Why I released a crappy todo app that no-one will ever use

http://www.moreofless.co.uk/just-ship-it-like-yesterday/

by rhubarbcustard • 14 years ago

69 33 14 years ago

moreofless.co.uk

tommoor• 14 years ago

Seems like you have the right attitude! Shipping a "crappy todo app" is more than many will manage, best of luck with releasing more and more projects in the future.

rhubarbcustard5• 14 years ago

Hey, thanks tommoor, appreciate the kind words.

zio99• 14 years ago

Hey Steve, great projects dude. You've got my upvote. Keep it up! I especially loved Squareleaf and PicStrips. Even NotForest has a pretty sweet hypothesis and design.

rhubarbcustard5• 14 years ago

Thanks! Readability kinda stole Notforest's thunder but I still use NF every day, so damn useful.

pohungc• 14 years ago

This is cool!

Feature creep: add some neat keyboard shortcuts for the power users ;)

RegEx• 14 years ago

I love RTM for that reason.

TomAnthony• 14 years ago

Site is down. Cache:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.mor...

Link to the actual app (when it comes back up):

http://www.moreofless.co.uk/todo

rhubarbcustard5• 14 years ago

It's back up now, had some emergency firefighting to do - never expected to get onto the HN front page, my poor old server never saw it coming!

electic• 14 years ago

To be honest, most people will never ship something by themselves their entire career. Also, most people will ship something that they think is crappy but it turns out it's the next big thing.

So, kudos for trying. Keep it up!

allardschip• 14 years ago

+1 for shipping code

orangethirty5• 14 years ago

A lot of the programmers/devs/engineers I talk to don't ship much code. They just re-work some existing code base to add X or Y feature. These people don't have a clue to what it takes to design something from the bottom up and hammer it into something that resembles the original idea. Shipping code, which is my favorite passtime, is just damn difficult. Not because the code itself is hard. No. Its because we procrastinate, change our minds, focus on early optimization, decide to to talk to others about it, and just do everything expect shipping the damn thing.

That is why you shoul dno tcall your project crappy. Hell no. You went ahead and shiped something. You started a project and saw it through. You know how many people go through life without ever finishing something? A lot! But you managed to do something. And to be honest, it is quite handy. Its is a nice project that could be setup on an intranet so people would stop using email attachments to keep track of their todos.

Keep hacking and shipping. Good luck.

edit

Do you mind listing your email on your profile? I'd like to get in touch with you.

rhubarbcustard5• 14 years ago

Thanks for the comment, I never for a moment expected anyone on HN to react positivity about the app so comments like yours are a real confidence booster.

You can get in touch with me through twitter (@steveify), or uk.linkedin.com/pub/stephen-claridge/4/219/934

orangethirty5• 14 years ago

I don't use Twitter, nor do I have linkedin. But thanks for taking the time to answer.

Will you be opening the source for the project? Seems a lot of people want to see how it works.

aaronlow• 14 years ago

Good for you, OP (site is down so I can't try your app at the moment).

orangethirty: as someone who is learning programming and trying to ship something as well (but running into the difficulties you alluded to), your post is very encouraging.

tim_moon3• 14 years ago

It's really encouraging to see someone ship something despite all the doubts. I agree with parent and find this really encouraging.

I've built a similar prototype as well, but just kept it locked up because honestly I was afraid to really put it out there since I shared the same doubts.

So to get past that fear I'm just going to put it out there. http://app.iammako.com

orangethirty5• 14 years ago

Thank you. Keep hacking. Don't stop because you somehow feel less of a hacker for whatever reason. Shipping is what we (aspire to) do. So get over the fears and dont look back. Let me know if I ca nbe of assitance. Email in my profile.

pserwylo• 14 years ago

This is good to read. I am one of the people you alude to who come up with countless ideas, start any number of proejcts, but never get through to shipping anything at all.

