Zero to BetaThe journey of raising an app

Next is Live!

The Application is live, go play with it here.
More details to follow up soon, it’s already the weekend…

Killing a MAJOR Feature

We’re getting very close to the deadline, and we’re still not done with the basic system.
After talking about nowdothis, and discussing its simplicity, an idea occurred to us to kill the ability to group tasks and just keep all tasks as separate, since it was responsible for complications on the development side, that remains up [...]

Very Similar App Comes Out Right Before “Next”

The strangest thing happened today, while we were finalizing “Next” and preparing to launch it, we found out that a new web app for tasks has been released just yesterday.
nowdothis is a very simple web app for tasks, which revolves around one of “Next”’s core ideas which is “One task at a time”. It has [...]

Back to Basics with “Next”

Just a week ago, Lifehack published a very interesting post on “The Task List” and the need to go back to basics and focus on what each of us can get done in the next couple of days, rather than creating endless lists under different contexts, projects, etc.

We make todo lists when we’re under pressure [...]

Tools We’re Using to Build “Next”

To be able to build an application that we’re proud of in 2 days, we had to arm ourselves with the best available tools to help us deliver a great product in such a short timeline.

Those tools are:
Macs as our machines, duh!!!
Ruby on Rails as a development framework.
Textmate as a development environment “IDE”.
Git for version [...]

Day one

Help Me and Entertain Me

Life is about fun… no one can deny that, even when people seem to work hard, it’s for the purpose of having fun at a later date.

Alex Iskold wrote an interesting post on ReadWriteWeb where he discussed that the success of future applications depends on them either being helpful or being fun for the sake [...]

The Pleasure of Killing Features!

Nick Brandbury has touched on an issue, which is particulary relevant to the whole idea behind Zero2Beta, which is killing features.

Considering that we’re facing the challenge of designing, developing and deploying a product in 2 days, we decided to take killing features as a sport, and went on with removing stuff and deleting features from [...]

“Next” Team Members

According to the available team, we broke down the different tasks like this:
Rida: Development of the web app
Mohannad: Graphics and Design
Cloves and Michael: iPhone app
Fouad: UI and Adobe Air
Waseem: Adobe AIR
Baher: Blogging, Marketing, PR and Photos.
You can browse through our photos on Flickr.
“Next” is Rida’s idea, and everyone contributed to the design decisions during a [...]

Limitations as Guidelines for “Next”

The whole Zero2Beta concept is about limitations:
limited team + limited time = limited scope
A part of the experiment is to use the limitations to our advantage, which drove us to adopt the following guidelines regarding “Next” our simple to-do list:
- Reinvention: we decided to take a whole new look at to-do lists and took a [...]