Jim,

Your email is the latest of seven that I've accumulated, unanswered (reason in a minute), about FirstLight. I guess it was only a matter of time until somebody put me on the spot publicly.

First, for everybody else remarking "huh?", FirstLight is planetary image processing software I was working on in the first part of the year. At present it reads only MGS-MOC image files, but it's designed to be easily expanded to other types, notably Odyssey THEMIS next on the list. I have more information online, including some sample processed images that (IMHO) are mighty fine.

I got the software as far as what's known as "alpha"--it functions, but has a number of known flaws. I don't consider it ready yet for sale.

Why isn't it finished? A big part of the problem is circumstantial. With the crash of the high-tech sector I'm working long hours for pitiful pay just to survive. Not much bandwidth left for FirstLight. A second reason is that I've decided to focus what time and energy I do have on beefing up www.marsglobalsurveyor.com, on the theory that, as an example of my work as a Web designer and programmer, I'm more likely to see a payoff from it, faster, in the form of new contract work. I expect to unveil a completely revamped site around the first of the year. Stay tuned...

A third factor is the potential convergance of FirstLight and www.marsglobalsurveyor.com. I was agonizing over what to charge for FirstLight, and hit a wall trying to balance its worth, which users of scientific software (labs and government agencies) are used to paying for, versus what the consumer market (all the non-subsidized enthusiasts out there) will pay, which ranges from zero to maybe a grudging $20. It's an extreme form of the classic pricing problem--what's the optimum balance? I had to conclude that in this case the extremes are so far apart that there is no feasible pricing.

So, instead, I'm looking seriously at installing FirstLight on my Web server to process the images online, and charge people per-image. I've always liked usage-based pricing, because it's inherently fair, and seems to automatically seek an optimum. A casual user would be out a couple of bucks a month, a serious user processing many images a day pays a price that should still seem reasonable. Nobody subsidizes anybody else.

This should be a relatively easy project because it's what I had in mind for the long-term anyway, and so I designed the software in a modular way (geek talk: ActiveX components wrapped in a thin shell for the Windows app version, components wrapped in a Web server for the online version). I'm estimating that I should be able to get it going before the end of the first quarter 2003.

So, you wanted me to tell you "a few things about FirstLight"...be careful what you ask for, you just might get it!

--Robert