Cogitu

You may have noticed a lack of updates from me over couple of months. Sorry for the lack of updates, but a lot has been going on and I wanted to let things settle down before I made this post.

The Decision

When I last posted, I mentioned I was looking into other alternatives - specifically going back to a full-time job or at least doing some contracting. I did end up taking on a small contract to test the waters. I don't have anything against contracting, but I just can't see myself doing it as a sole means of income. So, I'll be rejoining the workforce with a full-time job with a Fortune 500 company as of July 6th. I spent a lot of time thinking through this and it became obvious that I need to refocus my goals. I'm not going to post my whole rationale right now, but the short version is that I can be just as happy working on things I'm passionate about on the side while working a full-time job (which also involves things I'm passionate about). On top of that, I really need to make a much larger time & money investment than I'm willing to make to keep things going on the indie route. I also want to take some time to focus on some bigger picture items in my life...which is pretty hard to do as an indie or even as an employee at a questionably stable small company.

The Products

The products that I've published thus far - Pinball Mini & Budgee - will stay on the store, but I don't know how much further they will evolve. Budgee does have an update waiting for Apple's review (it updates the DB code so it doesn't crash on iOS 4 due to a quirk with a sqlite call). Additionally, there is one more update for Budgee that is still coming - it would have been part of this update, but I got sidetracked with a contract gig and wanted to get the crashing fix up ASAP. This update will add database backup/restore and will support copying categories between budgets. I still have a feature backlog with a few more items for Budgee, but I can't promise more updates will come after this second update goes live...it's not out of the question, but no promises either way.

The Company

As far as Cogitu goes, I'm going to keep the LLC alive and focus on one particular product that I've been working on even before I went indie. It's a personal finance product but much larger in scope than Budgee. I had planned on this being the "big" product for Cogitu anyway, but I'm not releasing it until I'm really happy using it myself. I'm not shooting for perfection, but I don't want to release a scaled down version for 1.0 either. If/when I have something to show, I'll post here, but I'm not ready to say all that much about it right now. I'm also going to keep the door open for a bit of contract work on the side...but I don't see myself taking on too much at the moment.

The End / The Beginning

This was a pretty crazy journey and I do want to thank all of my friends including those I know in real life and those that are from Twitter and other corners of the internet. Your support has really meant a lot to me. I hope that my results with this experiment don't discourage others from trying. I'm slowly writing up a lessons learned post that Will eventually find it's way here someday, but I definitely believe it is possible to succeed as an indie (even flying solo)...it just takes a very specific person and specific circumstances for it to work out in an acceptable way. I don't have the least bit of regret for trying the indie thing out - I knew it could go either way when I started this journey. I'm extremely glad I tried this and I've gained a lot from this experience. This is the end of my indie journey, but it's the start of something much bigger.

So I've been thinking about things for the last couple of weeks. I'm not convinced that I'm going to be able to make Cogitu into something that provides a livable income with my constraints (mainly time & money). I'm not giving up on iPhone/iPad development, but I'm just not seeing a good way to make it into a decent living at this point in time. I know it *can* work - other people have made it work, but for me, I didn't build up enough of a runway for myself AND still have money to dedicate to the business. I still have a couple of months of runway left, but I didn't set aside money on top of that to pay for things like marketing, graphic design, or other business needs. If I had a small team working together, I think things would be a little different, but as is, it's just me and I'm not sure that's enough.

At this point, I'm not sure what this means for the future of Cogitu. I'm not throwing in the towel, but I am looking into options - specifically I'm looking at regular full-time employment once again. I've looked at some contract opportunities (and I'm aware of others that are out there). The more I thought about it, taking on mostly contract jobs just to get by isn't that different that going back to a regular day job. In fact, I'm pretty sure I'd come out much better by going back to a regular day job vs contract jobs.

I've been working to add some of the most requested features to Budgee. I don't know that I'm going to get all of the requests into this release, but the next update will fix things so I can make changes faster. I'm making a few updates so it'll run on iPad (and iPhone OS 4) after this update as well. At this point, I'm not going to make it an iPhone/iPad universal app, but I do want to make sure it runs on both (right now, there is a change to SQLite in OS 3.2 that causes a crash when you try to save on iPad). There are still some other app ideas I'd like to work on and I do plan to continue development on them, but I'll need day job income to help make some of the ideas become a reality.

