Archive for September, 2007

Dealing With Legacy, or The Story of Paint.NET’s Bug Database

Monday, September 24th, 2007

As a computer scientist and software developer, I have been conditioned to live in fear, or at least gross distaste, of legacy. That is to say, legacy code, legacy systems, legacy process/procedures, etc. As a self-proclaimed cowboy rock star egotastic developer, anytime I see code that wasn't written by myself ...

Successful Freeware Tip #3: Release Often to Keep People Interested

Friday, September 21st, 2007

Prior to Paint.NET v2.6, I was releasing at a pace that covered several months. 2.0 to 2.1 was about 5 months, and forward to 2.5 was another 6 months. V2.6 was done in 3 months, and 3.0 took about 11 months. However, between 2.6 and 3.0 I release 2.61, 2.62, ...

Considering Direct Ad Sales

Monday, September 3rd, 2007

One thing that John Chow has given advice on is selling ads directly. I've been thinking about this a bit the last few days and I think it may be time for me to try it out. I certainly have the traffic for it! The getpaint.net website gets over 1 ...

August 2007 usage statistics

Saturday, September 1st, 2007

Now that I'm caught up on stats after having published them for June and July, and now that it's September, it's time to publish stats for August. Overall usage is up a surprising 15% over July, and 25% since May. Vista usage is still growing strongly, and is up another ...

Elusive Bugs: No known cause for missing resources, but solved regardless

Saturday, September 1st, 2007

Sometimes I get bug reports and, since no one else has ever reported them and they seem weird ("they" referring to the crash, not the user!), I write them off as a fluke, a one-time random occurrence, or what you might call "bit rot". However, when you start to get ...