Well, it's exactly 1 year since the last time I posted the M Cubed birthday retrospective, so I guess that means I need to do another one today. The past year has been quite an eventful one, at least behind the scenes.

Finishing University

The bulk of the last year was taken up with finishing my degree. This is the primary reason that you haven't seen much activity from M Cubed the past 12 months. Exams, assignments and my dissertation all took up the majority of the free time I had.

Unfortunately both getting a degree and running a software company require a lot of mental input and it's hard to do both at once. Effectively M Cubed was shut down for several months while I focused on my degree.

In mid June I had my last exam, all my assignments and my dissertation were handed in and I was finally free of full time education. In July I went back to pick up my degree at my graduation ceremony and now I the £20,000 piece of paper that says I am a Computer Science BSc. So with all of that out of the way I could finally focus all my energy on M Cubed.

Going full time

Last year I said that I hoped to be working full time from M Cubed. This year I can say that I am now a full time indie developer. Granted this is helped in part by the fact that I've been able to move back home with my parents and that I'm able to keep my expenses down. Many people wouldn't be able to live off what I'm earning, but it is enough for me to dedicate all my energy to it.

The biggest benefit of going full time has actually been having free time. Previously I would fill my free time with M Cubed work, but when combined with school/university work this would lead to me getting burnt out pretty quickly. Being able to focus most of my attention on M Cubed, I can now use my free time for things that are actually relaxing. I'm no longer having to stay up until 2am coding, I can get offline at 10pm and spend the rest of the night relaxing. I can't emphasises enough how much doing this has increased my productivity.

2 > 1

Going full time wasn't the only major thing that happened with M Cubed this year. As was announced in July, M Cubed's employee list doubled. Fabio joined to help with design and coding. The result is the website design you see now, plus many graphic improvements to our applications that you don't see yet. In fact you'll see the first fruits of our labour next week when we release Minim 2.0

Minim 2.0

Minim 2.0 is going to be the first release from M Cubed since I went full time. Minim has long suffered from a lack of focus and development time. The last release was 18 months ago and only fixed 1 small bug. The last major release was over 2 years ago.

Version 2.0 changes all of that. It has been completely re-designed and re-coded from the ground up. It is practically an entirely new application, the name and the core purpose of the software being the only things shared with 1.x. Whereas Minim 1.x was only the second real application I had written, Minim 2.0 builds on 5 years of experience, meaning I can say with confidence that it will be the best application we've ever shipped.

It really is a shining example of what the changes this year hold for the future. Every release I've done in the past has been limited by the amount of time I've had and has had me as the primary designer. Minim 2.0 has had several people working on the design and we've been able to put a lot of time and effort into polishing it. Whereas before the question was, "how can this feature be added in the shorted amount of time?", the question is now, "how can we best implement this feature?"

Accessibility

The other thing that Minim 2.0 will showcase is accessibility. Earlier this year I made a pledge: "By the end of 2009, every application I produce will be fully accessible". Unfortunately I won't be able to fulfil that pledge by the end of 2009. However, the next major version of each application will fulfil the pledge of making every application I produce fully accessible.

Minim 2.0 does fulfil that pledge by being the first M Cubed app to be fully accessible. We've put a lot of effort into achieving this and we hope it will help in providing a first class experience for disabled users.

Code Collector Pro is mostly accessible but needs the most work and this will be fixed in version 1.4 which we hope to have out early next year. Lighthouse Keeper only has some minor accessibility issues but these will be fixed in version 1.2.

To further highlight our emphasis on accessibility, we are setting up a new email address where you can contact us about any accessibility related issues with our software. If you have any questions about our the accessibility of any of our products then send us an email at accessibility@mcubedsw.com

The year ahead

Well the next year will see a lot more activity from us. As I've already pointed out, our next 3 releases will be Minim 2.0, Code Collector 1.4 and Lighthouse Keeper 1.2. We also have plans for a major revamp of codecollector.net, which has been feeling a bit neglected. We'll also be looking into dipping our toes into the pool of iPhone development. And to top all of this off we have a number of open source projects we will be working on. All in all, the next year will probably be the most productive one in M Cubed's history. Hopefully the post a year from now will tell you about all these great projects as M Cubed celebrates a half-decade of existence.

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