Not a complete failure

Remember that Sputnik scene of “The Right Stuff”?

I can imagine some Apple execs running frantically in the hallways and meeting in an underground war room in Cupertino headquarters. In the dim light, they start analyzing Google Chrome features (of lack thereof) and suddenly Steve slams the table with his fist and yells: “Safari is dead if we don’t change the direction now.”

Google Chrome must have been a shock for Apple’s Safari team. Apple developers were probably quietly completing alpha stage for Safari 4.0, and suddenly, bam!

Now Safari must redefine itself, and go in a different direction, and do it fast. SquirrelFish Extreme, announced today, only a few weeks after the original SquirrelFish Javascript engine, is maybe a sign of things starting to move. If SquirrelFish was a leap forward, why announce another leap forward before even releasing it? Because of Chrome, imho.

Every day, I spend a few hours on a Windows machine, and this week I’ve noticed that I’ve stopped using Safari completely. Chrome is my browser of choice in Windows now. A threat for Safari on the Mac, for sure.

Apple will probably not conform with playing catch up, and I’m looking forward to see what exciting stuff there are preparing for January. Or maybe Safari 4.0 has to be delayed, but for good.

For the last few days, I’ve been busy writing a new program, code named “Ventilo”, but that could also be called Frankenstein as it’s made out of a dozen of pieces of other programs that I’ve been writing over the last year and half.
Today I’ve made big progress and the creature is finally alive.

Where I had twenty programs capable of repairing one type of damaged movies each, now I have one Frankenstein creature capable of previewing them all.

Note that I’m not saying repairing, just previewing. Because what I’ve grown in scope, has come at the cost of feature depth.

I’m happy with that, because it’s exactly what I wanted to do:
Being able to view what is inside a damaged movie file is indeed very important. It’s telling you two things:

• First, that your beloved footage is still here, latent, waiting for a repair. You can almost touch it.
• Second, that there’s someone that cares about video professionals. It’s not always a fairy tale, shit happens. And it’s good to know that someone is here to help.

The reason why Ventilo does not repair the movie is a technical one: If getting a computer to analyze the contents of a file and preview a cherry-picked frame is a hard task, it’s an easy one compared to extract all the frames, video and audio, and present them perfectly synchronized, without artefact, in a broadcast quality movie.

Preview is a feature that luckily falls at the tiny intersection of what people wish could be done, and what technically I’m able to do. And it’s also the missing piece of the Movie Repair puzzle because it’s what creates the emotion, the engagement.

Ventilo was born from an intuition:

Every day, a few hundred (unlucky) people discover that an important movie file, because it’s urgent or because it’s a piece of their memories, has been damaged and cannot be open. They seek help in friends, colleagues, Internet forums, and end up searching for a “tool to fix damaged movies” or a “software to repair corrupt film”.

What they find is a dozen of crappy products that will lead them nowhere. The problem is that quality movie repair is delivered as a service, not as a software. But people doesn’t look for a service, it looks like a strange idea.

So how can I let them know, and help them recover their movie?

Enter Ventilo. A free tool that they will easily find and use, and that will tell them the truth about their file:

“No, it can’t be repaired because the file contains only alien data”

“Yes, it can be fixed, look at the preview… but the repair is a complex task, it can only be done by a video hacker and this service can cost you between x and y.”

Ventilo also facilitates some hardeous tasks, like data extraction and transfer, and saves time both to the customer and to the repair technician.

In summary, Ventilo lowers several barriers:
Barrier to discovery (Google will find it), to use (it’s software), to gratification (free preview!), and to engagement (big hope, small time footprint).
Thus enabling many more people to get their file repaired.

As I’m working alone, instead of a specification, I prefer a small set of guidelines that let me decide quickly whether something must, can, or cannot be added to Ventilo.

My guidelines:

• Tell something interesting about all the files in my “collection” of corrupt movies, and preview 90% of them.
• Release 1.0 within one month, stable enough.
• Provide a simple user interface that makes Ventilo feel like a Mac application.
• Give an emotional touch to the Preview.

Ventilo is far from finished, the user interface work has just started. I’ll share with you in the next days the first screenshots and discuss a couple of interaction design items.

click to enlarge

Contact me if you would like to beta-test Ventilo. bjoossen at aeroquartet.com

Interesting research paper about the small Mac developers who form a community with its own role models and non-written rules. (via Gruber)

I feel identified with this description of independent Mac developers. Hopefully I can join this ‘creative class’ soon.

Indie Mac developers appear to be prototypes of what Richard Florida (2002) calls the ‘creative class’. On average they do not make a sharp distinction between their personal and professional lives (Florida, 2002, p.14), they appreciate systems of meritocracy and subscribe less to the status of wealth, they seem more motivated by the respect of their peers than by money (idem, p.78) and rally around their professional identity as a software entrepreneur (idem p.80). Indies fall into the category of ‘free agents’ (idem, p.107): people whom willingly sacrifice the securities of a job to be able to pursue their own creative interests.

But you can only pursue creative interests full-time once you’ve solved the money problem. Thus making remarkable products that sell is the most difficult part of the equation.

A few days ago, as I was brainstorming ideas for my new icon design, several concepts emerged.

The “Chest”, my preferred one, was featured in the previous post. But a second idea also looked interesting and I decided to develop it as well:

A common problem I find when I write or design stuff, either an user interface, an illustration or an icon, is how difficult it is to judge your own work.

Usually, I let pass a few days before I look at it again. While you’re designing, you’re trying hard to make a certain message emerge out of the drawing, so your perception is biased until you’ve evacuated it completely. You can discover that the design doesn’t work or conveys a different message, but only after a while.

That’s why I’m leaving those two icons in this “almost-done” stage, until my mind cools down and I decide that I like them enough to finish the job.