It’s been a little while since I last gave folks an overall update about what’s up here at Ilium Software, so I want to take am minute today to do that. I started this as a single post but as always, I got a bit wordy so I’m breaking it up. Some of it I’ll post today, some will go up on Monday.
I have couple of reasons for doing this. First, I’m extremely excited about the future of our industry and our company. There is a lot of very cool stuff to talk about. Second, one of our blog commenters – Henry – gave me some excellent advice yesterday. Based on that I want to offer you guys some news.
First up on the agenda is Mac eWallet. If you want to know more, read on after the jump…
Mac eWallet
Mac eWallet is looking great. We have the basic UI in place and I’ve gotten some VERY positive feedback from our Mac testers. Undo turned out to be a amazingly huge job but it’s coming along nicely. Sync is tricky but at this point I don’t see any reason it won’t do most of what sync does on the desktop. The devil is in the details, however. One of the reasons I had initially believed it would be out sooner is that the initial work went very quickly with clear and visible results. Unfortunately, the detail work (much of which involves making sure it works like it should rather than adding big features) is proving quite challenging.
Another thing that happened is that in the recent past we moved ListPro for iPhone in-house (I’ll talk about that below) which forced us to outsource the Mac work. Fortunately, the guys we have working on it are GREAT – but it has meant that I have to do much more detailed specs than if I handed it off to one of the folks who have been working on eWallet for years. This takes time.
At this point, I’m guessing that it will be ready around June. Yep, that’s a long time – about 6 months later than I’d planned – but I’m trying to give a conservative estimate. Part of my estimate is based on the fact that we are going to test this baby like CRAZY. It’s a VERY complicated app that never existed before on this platform – that means we need to do TONS of testing.
Needless to say we still think Mac is a great platform to write for and eWallet for Mac IS coming out. It’s just taking longer than I’d anticipated.