Considering selling Mori

Hi,

well there is still lots of stuff to do with Mori. Somehow the program never felt as complete a solution as HogbayNotebook.

Without going in detail I want continuing develoment with more/better features, improved handling of their implementation and from a strictly user-perspective I donot care how to get this (though I bought the program some time ago).

Hope you continue working on it full time,

Greetings,
Rolf

i second that. every word of it.
Mori does *almost* everything i want it to do, and i want it to grow as slowly as possible. all i know i'll need in the near future is compatibility with upcoming Mac OS X versions. obviously, that's my individual, probably rare point of view.
i imagine one of Jesses concerns with "underdoing the competition" might be the conflict with the fundamental Hog Bay Software concept of "user powered software". also, "small and lean" may be difficult to sell in ample quantities.

Firstly Jesse, I find your openness amazing, and extremely refreshing. I admire the consistency with which you are following your user-powered ethic.

As to the future of Mori, I think you should think twice and three times before abandoning it, in however benign a manner. Mori swims in waters that are rich with competing products, but it is special. And the reason is that you are a particularly creative software designer. Your track record is of inspired innovation followed by beautifully crafted implementation...sometimes followed by diversion to the next big idea.

I myself understand all too well how the creative juices are attracted to the next thing, at the cost of finishing the last one, and with a major project like Mori that calls for constant review and maintenance, it is easy to sympathise with your problem.

Arguably, you would be right in identifying your particular skill as software construction, and there might come a time with each product when the right thing to do would be to hand it over to someone whose particular skill is software maintenance and refinement. Ideally that person would be a business partner or employee: I'd be very uneasy about a straight sale to someone whose primary motivation was to acquire a nice little earner, and I'd be very sorry to see Mori bale out of the user-powered experiment.

But then again, I fully understand the reluctance to burden one's life with partners and commercial dependents. It's your call Jesse, but thank you for asking us.

"Your track record is of inspired innovation followed by beautifully crafted implementation...sometimes followed by diversion to the next big idea."

Ha! Well my ego is boosted now :) And I'm actually busy now working on the next big idea :) It's not a new Mori feature, but I think it will be a good complementary app for mori and writeroom.

For the sake of HBS's openness, can we have a hint as to what this next big idea is?

Hard to say if they will turn into the next big idea, but the three things my brain is working on and excited about now are.

1. A simplified app for managing projects and tasks. As described this doesn't sound very exciting, and for some people it may not be enough feature wise, but for me it's proving to be really useful, and it's what I'm most excited about now.

It's not a replacement for Mori, it's a much much smaller app, but I think it will be good at managing your project and task list, while you still use Mori as a reference database. It takes a different approach then all the other GTD apps that I'm aware off and so even if you don't decide to use it in the end I think it should be interesting to play with. Here's the apps positioning as I have it written up now. The idea is to get this out as an alternative to OmniFocus which in my mind is very cool and entirely to much for my needs... hierarchies of contexts?

"TaskPaper - Simplify your work

For Mac users who want a simpler way to get organized. TaskPaper is personal project manager that helps you keep track of what you are working on and what needs to be done next. Unlike competting applications, TaskPaper's focus is on paper-like simplicity and ease of use.

"For the most part, the applications that are specifically designed for project organizing are way too complex, with too much horsepower to really be functional for 98 percent of what most people need to manage." -- David Allen, Author "Getting Things Done"

2. Before Hog Bay Software I worked on zooming user interfaces and wrote a ZUI programming framework called Piccolo. http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/jazz/ Over the last year/s I've been working on a cocoa based redesign of that framework. That's now done, but I'm still trying to figure out what killer app to build on top... simple little last step. My thinking is it will be a simplified brainstorming tool in a zooming environment, sort-off a cross between stickies and Viso. But I still haven't found the right angle on this and so the project is in percolation mode.

3. And last there's the new website that I'm working on. The plan is to have some version of the website up and running before any of these other projects go live, so I guess that means I should be working on it right now... but I"ve been working on TaskPaper all day.

Jesse

Mr. Grosjean:

1. A simplified app for managing projects and tasks. […] TaskPaper - Simplify your work

I think TaskPaper sounds very interesting, and might fill my own simple needs (the Getting Things Done religion is far too complex for me). However, don’t you think that the GTD/task manager landscape is getting a bit crowded these days?

That being said, I would love a task manager that I could synch between different computers, possibly using my .Mac account (I know that .Mac is a poor service for many users, but I have become addicted to synching). Also, I would love a task manager that interacted with Mail.app and Address Book in smarter ways than Apple’s current approaches. However, maybe Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) will answer some of those criticisms.

2. Before Hog Bay Software I worked on zooming user interfaces and wrote a ZUI programming framework called Piccolo. […] sort-off a cross between stickies and Viso.

You know, I understood what most of the individual words meant in that paragraph, but I cannot for the life of me figure out what you meant (sorry!). What is a “zooming interface”? It has to be more than just making things larger (or am I missing the point?). Could you provide an example?

Best wishes,
Clint

WOW! That looks interesting. Lets say it like this - i would pay a lot for a licence of a decent picture-asset-management software. Perhaps something that "takes a different approach then all the other DAM apps" :)
PhotoMesa looks interesting to me at the first glance.