The Colonel, Secret Recipes,11 Herbs and Spices

17 08 2008

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OK, corny subject lines aside, nobody really believes this KFC stuff right?

But seriously. Ever considered why it worked? What made this such an attractive idea to KFC and their customers, beyond the “Finger Licking Good” moniker?

Promotion, marketing, push, clout and an incredibly overzealous dollop of audacity to name but a few.

On Friday I wrote about a certain yobbo, over whom I’d gotten rather aggro about, due to the fact he’s cloning MixAction. I’ll be quite honest, it did get under my skin, probably reading what he and some others wrote in the forum and their attitude to purchasing development tools made me a little more aggro than otherwise.

A quick submission at the BSA made me feel a lot better though.

So. That’s the theme of this post. Herbs, Spices, Secret Recipes and my own overzealous dollop of audacity.

Hey. I was cloned before, back in the 90’s with my last application. I survived it then. My sincere thanks go to those folks who posted some encouraging comments on this blog in response to that post. I really appreciate that.

So talking to my best friend over the weekend, who also happens to be my business partner and wife (and not in that order, or any order, but the order you prefer if you’re reading this, dear <g>) I/we came to the conclusion that I really should push on with documenting what and where I’m at here in this blog, probably without the aid of screenshots and deep detail, as per before. Mainly because it’s been a great way for me to document what I’m doing, it gives me some perspective seeing it in writing and I hope it helps and encourages others in their efforts and engenders the same spirit of communication.

This took a great deal of talking about, I’ll be quite frank on that. But after analysis of the executable I managed to retrieve, . I have a pretty fair idea of where this guy is at.

Where’s he’s at is not where I’m at and so the threat doesn’t seem anywhere near as bad as it did on Friday. Indeed, as several others pointed out in comments to that post, a business is more than just building a product.

I guess one of my issues was the pressure on me (that I’ve put on myself) to produce ASAP. There are folks waiting for this product, from vendors to customers, whom I don’t want to give the impression that it’s not actually getting there.

Development is a slow and tedious evolution. While many readers may not buy into biological evolution, I’m sure any experienced dev’ will agree that software development - if not indeed business development - is the reality of “evolution” and not “creation” in this particular area.

Anybody can create - but few manage to evolve.

So those who are eager to see me release, please pause and consider a few items that I list below.

MixAction is not your average bear.
I’ve rejected and not included from the start the normal “Audio” paradigms present in existing software products in order to make this something somebody without an Audio degree can use.
To do that I had to simplify. Simplifying introduces complexity. It’s a conundrum. Simplify complexity and you have to do a lot more work to get the same job. I argue this is a programmers task. It’s our purpose.
The big June push was cool. But it came at a cost for me. The cost was dropping to many features. Those feature drops would become harder to introduce later. Mainly because while customers would request the features the UI would become more complex. The UI becoming more complex adds to bloat and, clearly, complexity. This complexity in turn causes the starting premise to become less valid each version update.
I need to add more “Mixing”. Sounds logical in context - it’s called “MixAction” after all.
So I’ve had to design an editor for Audio that allows a plethora of cool things to be done that didn’t break the MixAction UI.

So that’s what I’ve been up to the last month. Building an editor for Audio specifically with a MixAction view of the world. It’s name is MixAction Studio. It’s a complimentary product and part of the end sale price.

It’s not another clone of Acid Pro or Sonar or the others that are out there. What would be the point in that?

Instead it’s taking Audio and turning it into objects that can be manipulated, kind of like how us developers (and to some extent graphics designers) have objects we manipulate through properties. That took thought in respect of context and meaning, and design.

Initial usability tests on this UI for the editor have already shown some areas needing adjustment. There is a fine line between “clever” and “failing to intuit” in UI design.

So I’ll be expanding on this in the weeks ahead, talking some more and just prior to release I’ll be publishing screenshots.

Have a great, Sunday!