Building a product is slow, but steady going. I jotted down this list of the various hurdles and went through to get a useable product today:

• Design the UI: most of this was done for version 1.0 five years ago

• Understand the basics of Javascript (with 1990s Pascal to start from)

• Understand post 1990s programming concepts: objects, methods

• Get an environment up and running so that I actually could run a simple piece of code

• Find a way to get access to the data (presentations) version 1.0 was producing.

• Setup an environment that turns a program that says “Hello world” and turns it into a desktop app

• Figure out a way to scale text in a browser environment, preserving the exact proportions of design elements (resize your web page, this is not what most web pages need).

• Get github and multiple versions to work

• Build the first rendering engine that actually displays a chart: text boxes are easy, scaling images a bit trickier, data charts get nastier even

• Find a way to register clicks and make things editable: shapes, menus, in different context.

• Copy the rendering engine to a generic format (for thumb nails in story mode for example)

• Duplicate the app engine to enable multi-screen presenter mode (running 2 processes and a master process that talk to each other)

• Enabling on-screen editing of text, graphs, image dragging, image cropping, flipping

• Building the grid editing system (implementing my patent)

• Build the PowerPoint conversion

• Build the PDF conversion

• Build the image export

• Build the printing functionality

• Add automatic 16:9 to 4:3 and back conversion

• Add automatic dark/white background conversion (beyond simply changing the background color)

• Enable multiple windows (each window is a full copy of the render process) and coordinate settings between them

• Build user authentication: pro users get features others don’t have access to via a web server, involving password hashing and building a user database

• Build the first version of the online template database: search slide layouts inside the app, but pull data from the central server

• Hook up unsplash image search

• Hook up noun project icon search

• Create an auto-update mechanism that updates the desktop app in the background when new versions are released

• Get the mac app to run on windows as well

• Get certified with Microsoft and Apple so that people don’t receive scary warnings when installing the software

• Build the full-scale slide template server, integrating the PowerPoint-only content from the old one

• Get payments working

• Build the front end of the marketing web site and the template store

• Get PowerPoint conversion to work on the server as well

• Build the management console to manage slides, users, and the search algorithms

We are going into the next phase now with a live product, direct user feedback is exciting, but it also means I cannot pull off some of the dramatic overnight feature and architecture changes I did over the past year. To be continued.

Photo by Thomas Galler on Unsplash