We're leaving Mercatalog behind
2009 August 12A long time ago, a developer sat down at his computer with the goal: "Create the best software for organizing photos geographically. Ever."
Mercatalog isn't that software.
A year of development had gone into Mercatalog when it shipped, but it wasn't ready. It wasn't relevant either: the announcement of iPhoto's Places pitted our "Version One" against the combined efforts of at least three established corporations. Feeling like we had no choice, we pushed Mercatalog out the door as a product anyway.
Nobody bought it. Okay, we had one sale the first day and one sale a few weeks ago (which we refunded). But what we shipped doesn't work well enough to spark people's imagination, fuel their enthusiasm, or even trigger much feedback. Mercatalog was a dud instead of a product that people could buy into, although Geotagalog is still busy giving wings to its geotagging algorithms.
So now what? We'll still have to make major advances on a number of separate fronts to accomplish the original goal. With Geotagalog, the focus is much tighter and the results have been much better. For geotagging, we'd like to keep this focus; that means Mercatalog is just a distraction. Calf Trail's course might eventually lead to a place where we can implement that vision for geographic organization. Until then, Mercatalog is discontinued and will no longer be available in our store.