Whew it’s been a couple of really busy weeks on the Help Burner startup front! Firstly, I’m moving full speed ahead with development of HelpBurner and I’m really pleased about the progress that’s been made so far. I’m lucky enough to be in the position of having already had a semi-successful startup, so I can work full time on HelpBurner’s development and design…
I’m hoping to get some time to post some screenshots of HelpBurner and where I’m at with it in the next few weeks 
And I want to give it out to a small selected group of users. Keep tuned for more updates 
So here’s the startup progress since mid-December:-
Design – For the last month, I’ve been redesigning the UI and the user experience (UX) over and over again. I;m one of those people who know when it’s perfect but I’m not arty enough to be able to design it perfectly first-time, it takes me quite a few iterations to “get it right”. Anyway, I purchased a copy of Balsamiq Mockups and it was great! Within an hour I had created a few mockups and chosen the perfect one. The ability to tweak the design until it’s perfect saves so much time! Welcome Peldi and Val and Marco from Balsamiq, they were in the small startup position just a year and a half ago so it’s great to see a cool company succeed!
Development – I’m pushing full-steam ahead and have have an almost-beta-able version of HelpBurner. Development in Silverlight 4 is great if a bit fiddly – it’s just so powerful. Needed to go with Silverlight 4 because HelpBurner uses screen-capture and SL3 couldn’t do that without Java Applets and they suck from a user experience perspective. Luckily I’m in the Microsoft BizSpark program so all dev tools etc are free One of the great things about SilverLight (and Adobe Air) is that people can try the software (when it’s posted) from the website and they don’t have to install any software!
Company – I need to incorporate the the new HelpBurner company. Luckily in New Zealand it’s a super simple process of registering a company and only takes about an hour online at the Companies Office and only costs $100
Website – Everything is in place and this blog is running and HelpBurner’s also on Twitter. I’ve also got our GetSatisfaction community setup and ready.
What’s Coming Up
The biggest things I want to achieve over the next month is to get HelpBurner beta-able and give to that small select group of users so they can rip it apart and tell me where it sucks and what they as users want to see improved. You know, get the basics of it perfect before moving forward to completion. So:
- Get HelpBurner beta-ready.
- Select a small group of users.
- Get the beta to the users and start gathering feedback.
- Incorporate HelpBurner Ltd.
- Get screenshots of HelpBurner on the blog.
- Get ready for a more open beta.
- Start gathering worthy organizations for free giveaways at launch time.
- Consider CruistControl or some other continuous integration tool (any advice anyone?).
- Welcome my new baby daughter
Hello, Mike
My question is about mock-ups. Have you had a chance to try Microsoft Expression Blend? It gives great opportunity to create prototypes of Silverlight and WPF applications. You can implement UI, animation, interactivity, sample databinding etc. It’s a great tool. I think, you have to use it to develop Silverlight applications, so you can use it for prototyping. For example, I have spent 1 day to create a prototype of the WPF Wizard application (7 pages, animation etc).
Hope, this helps
Cheers!
Yep we use expression blend 4, silverlight 4 rc and visual studio 2010 rc as our dev platform… Great tools!
- mike
Real nice design and excellent content , very little else we require : D.