Year End NewsCongratulations to Telepark on the launch of WebWizards! You're definitely going to bookmark this site.
Year End News As the year draws to a close I'd like to bring you up to date on the latest news from Fog Creek Software.
In the last half of 2003 most of our programming efforts were spent on two major porting projects. CityDesk is being fully internationalized (the first non-English version, German CityDesk, is almost complete). Our other product, FogBugz, is being ported to run on Unix-based servers, which is also almost complete. So even though we're working at full speed, both of these projects don't really help much for our existing customers, which is why it may feel like we're slowing down.
In June I predicted that there would be another major version of CityDesk at the end of 2003. Unfortunately, that prediction turns out to have been, well, wrong. In the three years that Fog Creek has been in existence I have learned that every release takes a certain amount of time, usually three months, for the beta cycle and to stomp bugs. That means that if we did two releases a year, we would spend 6 months writing new code and 6 months in beta. If we do one release a year, we spend 9 months writing new code and 3 months in beta -- fifty percent more new code in the same amount of time. Since CityDesk 2.0 only shipped on August 25th, and we have a beta cycle for German CityDesk in our future, it's just too early for another release. We've got some great new ideas for CityDesk and we'd rather code them up and get them to you as quickly as possible rather than go through yet another beta cycle without them. Some parts of the UI are being rewritten, and I would hate to waste time fixing bugs in old code that we plan to throw out anyway just to get a stable interim release. As usual, we thank you for your patience, and as usual, please don't buy our software if it doesn't already do what you need! CityDesk has generated an incredible amount of enthusiasm. Everyone tells us it fills an important gap between the overpowered, overpriced "big iron" content management systems for large corporations and simple blogging tools, and we're proud of some of the great sites that were built with CityDesk: sites that highlight your creativity and the fantastic range of interesting voices on the web. I'm even prouder that companies like Telepark and Tintico are creating great new businesses by building better web sites for their customers -- web sites which anyone can update. That's the power of CityDesk and I thank you for your support and enthusiasm and wish you a happy and prosperous new year.
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This has been a terrific year. Monthly sales of software licenses were about 250% higher than the same time last year, allowing us to pay salaries to the company founders (always appreciated), move into shiny 