Muffin is launched!

Yesterday (Monday June 2nd) Muffin was launched! Muffin finally gets to introduce itself to the world. If you go to get muffin dot com you can read about Muffin, see what it looks like to use it, and even use it yourself!I’ve been using Muffin myself for the past 8 weeks or so. Those weeks were spent doing all the stuff ya have to do to make it fit for public consumption like having logins, making sure I wasn’t making too many presumptions with the navigation and flow of the application. I wanted somebody who was using it for the first time to feel immediately like they knew how to use Muffin.

What is Muffin?

Muffin is a simple way to track your spending. It helps you see at a glance what kind of shape you’re in as well as making it painless to keep your budget up-to-date and reflecting reality.

Why I made Muffin.

I initially made Muffin for me. One day (while thinking about what I had to pay for out of this paycheck and wondering if I had enough to make an extra payment to my credit card or something like that) I had an idea of “wouldn’t it be cool if I had something that could…” and like that Muffin came to me. I didn’t know any programming language and I had never even made my computer say “hello world” but I now had a reason to learn. I like making lists. And part way through making a list of everything I wanted Muffin to do I thought to myself maybe I’m not the only one who would find this useful. And here we are, six months later.

What’s next.

I have some new features and a few improvements to existing features to come soon. I’ll be posting in this blog about those new features as well as giving you some tips on how to get the most out of Muffin. I’m also working on a free companion web app that if you get any benefit out of using Muffin, you’ll love this too.
This entry was written by David, posted on June 3, 2008 at 8:28 am, filed under Coding, Muffin, Plans and Ideas. Bookmark the post. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL. | Bookmarking this post | del.icio.us | Digg | reddit
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2 Comments | Jump to comment form

  1. robot3021
    Posted June 12, 2008 at 1:31 pm | Permalink

    Congrats on launching a the new site (Muffin). I too have been eager to launch some ideas/services using Ajax/Web 2.0/whatever tools that sites like yours, 37 signals, etc.. Other than using BASIC on Apple IIEs in high school, I have no programming experience either. If you dont mind me asking what sort of resources and tools did you use to get yourself up to speed and eventually develop Muffin?

    Good luck

    Robot

  2. David
    Posted June 13, 2008 at 12:27 pm | Permalink

    @Robot,
    I plan to write in more detail about how I made Muffin but to answer your question(s) Muffin is developed in Ruby on Rails which is really beautiful and easy to pick up (but difficult to master). I found Railcasts and Agile Web Development with Rails hugely invaluable! You should definitely check those out and you should definitely give building something a try! The Rails community is very supportive and very fun!

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