I think this sentiment will help me to Just Do It™

orangethirty5• 14 years ago

For every personal project that I start three to four are left unfinished. Though this does not apply to professional work, where I have a perfect record. I deliver. Always. :) But unfinished projects are good too. They always contribute to our skills and are a good way to learn new stuff.

As long as you keep hacking, there is no way you wont ship.

JamesLeonis• 14 years ago

I like hearing these stories of released apps. It's one reason I like the Show HN threads. I enjoy reading about how they overcame the problems they encountered. As somebody who is working on a project, it helps to distract me from frustration and (hopefully) fix a problem I will stumble across in the future.

incision• 14 years ago

Good.

I think it's an important milestone to build something end to end, no matter how simple or imperfect.

On a related note, I was recently looking for a todo app for my phone and found myself wondering how it is that there are so many (hundreds) apps, many of which have their own ardent fans.

When there are so many competing apps and such parity between them, what's the lure for using one over another?

In my case, I tried several and ended up using the one which felt most intuitive to me - the app which allows me to record and organize things the way I think of them with the least effort.

So...I wonder if the relatively low barrier of entry to creating sufficient functionality in such an app has worked with the myriad, individual ways of thinking about time and tasks to feed multiple many successful apps in the same space.

If this is the case, how different would other spaces, which are currently dominated by just a few players look and feel if the mechanics were easier to implement?

vidarh• 14 years ago

It's really hard to get a todo app right because the information you juggle is so small, and individual user preferences are so vast that even competing in efficiency with a text editor and a plain text file, or a paper and pen, is hard.

So in one way the mechanics are trivial. In another way they're an immense challenge.

Xcelerate2• 14 years ago

Maybe I should have titled my app submission this morning "A crappy list of good domains that no one will ever use". A provocative title seems to be good for at least 28 more points than I got.

Xcelerate2• 14 years ago

(To add: My point is that sometimes "shipping" isn't enough -- you need something else to grab attention).

rhubarbcustard5• 14 years ago

heh, totally agree. I'm totally shocked that I made it onto the first page. Posting the todo to HN was just part of the "lets just ship this thing" process and I got real lucky.

rokhayakebe• 14 years ago

A good friend with 20+ years of programming experience once told me "even putting a form that collects basic information, and sends it as an email, is hard." Shipping a software product, no matter how lightweight, is freaking hard.

astrojams• 14 years ago

I was expecting the first comment to be something like "because you are a jackass" but then I realized that I'm not reading Reddit.

benrhughes• 14 years ago

I felt the same way when I released my todo app (http://benrhughes.com/todotxt.net - a windows implementation for http://todotxt.com). I mean, who's ever going to use this little PoS that I wrote basically so I could update my task list at work? The last thing the world needs is another todo app.

That was a bit over a year ago. Now I have ~500 active users and a half a dozen of contributors. I get random "thanks" emails, the occasional donation, and something nice to put on my resume. And the satisfaction of actually shipping something.

qu4z-2• 14 years ago

Well done!

I know the feeling of working on things and never shipping. I recently decided to actually see a small program (vim plugin) all the way through from idea to documented, installable release.

It's also highly bare-bones (around 10 lines of vimscript, although it started as many more). But I don't want to get side-tracked talking about it. I guess my real point is:

Congratulations on shipping. God knows it can be harder than it seems.

alance• 14 years ago

Well it would seem that the logical next step is going to be giving it a way to provide permanence to the data. That generally means online storage, but there might be other ways that are more in keeping with your offline approach... or maybe you could give the user an easy to remember token that they can use to fetch their todo list from another computer. I like the shopping list aspect of it. I would focus my energy completely on the usability side. Keep optimizing for convenience.

I've just launched a todo list sort of an app too, but it borrows heavily from open source components, much hairier, different audience to yours I suspect (alouy.com).

epaga• 14 years ago

Congrats on shipping.

Looking at these comments, I can tell HN is doing its best to re-discover its positive attitude towards "shippers" -- I kind of feel bad for anyone who tried to post a "Show HN" a month ago, only to hear crickets in the comments section. ;)

Why I released a crappy todo app that no-one will ever use

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