What’s Next?

VeriTime Time Tracker is an application that has gone through many updates, builds, rebuilds, rewrites you name it. I do not know if all these are good or not. Each person will have their opinion on the matter. With rapid changes happening in the technological world e.g. the arrival of new products and ideas and the quick obsolescence of others, it is very easy to get distracted and affected. Sometimes I felt if it was still wise to continue working on VeriTime. Web applications were getting more popular and the call for the death of desktop applications was getting louder.

Are Desktop Apps Dying?

Are desktop applications really on their way out? Are web and mobile applications the way to go? These questions were very much present in my mind during the last two years and this could be one of the reasons (together with the previously mentioned ‘burn out’) why my motivation for VeriTime waned. One part of me wanted to let go and like a lemming do what other people are doing i.e. get involved with web applications etc. Another part of me wanted to continue work on it because I still received comments and suggestions, new registrations, and an occasional renewal here and there. I felt that by abandoning it I would be letting down these users who have been with me all these time.

Ever Onward

After the dust has settled and giving some serious thought on it I have decided to continue working on VeriTime and this time to really put the effort in making it a successful product. I have to admit that also cannot completely ignore the new avenues opened by the new smartphones e.g. iPhone and Android.

There are many challenges ahead not made any easier by being the only person developing it and only having the evenings and weekends available. The attitude to take is to deal with the challenges one at a time never forgetting that there are more important things that cannot be ignored and must always be attended to.

Things to Do

So after rambling about what happened and what I intend to do here are my plans for VeriTime. Please note that these are general plans and the specifics will come in due time:

• Release the next version (8.0 or 201012 or 201101) of VeriTime with new features e.g. Planner View of the time entries.
• Make available a multiuser version (I did attempt this before and I am doing it again). This time I might make this a web application rather than a desktop one. The web application can be run from a local webserver if needed).
• Make a mobile web app. For now the target platform is the iPhone. My idea for this is to come up with a version of VeriTime that is available for the desktop (as an application), for the web browser, and for the mobile device. All of these will use a single data storage. I shall discuss this idea in a later post.
• Produce video blogs about VeriTime.

There you are. These are the things I intend to do in the next few months/year. I am not sure if I will be wholly successful and you are welcome to come for the ride (i.e. follow my progress and maybe get involved one way or the other). I shall come back to these ideas in later posts. I do welcome your comments about these plans and anything else that you might wish to communicate to me.