better at starting than finishing

I'm better at starting things than finishing them. This week has provided another round of interesting ideas from the fascinating people I work with, but now it's time for me to be a mature programmer, and finish one of my side projects. I want to be like Oliver Steele, who created packagemapper.com over Thanksgiving. Or Don Hopkins, whose site has a ton of little projects that work. Or, heck, Wil Shipley, the creator of Delicious Library and a major contributor to the incredible Omni Group products. (Sorry, Wil, I don't know exactly how to describe your role at Omni; hope I'm not selling you short.)

My last few years of working on software has all been very isolated and obscure. If I wanted to show anyone anything, they had to either come to my lab, or for some projects I could bring my demo machine with me and demo it live. The projects have been either demo-ware or essentialy theatre. With the Open Laszlo platform, I can finally make rich smooth tasty applications that other people can use from the comfort of their own homes. Now I need to add the fit-and-finish step to my process. One standalone rich text editor, coming right up...