Cashflow App : a preview at WWDC?
For those of you who were asking, here's a quick update about the Cashflow App development.Things are going well, we took some infrastructure decisions, the presentation Website and the logo are almost done, we're refining the UI and we hope to have something to show at WWDC in 12 days.
About infrastructure
Initially, both Cashflow App's servers (Staging and Production) were 256Mb slices hosted at Slicehost set up with Ubuntu Machine. And then, a few weeks ago, we heard about Heroku announcing their commercial launch.The timing was perfect and Heroku's technology seemed too interesting not to give it a chance. After some initial testing, I've migrated the 2 slices to 2 Heroku applications (Staging/Production). Even though Heroku offers git repository hosting, I do prefer to keep things separated, so the code is still hosted at Github. I'll explain in a later post how I manage the different git branches with the different Heroku applications.
Talking about Github, we also migrated our issues from Lighthouse to Github, with this small piece of code I wrote some weeks ago. Github issues is a very simple and flexible solution that better suits our needs.
Presentation Website and Logo
We were lucky enough to work with a great designer who really understood our strong desire for simplicity. He did a great job with our logo and presentation Website.
You'll soon be able to see it live and to signup for our beta release (we don't have a date yet).
Features and User Interface
It's interesting and hard at the same time to select the features that will made it to the first release.
Scott Stevenson, from Theocacao had this interesting quote : "Once you've come up with a UI concept for a 1.0 version, try to imagine how 2.0 would look and work better, and consider making that 1.0."
Our aim for the first release is to provide a well thought app with a clean user interface and enough features and polishing so that people will find it useful and pleasant to use. We have many ideas about the app functionality, but we do not want to make too many assumptions before people really start to use it.
We are really excited about the early feedback we will receive.
A preview release at WWDC?
We are working really hard to try to have a preview release at WWDC on June 8th. We'll first give access only to a few selected people, then we'll send some beta invitations in batch.
In the meantime, follow us on Twitter : @cashflowapp or @tbalthazar to stay tuned.