Launching De MonsterDebugger, one week later

On the 3rd of February we launched a free tool called De MonsterDebugger. Within 48 hours it had been downloaded for more than 1000 times and got featured on several blogs worldwide, exceeding our expectations enormously. Launching a product isn’t something we do on a regular basis so we would like to share this experience with you today.

In short De MonsterDebugger is an open source debugger that can be used with Adobe Flash, Flex or AIR projects. It started its life as an internal tool to assist us while building the first prototype of PEF . PEF uses a number of techniques, but the main part is developed using Adobe Flash CS3 and AIR. As many Flash framework users know the Flash IDE doesn’t come with a sophisticated debugger. Since we figured that we were not the first to bump into this problem we looked at other debugger projects that were built from this craving need for a decent debugger. Some of them are listed here with their pros and cons:

X-Ray
+ View physical parent/ child relationships.
+ View all public properties and methods of an object.
+ Execute ActionScript at runtime.
- Only supports ActionScript 1 and 2 (which we don’t support at all).
- Unable to debug AIR applications.

Arthopod
+ Standalone Adobe AIR tool.
+ Send snapshots of a DisplayObject.
+ Password protected connection.
- No live editing possibilities.
- Only supports tracing.
- Need to predetermine what you are going to trace.

Das Bugger
+ Standalone Adobe AIR tool.
+ Really easy to use.
+ Has “always on top” as feature.
- No live editing possibilities.
- Only supports tracing.
- No multiple depths in trace.

Whitefly
+ Trace from the browser, IDE or standalone.
+ Explore Arrays, Objects and even custom classes in multiple depths.
+ Easy search through your traces.
- Light colors are hard to read.
- Has not been in development for quite a while.
- Is a bit buggy (quoting the maker).

Alcon
+ Monitor frame rate and render time.
+ Monitor memory consumption.
+ Supports ActionScript 2 and 3.
- Traces are a little bit hard to read.Does not support live editing of properties.
- The interface is too crowded for my taste.

The problem was that we actually needed a combination of the above listed debuggers, but unfortunately none of them were open source available at that time (except for X-Ray, kudos!). So we decided to build our own version and develop it alongside the development of PEF. Because the first version of De MonsterDebugger (version 0.9) was extremely valuable to us we decided to build a second version and add even more useful features:

• Explore your live application and check what’s going on under the hood.
• Adjust properties at runtime.
• Run methods at runtime and see what they return straight from De MonsterDebugger.
• Trace objects of any type to De MonsterDebugger and it will show the complete structure of that object in an easy-to-read tree structure.
• Highlight DisplayObjects.
• Auto update framework.
• Clean interface.
• Open source.

Open Source
Although we added this question to the FAQ many people still ask us why we would share something under an open source license. The main reason for that is because we want to give something to the community. During the launch of the second version we raised the bar a bit higher: We added a product site, started gathering feedback and took the time (and pain) to create a decent Flex skin. Also an open source project has more chance of succeeding due to the fact that other developers can adapt it to their own needs.

We invested a lot of time in polishing not only the product but also the website and help files since we are planning to release the first beta of PEF sometime this summer. And since we have no experience launching our own products we use De MonsterDebugger as some kind of practice.

Spreading the word
Having a cool application is nice, sharing this with others and working together to improve it is even better. The question is how do you make sure people know of its existence? Our social media experience is this blog (4 posts and 10 comments) and Twitter. Since our blog isn’t very helpful (yet?) with spreading the word, we decided to use Twitter and send out a newsletter. The initial buzz came from people who are following us on Twitter, their network picked up on it and started spreading the word as can been seen here: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=monsterdebugger.

This worked out far better than we had initially hoped. After the second day De MonsterDebugger was featured on several weblogs. A couple of nice examples are:

• Rozegain
• Big Spaceship
• Vedovelli

Fabio Vedovello surprised us by making a screencast in Portuguese of De MonsterDebugger after only one day. We think he was in a rush while recording it since he didn’t remove the part where his dog started barking (check the part around 6:00). Don’t take us wrong Fabio: We love it, even more with the dog! Another screencast showed up a bit later (no audio) showing a very different way of using De MonsterDebugger. The screencast shows how you can actually draw an object using a combination of live editing and running methods, in fact we never used it in this way and that is pretty cool to see.

While we had high hopes for the social media side of our little marketing campaign, we also decided to try out an old marketing trick: banners. Instead of making typical promotion banners yelling ‘free’, ‘download now’ or anything like that, we thought it would be better to give developers the opportunity to share the fact that they are proud to use it. Typing this still gives me the chills but I’m glad to see them appearing on several blogs:

• Vedovelli
• Trinidev
• Saumya

As a result of this micro-campaign De MonsterDebugger got downloaded a 1000 times during its first 48 hours. Although the main goal was to share knowledge with the community and build a stronger network, this launch also had some interesting side effects: De MonsterDebugger website was visited 1690 times, 520 of those visitors also visited De Monsters official website and 100 of them watched the PEF screencast . This resulted in contacts with new companies who are interested in beta testing PEF and giving feedback on this new service: yes, we are looking for launching partners, please email us.

Conclusion so far
We’ve been getting a lot of great feedback from people all over the world, so if you dig it when people tell you how great your application is, our advice would be to create an open source project and share it with the world! But there is a flipside as well, after reading a lot of good comments about De MonsterDebugger the more negative bug reports slowly found their way to our inboxes, so we decided to start debugging right away and almost forgot about our other projects. WRONG! Promoting your software on services like Twitter and actively participating in discussions on blogs or forums won’t cost you any money but do take up a considerable amount of your time. To give you an indication: We’ve spent three full days analyzing our visitors, replying to mails and merging in current discussions. We expect that we will have to keep investing more time in De MonsterDebugger in the near future to release bug fixes and help people with potential problems. Don’t get me wrong on this though, we intend to keep working on De MonsterDebugger, we even feel obliged to do so. We just want to point out that just releasing something open source is not enough, you have to stay actively involved in it and invest time to make it an actual success.

What’s next?
We intend to push a couple of updates to De MonsterDebugger in the next weeks. Also there have been some nice contributions that we received from some users via e-mail. We are quite confident that this will greatly help us improve De MonsterDebugger, but to further develop it we still need more feedback, help and contributions.  Yesterday Adobe finally released an improved version of the AIR Marketplace and De MonsterDebugger has been added! The release of De MonsterDebugger on the Adobe AIR marketplace could mean that we get more feedback on the application and thus more help to improve the application; we could be wrong though so we’ll keep you posted on this topic.

We hope that if you are a Flash, Flex or AIR developer you might consider taking 10 minutes and try De MonsterDebugger yourself. Feel free to help us spread the word, we are really looking forward to hearing and reading what you think!