The End of Coffeeshop (and the beginning of something new)

The great Coffeeshop project has come to an end. Altogether it comprised almost a year of work, hundreds of hours of coding, a thirty page business plan, two different versions, and 170 downloads. In the end, I was simply trying to do much, the program became bloated, and the need wasn't there. The AIM integration was too inconsistent. Basing the server on Apache ate up too much RAM for a program that people need to have on all the time if it is to be successful. And there were too many little bugs: shared directories suddenly becoming unshared, the firewall tunneling never working right, the media player occasionally stopping in the middle of a playlist, or the viewing of friends files going haywire occasionally. Most of the mistakes were because I was packing an enormous set of features into a program that I built in my spare time over the summer. They say in software that the perfect is the enemy of the good. In the case of Coffeeshop, that was not true. The improvement of Coffeeshop over e-mail or AIM Get File is that you can browse and download files on demand without contacting the other person. But for that to work, Coffeeshop must be on all the time. For a user to trust a program enough to run it as a server that is on all the time, the program must give the impression that the creator thought of everything. It must give the impression that it was created by a professional who crafted the program with care, not a college student hacking away. The reason for dropping Coffeeshop altogether rather than fixing these problems is because the need for a program such as Coffeeshop has slackened. College students use I-Tunes to find music and MyTunes to download it. They e-mail and post to web sites to share photos. They use AIM to share other files. Competition has increased. Grouper, QNext, and thefacebook.com's Wirehog now offer sharing in a social network. However, there was one feature of Coffeeshop that did work very well and that people really liked. During Christmas break, I combined a few other ideas with this feature, and built a new program. It was amazing how easy it was to build after all the work I've done on Coffeeshop. I've already had successful test installs, and if it scales up well it should be ready for public consumption in a few weeks. So stay tuned, this could be hot :-) UPDATE: The program is out! Go to www.lanovision.com