It’s the end of another year and as I have done since 2014, I’ve started working on my annual report¹. Recently I announced I’d starting working a SAAS product to allow others to easily generate their own numbers based interactive reports using the rendering engine I had development this year for my own. Unfortunately, this project is now on pause—more on this in a moment.

I’ve felt myself on the brink of burning out this last month as I deal with the end of the year and the success of my Apple Music Analyser project. This music app grew to be far more successful and involved than I originally planned. On top of this I’ve been trying to get a new version of my Live Photos app—Live Memories—out the door recently in time for the Holidays. Combining all of this has pushed me a little too hard recently, so I’m taking stock and below is the status of all my projects²:

Atlas Wallpaper — Link

Being only nine months old this app is way more successful than I could have ever planned. It is at a stage where it is mostly self sustaining, but to prevent daily paid upgrades from decreasing it needs some more features. A few months ago I started building a custom Style sharing function. This needs more work but is close to finished.

I will be putting Atlas development on hold until early 2019, at which stage I will reduce scope for the sharing function and ship something that works. Until then, and unless something changes, Atlas is in maintenance mode.

Live Memories — Link

Live Memories received a big update today that brings many of the key features that customers really wanted to the app, this includes:

• Reordering of clips
• Aspect ratio previews
• Ability to toggle back on the watermark after paying to remove it
• Filtering the photos list by Album
• Ability to jump to a particular date in an album

In order to get this out in time for the Holidays I needed to cut some corners on UI and de-scope some features. I’ll circle back to these early-to-mid 2019 depending on customer feedback. Until then, and unless something changes, Live Memories is in maintenance mode.

Report Making SAAS (working title: Infovis.app)

Work on this has come to a stop for now. It turned out to be a bigger project than I first planned and I need to rethink the archecture and technical decisions. Meaning, it is on hold for now. It is still a project I would very much love to tackle soon, though. Just not right now.

2018 Annual Report

Work on this has commenced and it is the project I am most excited about. As I work on this, I will be continuing to build out the core engine that will drive the Report Making SAAS listed above. The 2017 report came out in March of 2018 (and 2016 in late January of 2017), I’m hoping to hit a begining of the year release date for my report this year. Having said that I will push back the release for my own sanity if need be. This is my number one project right now.

Jam Club

Jam Club is my—not often talked about—music social network being built with Mitchell Busby. Over the last two years we have rebuilt it twice and it’s still only in beta. Recently parts of the beta broke such that it is unuseable. This is one of those projects that bounced around in my head for four years before I started work on it, a little delay shouldn’t hurt it. I plan to revist it early-to-mid 2019 with a axe to quickly cut scope and make it active again.

Anything Else?

There’s also a tonne of small projects I build every so often—like Wall of Apps, or my personal temperature tracker—these will (as always) continue in maintenance mode as they have managed to do for years. I love small projects that scratch and itch and are finished quickly, those sort of small projects always take precedence over bigger ones listed above—my projects are hobies not businesses, I need to treat them as such.

The List

• Atlas Wallpaper Maintenance Mode
• Live Memories Maintenance Mode (new release today)
• Report Making SAAS On Hold
• 2018 Annual Report Very Active Development
• Jam Club On Hold

I need to try to prevent burning out, and remember to make stupid shit.