I've just released Lighthouse Keeper 1.0.2, offering a whole range of bug fixes. It's been exactly 1 week since I released Lighthouse Keeper, so I thought I'd do something I haven't done before. I've often made many posts leading up to a release but never one looking back on the release. I thought I'd do a look back at the release of Lighthouse Keeper and give you an idea of some of the thoughts and challenges this past week has given me.

Firstly, what does a release involve? Well you have to update the website and documentation, prepare a press release, prepare the application for deployment. Thankfully I'd prepared things well in advanced, so this was a pretty organised release by my standards. I was actually ready to launch up to a week prior to when I did, but I chose to wait and get everything right.

Launch day was still incredibly hectic though. I may have prepared the press release but I had to send it out to everyone. The application was ready for deployment, but I had to get it onto all the download sites. And then emails came in asking about various things and reporting bugs. Which brings me onto the next challenge...

No matter what any developer tells you a 1.0 is always going to be a beta. When you are testing you often have a small-ish group of testers, at least relative to your user base. As soon as you release your 1.0 you are testing with a much wider pool of users and so you will start findings bugs you haven't seen yet. Thankfully these will relatively few with LHK 1.0. Many of the bugs people were findings weren't actually bugs at all, but a misunderstanding of how the trial limits worked.

Before you register Lighthouse Keeper you are limited to viewing just one project, which in 1.0 was the first project you download. The problem is that some people thought it was a bug, and many of those that realised it was a trial limitation wanted to play around with another project instead. "No problem," I thought, "I'll get that into 1.0.1, should be fixed next week". Beyond these problems though things were going well and the reception from people was great.

Unfortunately Friday brought about panic stations. I was taking a screenshot of a feature of Xcode for a forum discussion I was having with someone and used Lighthouse Keeper's source to show it off. As the source code is private I scrolled up to the top to some boilerplate code that Apple provides. I took the screenshot, posted it to the forum and then switched back to Xcode... I then felt a weight drop in my stomach.

Right below this boiler plate code is the code that runs as soon as LHK launches and at the very top of this was some VERY bad code. During the beta period I'd put in some code that stopped the app from launching after a certain date. This is all fine and dandy during the beta, but I'd forgotten to remove it in 1.0. To make matters worse, it was due to expire at midnight GMT that day.

And then to make the day go from bad to worse, a bug randomly appeared that caused the parsing of dates sent from Lighthouse to fail, meaning all the dates displayed in Lighthouse Keeper vanished. This one confused me as it: a. would've been something I'd have noticed before releasing 1.0 and, b. was something that was working with 1.0. As the API hadn't changed I was (and still am) puzzled as to what caused it. It's fixed now so I don't choose to dwell on it any more.

2 hours later I'd finished up the already started trial improvements, removed the beta code and fixed the date bug. It goes to show that no matter how well you prepare, things still go wrong. And on Friday things continued to go wrong, even after releasing 1.0.1. Unfortunately the software update wasn't working for some people who weren't sharing their system specs. This is a bug in Code Collector Pro that I'm aware of and have come up with a work around for, but I thought I'd fixed it prior to LHK 1.0 (and indeed remember testing it and having it work).

Due to the unique nature of the bug, I could release a silent update to 1.0.1 to fix it. Those who had already upgrade to 1.0.1 weren't affected by it and so wouldn't have a problem upgrading to any future releases, those who were affected hadn't yet upgraded. At least the bright side of the day was that I'd been lucky enough to find out about these problems and to fix them before they became a major issue.

The other bright side of Friday was that sales started to come in. Maybe it had been the trial problems or maybe people had just needed time to see if they needed LHK, but I had no sales for the first two days. This was odd for two reasons. I'd been used to sales on the day of a new release for quite some time, Code Collector Pro had great sales from the get go with 1.0. The response from those who'd tried it out had also been amazing, with quite a few people seeming genuinely excited about the fact that LHK exists.

What actually caused the lag time I don't know, but based on the emails I received in the first two days I'd say it is a bit of both reasons. Another nice side effect is that I've had a boost in CCP sales as well, which had been dropping off recently. It's not something I've seen before, but if releases of CCP and LHK end up attracting users to look at the other then all the better.

A week later I can say that Lighthouse Keeper has been a pretty good (if turbulent) launch. With 2 bug fixes Lighthouse Keeper is now at a stable enough version to allow me to concentrate on my next project, Code Collector Pro 1.3.

Comments (2)

---

Page 2 of 2 pages  <  1 2