I’m working on a new consumer-oriented webapp for touch-typing lessons. I’ve been very much inspired by Patrick McKenzie of Bingo Card Creator fame, so you will find some obvious similarities between our approaches and target audience. This blog will document both the technical and business aspects of bringing Quick Brown Frog to market.

So, why typing software?

Typing software has been around forever, and there are some excellent, well-known packages for learning how to type. But most of them are shrink-wrap products that you have to physically purchase and install from CD. The idea that you need to have a round piece of plastic shipped to your home in order to install a piece of software is really an anachronism in 2010.

Yes, there are some decent typing tutors on the web, but the ones that actually work half-decently are Flash or Java apps. I think I can do something in the modern browser, and without resorting to any plugins.

Tools

Additionally, once I’ve had a chance to go back and clean up and refactor my code, I hope to take the nuts-and-bolts scaffolding from my app and turn that into a product- a quick-starter way to create all the common things a consumer-oriented webapps needs, such as account creation, secure password hashing, “Buy Now” links, expiring downloads, etc.

Stay tuned for more news on that front, as well as some “how it’s built” type posts.

Quick Brown… Frog?

“Quick Brown Fox” was the obvious choice, but alas, there’s already an (iPhone) app by that name. QuickBrownFrog.com was unique and available, so there it is! It’s still quite heavily under construction, but feel free to visit and leave me some (much appreciated) feedback.