Starker - Release the dogs

By Tuesday morning, I have reconsidered Android.

Chances are slim that I will succeed in rewriting an old unsuccessful program into a killer app. I’m not a marketing genius. I’m not a great programmer either - more of a lazy hacker. I’m not ready to support this package on different platforms. Heck, I don’t even own an Android device.

I want to be able to use my version at University. Share it with friends. And I want this project to be fun.

So I started thinking about what Agenda might look like if I built it for ME. Well, it would run in a browser, since I want it on every platform possible. And the data would be on the web, since I want access from every machine I own. And it would integrate with other software. Multiple users could share data. It would support publishing data.


And it came to me: Use the web.

Use. The. Web.

And a modern design for Agenda started to gel. I chatted with my buddy Dale, who loved Agenda even more than I did. He gave me some great ideas, and reminded me again of why Agenda was so fabulous.

A new design was coming together - build a web app with the functionality of Agenda, runs anywhere on anything, using open-source tools that let me leverage millions of other applications.


Building for Ipad or Android or any proprietary platforms would have been so old-fashioned. But it will still run on those platforms, using their browsers.






I'm building this for me. In the software world, when you yourself use the tools that you build, it’s called “Eating your own dogfood” (and has the charming shorthand ‘dogfooding’). I’m laying out my own menu, I can pick the ingredients I like.

I had this image of an old ‘Get Smart’ episode, when Siegfried tells Starker to release the dogs, but they have run away.

Siegfried: Starker?
Starker: Ja?
Siegfried: Why did the dogs run away?
Starker: They didn’t like the food.
Siegfried: What did you feed them?
Starker: The same thing we feed the prisoners.
Siegfried: [shouting] You fed that to the dogs?
Starker: Ja, why?
Siegfried: You stupid! You could have made them sick!