Posted by Patrick Fitzsimmons on Mon, Jan 24, 2005 @ 11:17 PM
My newest invention - Lanovision - which is a continuation of the Coffeeshop project, is now ready for people to test out. I've already got a small network going and it's working really well. Send me an
e-mail if you want to test it out.
Posted by Patrick Fitzsimmons on Thu, Jan 13, 2005 @ 01:01 AM
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
Posted by Patrick Fitzsimmons on Tue, Oct 26, 2004 @ 12:24 AM
Go to
www.coffeeshopmusic.com to download it.
Features include:
- Sharing any file with your friends
- Importing of your AOL Buddy List
- Automatic creation of photo slideshows
- Instant searches of all your friends files
- Create playlists including all your friends music
- Stream video off of your friends computers
- Works behind some firewalls and routers
Download it now!
For the techies out there:
Coffeeshop is written in PHP and Python. The installer bundles together a stripped down versions of the Apache webserver and PHP, the Videolan media player, the Firebird database server, and the main Coffeeshop application. Yeah, that's a lot, and it's probably not the optimal way of doing it, but I've stripped it down enough that it compresses to a 12MB installer. Using Apache should make it more secure than using something lighterweight but less proven. The PHP scripts manage the access to files, while the main UI is written in Python using wxPython. The built-in media player uses the Windows Media Player COM object.
UPDATE:
The beta test has uncovered a number of problems. One is that the integration with AOL Instant Messenger doesn't seem to be working for a couple of people. It's the worst kind of bug: the bug that I can't for the life of me replicate. I've even looked at their output logs and it's identical to mine until they get an error message. ARRRGGG. It seems to be only happening to people outside of New England, so it may be AIM's servers give back different messages based on location. The other major problem is a memory leak in the UI. Both of these problems are going to take a while to solve, and I may have to wait until Christmas break to fix them. Also, given the success of the Itunes/MyTunes Redux combination, I'm not sure if Coffeeshop is really going to be able to take off. The best idea may be to create a much simpler, smaller version that plays to Coffeeshop's main strength. We shall see . . .