This week I cancelled my everchanging.com hosting account, effectively shutting down everchanging. For those who aren't familiar with it, I've been running a shareware company called "everchanging" since 1997. At first I had dreams of changing the world with a piece of software, and getting rich and famous in the process. Eventually everchanging became a source of tax write-offs and an email address I could use to sign up for spam-happy services such as porn sites.

Last year I ditched the shareware model and went open-source, posting all of my projects on sourceforge. A few people actually contributed work, but mostly everyone continued to look to me to fix everything and to be a source of unlimited free customer support.

So what's changed? What made the entire thing joyless for me? Well, I think that would be NewtSync. Don't get me wrong, the Newton community is a great bunch of people. The public beta was probably the first bad idea. Setting up the ability for people to fund the project was another mistake. The funds covered little other than overhead.

I thought it was really cool when I saw an article about NewtSync in Slashdot. At that time iSync had just been released and I had written a beta tool to synchronize Newtons with Mac OS X. Originally I had called it nSync. Get it? it's a pun. I was criticized widely for using the name; apparently many people have no sense of humor. My site was Slashdotted and I barely managed to talk my ISP out of nearly $400 in bandwidth overage costs. I signed up for an expensive high-bandwidth plan to prevent that from happening again.

Then the support emails started flowing. Email after email after email, probably 40 emails a day. All ranging from the short and uninformative "it didn't work" to logs, transcripts, backups of their Newton, etc. One user emailed my application back to me. Um, huh? It was all in good nature but it just started piling up. In addition, while syncing addresses was easy, syncing calendars turned out to be nearly impossible. The way the Newton stores its appointments is utterly insane. An excerpt from the Newton Programmer Reference:

mtgInfo is set to (mtgDay<<8) + period, where mtgDay is the date, measured in days, of the meeting. This is the same as mtgStartDate, but in days, instead of minutes—that is, more simply, mtgStartDate DIV 1440. period is the number of days between meetings. Technically, period can range between 1 and 255; however, the current Newton user interface allows the user to choose only every other week (14 days) for this kind of meeting. Opening a kPeriod meeting always displays it as an “Every other week” meeting type and resets its period to 14.

There are two pages of text like this, describing a single field and how it varies based on the frequency of a repeating appointment. In addition, there were third-party extensions and utilities which actually changed the format of the dates, making matters even worse and breaking stuff for even more people, who couldn't uninstall the utilities that were breaking the sync.

While all of this was going on, work at Apple started getting, um, challenging. We'll call it challenging. What was an easy 40 hour work week turned into 80 or 100 stressful, "how the fuck am I going to finish this on time" hours. My life was falling apart too; I had no emotional energy left to invest in my relationship so it died off. I found a "solution" to all of my problems in drugs, which seemed to allow me to stay up all night and work, and not think about my emotional problems.

Needless to say I didn't have time to work on NewtSync.

I started getting messages like this in the forums on my site:

"Never have more innocent people been goaded into loading up this never has worked piece of crap application. I first downloaded version k and no version has ever worked."

"If you're going to do this, do it right or just get out of the game. Stop bellyaching how hard your working in your replies and do it right or just quit. Stop wasting everyone's time making your failure of an application to work."

I think this was the point at which I stopped replying to customer support messages. There were lots of replies from people who said NewtSync worked well for them, but this particular message stuck in my mind. I could quote these nasty messages for paragraphs and paragraphs, and I could quote the positive kudos for just as long, but it's all just been too much for me.

I could probably handle this stuff if it was a full-time job but I can't afford to quit Apple and wouldn't want to anyway. Despite the stress levels my job at Apple is far more enjoyable than any work I've done on my own. My products get critical acclaim from magazines such as ComputerWorld. I have access to great QA testers and documentation writers. I get to demo my work in front of WWDC crowds.

So, the only other logical step is to close down the company. The name represented my desire, 8 years ago, to do whatever it took to get recognized, to write great software, to change the world. But times have changed and I get to do all of that for a regular paycheck. Plus I get to spend 90% of my time engineering my software and 10% of my time supporting it, instead of the other way around.

The software will still be in the public domain, still available, still free, and anybody can contribute code. I've been putting in a little work making the Mac to Newton connection seamless and easy, and that's all done, and I might release something once everchanging.com is fully shut down and I don't have to bear as much backlash for not working more on the calendar syncing stuff.

Anyway, here's to closing old chapters in your life and eventually opening new ones. *clink*