More teasers? (Get it?) Of course! With ample time to work this holiday season (I love vacations!) I've already managed to put a serious dent on the work left to do. I have also decided to make Tea a self-hosted project, meaning that costs will transfer from a one-time license to still-reasonable yearly cost to help pay for server usage. As more people sign up, the costs will hopefully drop for average users, while I will be forced to come up with a solution for the more-visited users.

That's right people, Dirk's got a new uber-secret project planned for release this holiday season. After all that Christmas fun, you'll probably have just a little bit of cash left over, well this will be an opportunity to get it out of your wallet! Cost will likely range between $20 and $30 depending on what extras you chose.

A Teaser

Ever heard of Shaun Inman's Mint or Google Analytics? (If you haven't you're weird.) Well this program will be a similar statistics solution, combining the "in-house" control of Mint and the features of Google Analytics it will be another powerful addition to your statistics arsenal.

Once again kirupaForum has helped me out; throughout the two-week cycle of the first two versions of Rain, I have relied on kirupaForum and its experienced and talented body of users and moderators to provide helpful and insightful feedback. One user specifically, who goes by haam, has been extremely helpful by providing important feedback on user psychology and design of the application.

A Blaring "F"

I try not to fail in what I do. But sometimes I just can't seem to get it right; with Rain I've had so many ideas and inspiration with the design I was hard pressed to achieve consistency throughout the application. Once of the most obvious examples of this is the discrepancy in the overall design of the main window and the Posting and Settings windows. The main window focuses on a dark blue color scheme with rounded corners and a 6 pixel border. Completely different from the main window, the Posting and Settings windows have a dark gray 8 pixel border and a white fill with absolutely no rounded corners. This is obviously a failure in design.

Restitution

To make up for this mistake I plan to restyle the main window to look exactly like the Posting and Setttings windows, with possibly a couple additions in the background and a more complex overall interface.

I'm happy to announce the official release of Rain version 1.1. The new features include a restyling of the Settings and Posting windows, incorporation of a Help section into the Settings window (There's nothing there yet.), a first-run screen to introduce the user to Rain, optional auto-closing of the Posting window, and the ability to post to Facebook.

You will need Adobe AIR to run this application. AIR is a cross-desktop (Windows and Mac) runtime that allows you to build applications that will look and function the same on all supported operating systems. Download it here.

When Rain v1.0 was released I also created a thread on kirupForum asking for critiques of the user interface and the software as a whole. I did not expect such a big response from the thread, with a lot of major people participating in the discussion. I got some very good feedback on the application and an insight into the reasoning of users.

Something I needed to hear.

A few moderators and another user pointed out something important. Very few users know what AIR is, even fewer feel like installing more software to run a simple application. Although it is frustrating, it made me realize that to gain a shred of attention or popularity I would need to make this application worthwhile. And that I would need to make it extremely easy to use yet still powerful.

On a warmer note...

I did get some very positive feedback about the interface, along with some tips on how to improve it. Even pushing version 1.0 of Rain out has given me a new perspective on designing desktop applications. I highly doubt that my work on Rain will stop anytime soon.

Jus a little teaser, Rain version 1.1 should be out by this Friday; it will feature a built-in help section, Facebook status updating, and a couple other features to make posting to your favorite sites even easier!