For me, I think app store development was more fun and interesting when I could build things without thinking about sales potential. I haven't really fallen in love with Xcode/Interface Builder - both are great tools and they are extremely powerful, but at the end of the day, I still miss Visual Studio and the .NET Framework. I'm not saying I miss Windows - there are certainly a lot of things I like about Mac in general and there is still no question in my mind that Apple's hardware & OS platform is king of the hill from a user's perspective. I just feel like I spend too much time focusing on some minute technical detail (e.g. tracking down an invalid access exception) instead of the application logic itself. I've gotten much more comfortable with the tools & techniques over the last several months for sure, but it just doesn't do it for me.

If some miracle happens where things start looking up for Cogitu, I'm certainly up for continuing on this course...I just don't see that happening. I did leave enough runway to go into August with this indie journey though, so unless I accept a full-time job (or need to work on something like a professional certification), I'll keep going. No matter what happens, I'll post at least one more indie update next week.

There isn't much to post this week. My family came into town and stayed at my place for for a while last week/weekend, so I didn't end up getting much of anything done. I've got a few more iPad ideas that I'd like to try, but they are interesting to me simply because they are apps I personally want...but I just can't decide which I want to try.

This Week

I started some updates to Budgee early last week and I'm going to continue those while I start on some of the iPad ideas. I'm thinking I may do the initial design for all three iPad ideas and start working on any/all that still seem appealing. If one seems to feel better than the others while I'm working on it, I'll focus on that one - otherwise, I'll just move forward on all of them as best I can. I don't really want to spread my focus out beyond one project at a time, but maybe this will help with motivation until I can choose one of the projects to focus on.

Last week, I mentioned I was re-evaluating things. This week, that's even more true due to additional happenings.

Mint & Intuit

When I decided I wanted to try the indie, the main area I planned to focus on was personal finance software. Budgee is already out there, but it could use some improvements and I also have another similar, but different idea that is closer to something like Quicken. I'm passionate about personal finance and I think there are still some opportunities to provide something different in the app store. Mint.com is hugely popular with people right now and with good reason - it's totally free. I know some people have problems with it because it doesn't support their bank and others just don't like having their financial data online (with a third party). Those issues don't seem to be a problem for most people though.

For me, the issue with Mint has always been that they are more focused on reacting instead of being proactive. Yes, you can setup a budget, but budgeting support is fairly limited today. The bigger deal was that the only transactions you saw were ones that were being processed by your bank (or credit card company, etc.) As such, you couldn't use cash at all since you *have* to import transactions directly from a bank. You also couldn't enter a transaction before the bank processed it - so if I use my debit card to grab lunch, I have to wait 1-3 days for that money to show up as spent on Mint. Well, as of last week, Mint.com has been updated to address this issue. Now you can manually enter transactions, track cash accounts, and even split transactions. So why is that a big deal for me? Well, Mint already has an iPhone app and I think it's reasonable to assume it'll be ported to iPad in the not too distant future. I think it's also reasonable to assume the new features will be worked into the app as well.

In and of itself, that's not the end of the world - but now you have the issue of price. If the Mint.com app (or service) had a fee, then things would be better, but as-is, the existing personal finance apps are going to have to compete with a free service (that's relatively full featured). For iPhone apps, I don't think this is *quite* as big a deal since they are already priced extremely competitively, but for iPad, I think it's a different story. I expect quite a few Quicken replacement type apps to jump to iPad over the next few months and I would expect the price range to be $5 - $20 for these apps...with most in the mid-upper end of that range. If Mint.com updates their app to work on iPad and adds in the new features, I'm not sure such pricing will still be possible. The one area where Mint is still weak is budgeting - so that is still one area to focus on.

Moneywell

Here's the thing though - I know Moneywell is coming to iPhone (and I would assume iPad as well). Now Moneywell is a great app on the Mac and I'm sure it'll be a great app when it hits the app store. It's focused on managing your budget as much as your accounts and it uses the envelope system as it's budgeting method of choice. This is something I've been planning on doing as well. So if I continue down this path, I'm going to end up trying to compete with Moneywell directly. What I won't be able to compete with (at least at this point) is that Moneywell will sync with desktop software. I don't know if desktop sync is something people will be as interested in if there is an iPad app, but I can certainly see the interest with using the iPhone/iPod touch as a mobile input/view device for the desktop app. Anyway, the point is that the app I've been thinking about building is not only going to have to differentiate itself from Mint.com, but it'll also have to do the same (and perhaps more so) from Moneywell. On one hand, I like the idea of competing with the big (or bigger at least) guys. On the other hand, it's just me...no designer, no team of developers, no existing banking framework (for data download from banks, etc.) I know I can build out a nice app that I'm happy with and that I think users will enjoy. The question though, is whether or not I can do it fast enough, sell it for a competitive price, and still make a living doing this.

