From TuneSleeve to Polkapps

It has been nearly one year since I’ve published TuneSleeve, my album art importer for iTunes, on the web. I had originally developped this application for my own needs but figured that other people might find it useful as well, so I decided to offer it for free and accept voluntary donations.

Today, I can say that the experience was very positive and worthwhile. Not necessarily from a revenue stand point (I won’t be leaving my day job any time soon), but I have gathered quite a few happy users who expressed their appreciation of TuneSleeve.

Of course, I also got feedback from a lot of users about things that did not work quite right for them in the application. My typical response to them had been “this is a known problem in the current version of TuneSleve and will be fixed in the next version”, without promising any release dates for the “next version” in question.

And weeks became months, during which I pasted my canned reply to user after user submitting the same bugs or feature requests, without actually doing anything about it. I do have good reasons for letting the TuneSleeve code rot on my hard drive for so long (young kids, busy day job and major renovations being top of the list), but as I got more and more daily downloads (and more and more bug reports), I felt like I should really do something about it.

So last week I fixed the most frequently reported problem in TuneSleeve, which affected users on a dial-up or unstable internet connection. There was a problem in the error-handling code of the image query/download process which prevented users from saving the images that had successfully made their way when a single image would fail.

As I was posting version 1.0.6 on the download page, I realized that I did not have a place on my site to advertise this new version and post the release notes for it. This simple problem triggered a series of thoughts and ideas which ultimately led to Polkapps.

Polkapps is the name of the company that I’ve just started, under which I will continue the development of TuneSleeve as well as some other projects that I have in mind. Starting a company represents a commitment, to my users as well as to myself, that I will spend serious time on TuneSleeve, adding cool features and fixing bugs on a regular basis.

It also means that TuneSleeve won’t remain free forever, as my goal is to move beyond the “application-developed-during-my-spare-time” state and provide professional-grade applications with prompt technical support and everything users can expect from a serious software company for applications they paid for.

My plans are not quite set in stone yet, but one thing is for sure: it won’t take another year before you see an update to TuneSleeve!

I invite you to keep an eye on this blog to follow the history of Polkapps as it is being made!