Monday, November 16, 2009

Juggling Three Projects

There’s one thing that I’ve learned while writing iRingtones, Managed Scripting and Mud Designer and that is maintaining three different projects is rather time consuming. I’m glad that they are all free and thus I’m not totally obligated to devote 100% of my time to maintain and improve on them, and considering that iRingtones has so far be the most popular project of mine by far, I’m beginning to re-think how I write my applications and what kind of projects I will take on in the future.

In what direction will the three projects I’m managing start driving towards? Well, iRingtones is pretty much going to remain as-is. There will be an update soon providing batch conversion, and if I can get the chance to look into MP3 conversions, I will try to allow MP3’s to be converted as well, instead of WAV files only.

Managed Scripting has a couple things that I need want to do with it, and that is Domain support, security policies and finish up the VB support. Once that is done I really won’t have a whole lot of work left to do on it besides just add additional functionality, which at the moment isn’t a huge rush considering the script engine has only been downloaded 15 times. There doesn’t seem to be much interest in it. Or I’m just not doing a very good job or spreading the word about its release. Considering all I used was Twitter and this blog to advertise iRingtone, and a couple website signatures being updated to include it, I got 170+ downloads in less than a week. Managed Scripting I actually went to various websites and posted a new topic showcasing it to people, and got less than %10 of the downloads iRingtones got. Simply put, the demand for a managed scripting engine isn’t as great as an iPhone ringtone conversion utility.

Where does this leave Mud Designer? I’m still wanting to build an IDE for MUD Development and the project isn’t going to be left out either. Once iRingtones and Managed Scripting have had the updates done to them I’m wanting to do, then Mud Designer will get it’s share of the lime light from me as well. I’m still messing with the WheelMud framework and thinking about implementing it into the IDE instead of building my own engine, but that is still up in the air. While the WheelMud author has been nice in answering posts of mine, I never really got an answer from him about me joining his team to build the IDE.

There’s a couple things taking shape over the horizon for me, one being the possibility of developing a game editing environment for someone advertising on the creators club site for a team to help build a game together. I’m also sick of looking at my Windows Vista Interface and I’m considering writing my own Shell implementation that follows along the same concepts that Gnome 3 has introduced.

For now, I’m off to play some MMO’s.

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