Monday, December 1, 2008
For those of you using Twitter, you can follow me at http://twitter.com/kerlmax. I will be using it mainly for Kerlmax business information, but since I don't have a personal account, I'll probably mix a little bit of that in with the other tweets.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Austin Traffic is now on the iPhone App Store
Today Austin Traffic 1.0 was released on the iPhone App Store after being retooled from a web app. I was never very happy with the speed of the web app. As I worked on improving the speed, it became clear that a native application would be much faster and provide other enhancements. Now you can customize the road groups to the ones that you drive on frequently. Currently there are about thirty roads to choose from, but I can easily add more if there are requests. The listings now show the times of the incidents. Most importantly, in my opinion, is that the app downloads a smaller amount of data and only from one network connection which makes it much quicker than a web app.
Saturday, October 25, 2008
Sharpshooter
First off, I admit that this blog has been lacking on content. I will try and post here more regularly. The biggest thing the blog is lacking is any news about Sharpshooter, my Mac screenshot helper utility application. In early September, I put the final touches on Sharpshooter and started selling it online.
Before I started Kerlmax, Sharpshooter was a personal side project available as freeware. I got a lot of positive feedback about the app and a lot of feature requests as well. This encouraged me to put some more work into improving Sharpshooter so I put together a plan to start the company and release version 1.0.
Because the app was previously available for free, I sold it at a 20% discount of the regular price of $15 for the first month. Unfortunately I really don't know much affect that had on my sales. Most of my sales came in during the first two weeks and everything since then has been slow but fairly consistent, even after dropping the discount. All of this has been with almost no marketing on my part. That's going to change when I release the next minor revision. Hopefully with some press coverage sales will pick back up.
Before I started Kerlmax, Sharpshooter was a personal side project available as freeware. I got a lot of positive feedback about the app and a lot of feature requests as well. This encouraged me to put some more work into improving Sharpshooter so I put together a plan to start the company and release version 1.0.
Because the app was previously available for free, I sold it at a 20% discount of the regular price of $15 for the first month. Unfortunately I really don't know much affect that had on my sales. Most of my sales came in during the first two weeks and everything since then has been slow but fairly consistent, even after dropping the discount. All of this has been with almost no marketing on my part. That's going to change when I release the next minor revision. Hopefully with some press coverage sales will pick back up.
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Austin Traffic updated
My Austin Traffic iPhone web app just received its first major update. There were really just two changes:
I know there are bugs with some street names (e.g. McNeil) but those can easily be fixed once I know about them. Don't be afraid to send in bug reports to support@kerlmax.com.
Next up on my plate for Austin Traffic is to show the incident times and optimize it more for even faster loading over EDGE while you're sitting in traffic on Mopac or I-35. I still need to investigate the optimizations but already have several pointers and thoughts on how to achieve them.
- Traffic incident types are now shown at the beginning of the table items and drawn in red.
- Now uses proper capitalization instead of everything being lowercase. This was change was pretty easy to add thanks to John Gruber sharing his title-casing script and Adam Nolley porting it to PHP.
I know there are bugs with some street names (e.g. McNeil) but those can easily be fixed once I know about them. Don't be afraid to send in bug reports to support@kerlmax.com.
Next up on my plate for Austin Traffic is to show the incident times and optimize it more for even faster loading over EDGE while you're sitting in traffic on Mopac or I-35. I still need to investigate the optimizations but already have several pointers and thoughts on how to achieve them.
Monday, August 25, 2008
Austin Traffic is live
Kerlmax's first product, Austin Traffic, is an iPhone optimized listing of current traffic incidents in Austin, Texas. It just made it onto Apple's web apps directory.
I made Austin Traffic because all of the websites I found with this type of information are painfully slow to load on the iPhone. The City of Austin has a page of recent incidents but the text is too small to read and you have to scroll back and forth a lot because of this. Thankfully they provide an RSS feed and that's what I'm using to gather the information for my app. I have reformatted it for easier viewing and grouped the incidents by some of the major thoroughfares around town.
There is still more work to be done, but the web app is quite functional now and I wanted to let everyone else give it a try. Hopefully you find it as useful as I do.
I made Austin Traffic because all of the websites I found with this type of information are painfully slow to load on the iPhone. The City of Austin has a page of recent incidents but the text is too small to read and you have to scroll back and forth a lot because of this. Thankfully they provide an RSS feed and that's what I'm using to gather the information for my app. I have reformatted it for easier viewing and grouped the incidents by some of the major thoroughfares around town.
There is still more work to be done, but the web app is quite functional now and I wanted to let everyone else give it a try. Hopefully you find it as useful as I do.
Kerlmax now open for business
The doors are open. Please excuse our mess.
For some time now I have wanted to set up a side business so I could work on my own projects. This year I pulled the trigger and got things rolling. A few months ago I filed the necessary paperwork to start my own company, Kerlmax LLC. Right now it's just me, Isaac Wankerl, running the show (and I don't have any plans to change that unless the company becomes seriously successful). The company motto is Exciting and Intuitive Software and I hope that our upcoming products live up to it.
My first product (a free iPhone web application) is already out and within a month my flagship product should be finished and released. In the mean time I will also be working to clean up the website and get this blog formatted to my liking. Thanks for stopping by and come back soon!
For some time now I have wanted to set up a side business so I could work on my own projects. This year I pulled the trigger and got things rolling. A few months ago I filed the necessary paperwork to start my own company, Kerlmax LLC. Right now it's just me, Isaac Wankerl, running the show (and I don't have any plans to change that unless the company becomes seriously successful). The company motto is Exciting and Intuitive Software and I hope that our upcoming products live up to it.
My first product (a free iPhone web application) is already out and within a month my flagship product should be finished and released. In the mean time I will also be working to clean up the website and get this blog formatted to my liking. Thanks for stopping by and come back soon!
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