Holy heck! Amigo is alive and kicking!
You faithful BNA readers are the first to know. Please give it a good thrashing and email us if you find any errors. Please submit any bugs (with screenshots, what platform you’re on and what you were doing) to support -a-t- heyamigo d*o*t net
The above screenshot is me telling BitPusher to set it live :)
Thank you for all your support, feedback and encouragement. It means a lot to us. We’ll keep you updated on how it’s going.
Believe it or not we’re about ready to launch Amigo! The photo above is me doing 1:30am bug testing - gotta love it! I’m forcing myself to do almost all my testing in IE on a PC, as that will statistically be our largest user demographic.
We’re doing final tweaks, changes and testing. I’m really excited as it’s all starting to come together. We’re pushing hard because it needs to be live for The Future of Web Apps.
If you haven’t guessed, we’ve decided to move ahead, despite the trademark issues. We feel it would be detrimental to wait until it’s sorted out, as that could take months (maybe even a year or more).
If you applied for the Beta, don’t be offended if we didn’t contact you - we could only allow a few people in. Thanks for your help and excitement!
I’m currently in Kenya, just outside Nairobi in the beautiful Rift Valley. (I was lucky enough to be invited to do some consulting on web strategy for an African wildlife conservation web site.)
It’s amazing how all I need is a web connection (in this case a satellite connection), and I can still to manage the building of Amigo. Let the work continue! Jason has just cranked out some more comps for the website. Here’s a sneak peak at the Buzz page (I’ve changed the strapline, obviously).
Just a quick note to say that the deadlines have changed slightly again. This is more because things are just taking longer than we thought they would (designs going back and forth, fundamental questions from our developer that need more than a yes or no answer etc) rather than us falling behind because of external forces.
The new deadlines are:
This means that the launch has been pushed back to July 7 (previously 22nd June). This is not ideal, and to be honest we are hoping that we won’t need that long. But we can only wait and see. We’re more or less on track though, which is encouraging! Whatever you do, don’t skimp on your contingency time - you’ll need every last second of it.
Building web apps is nice. It’s interesting and challenging and imaginative, but it doesn’t pay the bills in the beginning, at least not for most of us. So we have other jobs to do, like running workshops. We’re at a workshop today, Eric Meyer’s ‘Professional CSS XHTML Techniques.’ It’s in London which means that we have to stay over for a least two nights and it also took us around two days before that to prepare for the workshop. So this week we haven’t been able to devote as much time to Amigo as we should.
The point is that this is normal. Unless you are Google and you do have gazillions of dollars and just as many workers then you will have to build your web app ‘on the side’ and while you are doing other stuff. Work this into the timeframe. Don’t assume that you can work on your web app every single day, it’s not realistic. Stuff happens, you need to work (to get money), you get tired, it’s Sunday and your family is visiting. Whatever the distraction is don’t deny that it exists. It’s the only surefire way to get behind with the build.
We knew it would happen, but we’re falling behind on our schedule.
Jason is due to have the UI design finished tomorrow but we haven’t even decided on the logo and colours yet so that isn’t going to happen.
Dave is still working on getting the alpha live which is fine and he is on track for his 9th June deadline for version 1 to go live.
We (myself and Ryan) were due to have all the copy written for the website by tomorrow but (eek!) we’re going to London for the awards ceremony of our 55DSL competition on BD4D. So that won’t happen until next week at the latest and besides Jason is not ready to start the website design until he finishes the UI design.
Our schedule was ambitious and to be honest we’re surprised we got this far without it falling apart. Hmm…time to regroup, rethink and push back some deadlines.
The new deadlines are as follows (updated on Basecamp)
UI designed = May 1st
Website copy = May 4th
Website designed = May 19th
Thanks goodness we worked in three weeks contingency for this kind of stuff.
Gill and I travelled down to Brighton to meet up with Dave, our developer. We met in a brilliant cafe called “The Fringe” and chowed down some burgers and beers.
I’d highly recommend meeting up with your freelancers before they commence work. It was tremendously valuable for several reason:
We had Dave sign the contract and we paid him his first installment of £1966.66. We always pay on a 3-stage timeframe.
We just found out that perfecting the wireframe is not only extremely time-consuming but also that it’s difficult to video outside the office. We thought it would be a great idea to run over the wireframe on a lazy Saturday afternoon in our local coffee shop. We would video the whole thing and it would make fun and interesting viewing - we were wrong!
Click the header to watch the video clip.
Our problem is that if we don’t set out exactly when and how things are going to happen the likelyhood is that they won’t happen. Or at the very least take a lot longer than it should do. So we need to pin down exactly how long it will take us to build our new app and set a deadline for the finished application.
We decided to allocate time for each section of the building of the app based on what we had learned from our first app, DropSend. We started at the begining and allocated time for each thing we had to do - we didn’t build in any time for ‘things to go wrong’ but we did add some contingency at the end. So the following represents our ‘ideal’ timeframe for the building of the app.
Usability
Perfecting the wireframe - 3 days
XHTML for the wireframe - 1 week
Design
Designing the web app UI - 3 weeks
XHTML for the UI - 1 week
Coming up with a name - 1 day
Code
Development of the web app - 4 weeks
Website
Writing the copy - 1 week
Design of the pages - 1 week
XHTML for website - 3 days
Extras
Contingency and Launch - 3 weeks
Total = 15 weeks
Firstly we gave ourselves a deadline. We decided that we must have a designer and developer in place, with contracts signed by 31st March. This would enable the whole process to begin.
Once we had the timeframe set we could go ahead and set milestones in Basecamp so that we knew what should be done by which date. Because some of the work could overlap (ie the coder could be working on the development while the designer was working on the website) the whole process would not take 15 weeks from beginning to end but nearer to 11 weeks.
We set these deadlines:
31st March - wireframe perfection finished
6th April - XHTML of wireframe finished
10th April - site copy written
13th April - changes to XHTML of wireframe finished
13th April - developer and designer start
27th April - UI design finished
27th April - XHTML of UI starts
27th April - website design starts
4th May - XHTML of UI finished
4th May - website design finished
10th May - XHTML of website finished
1st June - Code for app finished
22nd June - App launched
Sounds simple doesn’t it?