Time to take a deep breath. Flickr Uploadr 3.0 is out for all and two minor revisions later is looking pretty good. There are still issues to be resolved but I won’t spend any time here whining about desktop software or how hard it is.

Instead, a couple of lessons I definitely learned the hard way from this release.

• Desktop software, despite my best efforts, just can’t be deployed as rapidly as a website can. I’m still trying to find the sweet spot between pushing fixes as soon as they’re fixes and not bothering users with a constant stream of incremental updates.
• Some bugs are not as bad as they seem. And specifically not as bad as the one you might introduce hurrying out a fix. The transparency the Flickr Forum gives us in diagnosing bugs and communicating workarounds is invaluable here. Keeping members in the loop is just about as important as fixing the bugs.
• Other people’s computers are more different than your’s than you can possibly imagine (or replicate with 6 computers). Statically link like your life depends on it! (But that’s only half the battle.) Diagnosing problems when you can’t just fire up cmd.exe or Terminal is a daunting task.

The next challenge will be turning the GPL’ed Uploadr into something moldable and bendable for other developers to play with. In the meantime, check out the new Flickr Uploadr and its source code at http://flickr.com/tools/uploadr/.

Photo from Cal.