2012 was a very eventful year for me, at the beginning of the year I completely stopped doing client work and concentrated full time on products – then in the second half of the year I had to take too much client work and couldn’t spend nearly as much time as I wanted on the products.
There are some changes in my personal life that are going on at the moment (all good – don’t worry) that will again free up my time to work on the product.
Like every year here are my summaries and plans for each product:
yaTimer time tracking software
In the beginning on 2012 yaTimer was at version 2.6.6.3, I’ve just released yaTimer 2.8.1 in time for the new year.
yaTimer had more upgrades during 2012 than any previous year but those were typically small upgrades – the big upgrades are still planned for yaTimer version 3.
I’ve started selling yaTimer as a subscription in the end of 2011, this was successful and a great business move because it evens out the earning over the year and makes cash flow more predictable.
During 2013 I’m going to keep moving to the subscription model by making it more prominent on the site and by making the one-time payment option more expensive.
Also, for customers that bought with the one-time payment option I’m going to start charging for upgrades (after the first year of free upgrades is over, obviously).
yaTimer Central synchronization and team tools for yaTimer
yaTimer Central has remained almost unchanged for the entire year, but a new and radically better version is almost ready and will be deployed during 2013.
During 2013 I’m going to make the integration between yaTimer and yaTimer Central better and slowly add more features to yaTimer Central.
Giraffe Upload photo backup software
Giraffe Upload is slowly gaining more customers, it has improved substantially since it’s release in 2011 and will continue to improve in 2013.
There’s a new version that will be released in a few days that includes a major bug fix and some UI updates.
Useful Photo Tips
My photography blog has been quiet for most of the second half of 2012 because I simply didn’t have the time to write for it – I’m going to start posting regularly again soon.
I also want to release a series of on-line photography courses using this blog, I’m not sure I’ll do it in 2013 because I need to grow the blog some more before I can do it.
This blog, the productivity tips and the yaTimer Newsletter
All of those also suffered from my lack of time during the second half of 2012 and will also return to regular activity soon.
Squirrel Clock, Task Zebra, Invoice Squirrel and the unnamed anti-procrastination software
Squirrel Clock never actually took off and during 2013 I will either rewrite it (again) to be a tablet based time clock of shut it down.
Task Zebra was originally designed to help freelancer both manage their time and to get paid on time, this combination proved to be problematic so it was divided into two products – Task Zebra became yet another task list and the “get paid” portions moved to Invoice Squirrel
The world doesn’t need yet another task list so during 2013 I will shut down Task Zebra.
Invoice Squirrel didn’t get much interest and will probably never be developed into a full product.
The anti-procrastination prototype was shelved because after my experience selling Giraffe Upload to consumers (as opposed to businesses) I thing it will be really difficult to make it economically viable.
Start Menu Search for Windows XP and the timer software website
Start Menu Search was officially retired, you can still buy it but I’m not going to do anything with it.
Also, the timer software website that I never did anything interesting with was closed – you can expect the content that was there to appear on this blog soon
Open Source project
Everything Up? Server Self-Test – is still alive and I use it every day, it probably needs some “marketing” work (that I don’t have time to do) before anyone else will use it.
My A/B Testing system – It doesn't have a catchy name yet but I’m going to release it as open source this year – after I see it works well on my site.
The software running this site – It’s a CMS only a programmer can like – and I really don’t expect it to be used by anyone else – but I have no reason to keep it secret so it too will be release as open source.
Ok, those are my plans, hope you have a wonderful 2013
posted @ Tuesday, January 1, 2013 11:31 PM