The growing pains of NGEDIT

Just yesterday I published the new Codekana web site. You can have a look at it here:

http://www.codekana.com

For comparison, here is a capture of the old main page (click for a full size version):

The goal with the redesign was to better communicate the benefits (hence the animated GIF and the key-features extract), communicate better the fact that it is fairly used and liked around the globe (hence the customer map and testimonials page and link), and to better show the many things available via the Codekana web page (hence the sidebar with the links).

I will be happy to hear your feedback on the redesign!

J1CK Twitter mobile client
On other front, the J1CK project is advancing nicely, and we are about to release our first public app: a Twitter client for Java mobile phones. I have posted a few screenshots to whet people’s appetite before the first public release at the blog over there: http://j1ck.com/blog/2009/09/17/j1ck-twitter-client-for-java-phones. If you’d like to get early access to the beta, just email me via the email link on the sidebar, post a comment to this blog post or the one on j1ck.com, or use any of the contact forms on either page.

I will be posting both about J1CK news and about general usability topics over at the J1CK blog, so you may find it interesting to subscribe. Usability is in such a poor shape everywhere that the sources to draw interesting topics from is endless.

Next steps on all fronts
This is going to be a very, very active Autumn. I really want to push all products forward and get to the next stage.

For ViEmu, my immediate next stages are the new Symnum/NGEDIT customer portal, which is half-done (done in Python using MySQL, web.py via FastCGI on Apache for the web front-end), a ViEmu 2.5 with a few very interesting new improvements (which will be the first paid upgrade for those who bought over a year ago, and the first paid ViEmu upgrade ever), and then ViEmu for VS2010 [EDIT (some people asked about these): the same upgrade fee will include ViEmu 2.5 for VS <= 2008 and VEmu 2.5 for VS2010. And if you buy ViEmu now, both the 2.5 version and the VS2010 version will be included in the standard one year of free upgrades, so there’s no need to wait].

For Codekana, I want to release a Codekana 1.5 with a few improvements, and then go straight to Codekana for VS2010. The new editor technology in VS2010 will alow incredibly powerful new features for Codekana. After this, I have already planned the route to move Codekana forward to the next level, and I think I can turn it into a much more useful and poweful tool in the following months. I have been talking to a very good programmer who is a good friend of mine too to try and get him to work with me part-time, and he would be helping realize this vision. If this happens, it will really help get there much faster, and the business will surely improve as a result.

I have made great advances lately in my technology research for my up-and-coming text-editor kodumi. It’s been a very theoretical research since 2005 when I started, but I have finally made enough advances to start implementing a first prototype. I’m working in Python, as it’s just a prototype, and it should help work with less overhead than C++. Hopefully, it’s just a matter of several months before I have something of practical use. After this, I plan to start using the technology in Codekana first, and in the stand-alone editor later.

Finally, J1CK advances very well thanks to the great team we have, and we hope to do great advances by the end of the year: Blackberry and iPhone support, and many more exciting offerings.

Conclusion
As you can see, my hands are really full with work in all fronts. I feel I have the energy to make everything get to the next level, and I do hope that there will be some qualitative advances in all products over the next few months!