Tech Demo 1.5

Well after much work, the new version of the technology demo didn't quite make it to the level I'd hoped by Sunday. Most of the time was spent fighting an internal Grazr XML parsing bug, a nasty IE bug with dynamic image loading, polishing the interface, and doing some unit testing/data canning to make sure the more public demo at mashup camp by Adam Green went off without a hitch. Adam has been pretty instrumental in this project with everything from strategy and industry advice, to actively helping with the conceptual design of Grazr.

Here's another quick blurb about the mashup camp demo from James Corbett. James is a pioneer thinker in this space with some really cool ideas. His ideas have influenced Grazr and he's the guy who actually coined the term 'feed grazing' from which Grazr takes it's name.

I've been communicating with James back and forth and he's excited about Grazr but I've been trying to keep the Grazr press down a bit to avoid the "Marimba Phenomenon", as Joel Spolsky calls it, where people check out your code to the effect of "this sucks" and never look at it again. The tech demo is cool but it's not 'there' yet and it's not even really 'grazing' yet but soon.

I'm going to call the current incarnation "tech demo v1.5" and work furiously this week to try and add back in some of the niftier features I had envisioned for tech demo v2.0. Hopefully tech demo v2.0 can then lead to Uncertain User Alpha version 0.1 :) at which point I hope to start opening up to more testers.