Transmission Begins -> The Director's Chair - John's Blog

The Director's Chair - John's Blog

Transmission Begins is changing

8.30am, 17th March 2010

It's been nearly two years since I founded Transmission Begins, with the goal of establishing a software company I (and others) could earn a living from. Last week I signed a contract for a full time position at ARM, so by that measure, I did not succeed.

I don't look on the last two years as a failure, however, and I've enjoyed the entire experience. The evidence of my job hunt for the last few months suggests that it has added useful skills to my CV. There were three of us working on software related to Transmission Begins towards the end, and I enjoyed running the business and writing more software than I have created in years. We successfully released one product - Catwalk, and brought another, Catwalk Radio, to beta release.

Sadly, there has been insufficient interest in that beta, so there seemed to be no prospect of the software growing to pay salaries in a short enough timeframe. A necessary, if apparently harsh, test!

If you're a customer of Catwalk you will not see much changing - Morgan has always done most of the support for you, and he continues to do that. The other projects may live on as personal hobbies, but I plan to put my parts of Catwalk Radio quietly on a shelf to gather dust for a while. Perhaps I can revisit them at some time in the future.

As bills come due, I will be turning off some services - the incoming landline (used in anger once), and the postal address (used mostly by Royal Mail to send bills for the PO Box). I don't plan to take down transmissionbegins.com, indeed I plan to migrate my other websites to this machine.

I would like to thank both Anne and Morgan for all they did, and thank you all for your time and enthusiasm. If you're interested in my further exploits, my personal blog remains a place I write occasionally. Morgan continues to support Catwalk at its familiar home.

One dead PC...

10.55pm, 18th October 2009

Today, I am testing my backup strategy.

My morning routine is to wake up with a cup of coffee and a read of the news on my PC. This morning, however, I was the only one that woke up - my PC (a Macbook Pro) failed to join me. This wasn't what I wanted before my coffee had kicked in! It has remained stubbornly unresponsive all day, so I've concluded it is time to replace it. I've had it a few years, and it has travelled well, so I'm not overly disappointed.

I'm confident in my backups (Famous last words perhaps, but I've been through a corrupt hard disk recently that tested them), so I hope the only issue is that sourcing and setting up the replacement I'd like is going to take a few days.

While I can do day-to-day things like email & support on an old PC I have lying around, I can't run the software I need to develop Catwalk Radio. Apologies in advance if you want to get in touch about a bug, and I need to delay a fix until I've got my new computer bought and set up.

Beta 2 now tested with more devices

7.09pm, 7th October 2009

A short note to announce that Catwalk Radio Beta2 is now at build 10, and has had numerous minor bugs fixed.

The most prominent was a crash on startup caused by a bug in our code in response to some uPnP commands.

Download it from the beta page, or here:

CatwalkRadio_1Beta2_10_Setup.exe (31.4 Mb)

Beta 2 updated

10.37pm, 9th September 2009

I've updated the Beta 2 release of Catwalk Radio. A customer discovered it didn't work on non-English installs of Windows.

That's a bit embarrassing - whilst it is only available in English right now, it should run on any language variant of Windows. Hopefully it now does!

The updated file is available on the beta page.

Beta 2 - multi-room Catwalk for any music

9.25am, 27th August 2009

As I mentioned before, we've been working on broadening Catwalk's multi-room ability to your general music collection.

I'm pleased to announce the release of Beta 2, which allows the playback of any CD quality wav file you have on your network to any (or all) of your network hi-fi.

We'll lift the wav file restrictions in the future, but I want to get this technology into the hands of customers early. I hope to build confidence in the multi-room capability as we broaden the range of input options.

This is a beta. As before, active participants in the beta programme will be able to claim a discount on the final price when the software is released.

If you have some networked hi-fi, why not try it now?

A traditional directors chair, on a sunny lawn.

A blog about Transmission Begins, by John McAleely

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© John McAleely, 2010