NetNewsWire Status Report: the Last 10%

I’ve been working on this app — originally Evergreen 1.0, now NetNewsWire 5.0 — for four years, at least. And now GitHub tells me that the 5.0 alpha milestone is 91% complete.

Which means, yes, I’m down to that last 10%. Old engineering wisdom says that the last 10% takes as much time as the first 90%, which means I have another fours year to go, and it will ship in late 2022.

I’m going to try and beat that, though, and ship in the first quarter of 2019. Let me emphasize the try part of that — there’s no guarantee. But I’m resisting all other temptations and buckling down on NetNewsWire.

What remains, of course, is all the stuff I’ve put off. Like syncing, drag-and-drop in the sidebar, search, and so on. (New app icon coming too.)

Note that I did say the alpha milestone is 91% complete. Let me be clear what I mean by alpha: it will be feature complete and won’t have any known defects. The alpha period will be for testing and finding and fixing bugs.

Once it gets to beta, it will be considered a shipping candidate. If possible there will be zero code changes from beta 1 to shipping. At any rate, code changes, at that point, will be made with extreme reluctance and caution.

(Yes, this is a little different from how other people do things. It’s how I do things.)

My hope is that it will get to alpha in February, and that things will move relatively quickly from there and then it will ship in March. Maybe on my birthday? (March 26.)

Again, that’s just a hope. Anything could happen!