Contracting Gigs

I mentioned it last week, but I've heard of even more local mobile development contract gigs. Some of them sound pretty exciting, so I'm definitely going to check them out. I don't know that I want to start doing contracting fulltime as my long term plan...if I did that, it seems like I'd be getting back into just about everything I don't like working as a regular fulltime employee...so I might as well go back into the .NET world and get a fulltime job again (which I still may do...I just need to find the right company before I'd do that.)

This Week

I'm going to keep pushing forward on the personal finance app because it's something I want to be using. I have it built as a webapp (which I've been using for 6 months or so now) and know what I do and don't want in the finished app. The only question for me is whether I make the real app a web app (as in HTML5 type), build a native iPhone/iPad app, or whether to look into building a Silverlight 4 app (with the main focus being a Windows version). Of course, the downside to a Silverlight app would be that I can't run it on my iPad/iPhone...but the upside is I could build the app much faster and I do believe the Windows world could use an envelope budgeting app (and I'm sure it would fit on a Window Phone 7 device nicely as well...) I'm also going to spend more time this week working the contracting opportunities - right now, I only know what they are at a high level, but I don't know if they are gigs that match up with my skillset nor do I know the planned budgets for them.

Over the last week, quite a few interesting things have happened that are causing me to re-evaluate things a little.

Contacting Opportunities

When I started this indie adventure, I didn't really plan on doing any consulting/contracting jobs. The whole point of this was to work on things for myself and see what happens. Well, I heard about a couple of contracting jobs my company could do and I'm starting to reconsider my position on such jobs. I'm still going to continue work on the iPhone/iPad as far as doing my own apps, but a little contracting would certainly help keep things running. The reality is that I want to take my time and really build the new iPad app right and release it when only when it's ready to go. The problem with that is that I do have a pretty fixed runway right now and if I need more time than I've allotted, then I may not have a choice to stay indie. If I had a bit of contracting income, I'd be able to extend that runway a bit, but of course, if I'm working on a contracting job, I'm not working on my own stuff.

Android

I know there is a growing interest in the Android platform, so I thought it would be a good time to take a look at the Android SDK. I've been playing with a port of Budgee for Android and I'm not sure how much I like the platform. Everything seems a little more difficult because of how Google chose to architect things. I'm not a big fan of Java, although it has definitely improved a ton since I last used it. I still really dislike Eclipse - it has some powerful features, but something about it just doesn't feel right. Maybe that's just because I've used Visual Studio (and now Xcode) for so long, but it definitely feels like everything is a huge collection of plugins instead of a tightly integrated & streamlined IDE. I may finish the Budgee port just to see the whole Android process, but I'm not sure if I'll actually release it into the marketplace. It's interesting to see a different perspective on mobile development at least.

MonoTouch & Apple's 3.3.1 Clause

I've mentioned before that I've been a .NET dev for a long time. I didn't like Objective-C that much when I first starting tinkering with the iPhone, but I've grown to appreciate it and the Cocoa framework. Having said that, I'd still like to write a lot of the code for my iPad app in C# on .NET. Naturally then, MonoTouch was a pretty good choice for me (for this specific app). I started really evaluating MonoTouch as a serious possibility about two weeks ago - I wrote a good bit of test code, tried out debugging, checked out what is/isn't supported, and just generally kicked the tires. Well, it looks like this isn't a viable option anymore due to the new developer agreement. I'm not *that* surprised with this new change, but it's a bit disappointing. I've got another post about this topic specifically, so maybe I'll publish that one day. Yes, I can write everything I need in Objective-C, but for my specific app, several things would have been much easier to deal with in C# (particularly since I could also use Visual Studio to write/debug/test all of the backend code). The UI code would still be all Cocoa widgets, so that part doesn't change either way. The big downside to having to write all of the backend code in Objective-C is that I can't use it to power the web services the app will need (which will likely be written in C#), nor can I port it to any other platform (other than Mac) without re-writing things again. I realize that is part of Apple's goal, but as a developer, I'd rather write the backend/logic components once and then craft a native UI on top of that for each platform/device. I know the MonoTouch team will do their best to make MonoTouch compliant with the new SDK, but it feels like using MonoTouch at this point is going to be asking for headaches later on...so I'm going to go ahead and build out everything in Objective-C.

This Week

I'm going to finish up some work around the contracting opportunities, and then I'm going to start some hardcore work on the finance app. I've spent plenty of time with the iPad and the apps that are out there at this point, so I have a good idea about what I do and don't like as far as UX goes. I'm extremely happy with my decision to not rush something out the door for iPad launch - there are several things I didn't think would be that important before the launch and now I can see they will be extremely important.