I have long known that ap­pli­ca­tion de­vel­op­ment is an ar­du­ous process. I have al­so long sus­pect­ed one of the rea­sons it's ar­du­ous is the de­vel­op­er. I should be more speci­fic, I am one of the rea­son­s.

That's be­cause I don't know what I am do­ing, and I don't mean that in the "I am a lame pro­gram­mer" sense (even if that's al­so true some­what), but in the sense that I lit­er­al­ly don't know what the app should look like, or what its fea­ture set should be.

So, I have de­cid­ed to em­bark on a se­ries of ex­per­i­ments I will call 24-hour app­s.

Here are the rules:

• I shall cre­ate a neat ap­­pli­­ca­­tion, sta­ble, use­­ful, us­able and de­­cen­t-look­ing.

• I shall do it in no more than 24 hours. Af­ter that time, it should be at least good enough for a pre­view re­lease, if not a be­­ta.

• Those 24 hours can be split in two or three ses­­sions

• Time spent do­ing icon­s, doc­s, etc, counts.

• All de­vel­op­­ment shall be pub­­lic (I am us­ing github)

• I must have a use for the re­­sult­ing ap­­pli­­ca­­tion, and it should be at least an ad­e­quate so­lu­­tion for that prob­lem.

So, what's the first pro­jec­t? I call it Die Schere (The Scis­sors in ger­man) and it's a video ed­i­tor.

It's not a kden­live re­place­men­t, it's just the video ed­i­tor I wish I had when I need­ed to glue a piece of one video with a piece of an­oth­er.

In the old, pre-dig­i­tal world, that was done us­ing a cut­ter and scotch tape. I want Die Schere to be as use­ful and com­pre­hen­si­ble as that was, but use­ful for clum­sy peo­ple like my­self.

Here is a video af­ter to­day's ses­sion, which last­ed 8 hours:

The ba­sic func­tions are there, even if lots of work is still need­ed.

• You can load clips to work with them

• You can cut clips (like us­ing a cut­ter!)

• You can choose the cut points in­­ter­ac­­tive­­ly or by ed­it­ing a time

• You can ar­range them (like us­ing scotch tape!)

• You can gen­er­ate the out­­put video

As a back­end it's us­ing men­coder, but there's no rea­son it should­n't work with ffm­peg or melt if some­one writes 20 lines of code.