtJS is a web application library with a lot of samples, but may need more time to learn. Other libraries like jQuery UI has been considered also, but not has necessary features in place for me.
• Data Synchronization Service: because PomodoroApp is cross platform, currently on Windows/Mac/Linux, and will support iPhone/Android also. There is no reason not to synchronize data across devices. I use node.js + MongoDB as backend, and host servers on Linode, Digital Ocean, and Windows Azure. That's really strange infrastructue architecture. The puporse is to reduce the cost, and try servers from different providers.
• Mobile Platform: Appcelerator Titanium is really fantastic for cross platform mobile development. Again, need some time to learn at the beginning.

So with ideas on every aspect settled down, I start to work with full of enery. Because I didn't always have this kind of long vacation for my own projects. I started the first release of PomodoroApp at the end of 2011. The main reason is that I have 2 weeks vacation, and I need to take the advantage of the long vacation. I have to admit that I also made some bad decisions when building the idea. I've listed some topics, and will have some blog posts to share my experience and lessons learned in future. So, what's the stuff about "Lean Startup"? This is a summary of what happens in the past year. I'll start a new blog post about the detail of this new version.