Kneedl is in Production!

It’s been a long time coming, over two years since the first thoughts were put together and the first numbers crunched, but this week build actually started on the Beta version of Kneedl. In the coming weeks we’ll have the site up and running and open it up to all the lovely people who’ve signed up to be part of the beta.

Why a beta? Well, we’re not keen on releasing something to the wilds of the internet without smoothing out the rough edges. We’ve done some closed testing with paper / Omnigraffle prototypes but that was pretty much a proof of concept. Now we’re getting into actual functionality there’s a lot more to think about, a lot more could go wrong, and we want as many diverse eyes on it as possible to give us feedback before we launch.

So far the main headache challenge has been to work out how the dual language support will work. Dual language (in our case Spanish) is key to the product. 40% of first time buyers in Miami were Hispanic in 2008 so we’d be foolish not to be catering to dual languages as well as dual culture. From a development perpective we didn’t want to build it all in English and then hack together some kind of language support after launch. In my experience, post launch ’shoe horned’ features either get put on the wish list for an indeterminate time, or getting canned entirely.

So, in short,  some real life PHP is being forged and we’re up and running.