It’s only a matter of time before this particular guy is ready for primetime… And by primetime I mean the market that happens to be 33 times larger than the one that I’m serving currently.

iRooster in the designer

It almost boggles the mind in a way: 33 times more people use Windows than the Mac, and I’ll have a chance to target a sizable chunk of them. Wow.

Anyway, it will be a while before iRooster is available for Windows, but it’s definitely coming along. I have to say, the speed of developing in Visual Studio (2003, not Whidbey. Whidbey’s actually much faster) is truly impressive. I’m able to work far more effectively in Everett than I can in XCode. This is primarily due to the tight and super-effective integration of the Forms Designer with the backend code, and the ease of working with managed code (in such a beautiful language too!)

It will be several months before iRooster for Windows is available (which will probably start off at v2.5, but we’ll see). You know the 90-90 rule, the first 90% of the work takes 90% of the time. The second 90% takes the other 90% of the time. If you go waaaay back to August 2003 you’ll see where I was griping about how much work it takes to really polish an application for commercial release. iR for Windows will be no different.

Also, a few notes about system requirements: I expect to require at least Windows 2000, just because I don’t expect my target market to still be running Windows 98 (or ME for that matter). Basically, if you haven’t upgraded your OS in the past 7 years, chances are you’re not big on buying shareware. Please correct me if I’m wrong on this. I’d love to be challenged on this.

I will require v1.1 of the .Net Framework to be installed. I’d love to use VS 2005 for this project, but I don’t want to tie myself to a currently unreleased version of the Framework (as beautiful and wonderful as I think it is). Ostensibly, one or two revisions after the initial release will require 2.0. 2.0+VS 2005 makes a number of things that I’d like to support incredibly easy (like using the system’s Icon Title Font, UI layout with Snaplines, possibly ClickOnce, etc.)