Just a little Cooqy

After Cooqy was submitted for the eBay Developer Challenge ‘06, I did minor tweaking in February, primarily building some of the extended search functionality that previously existed in AuctionVision. Cooqy’s design was done ad-hoc, so it was very, very rough at this point in time. Cooqy continued to run on my home PC until early March. I was getting a trickle of revenue via eBay Affiliate commissions, which kept motivating me to keep moving forward.
After some time off in March, development of Cooqy picked up again in April with the first major redesign of the UI to introduce tabbed search results. I was impressed that using the OpenLaszlo components allowed for very quick overhauls of the UI without too much trouble. Cooqy’s UI underwent three major overhauls…each overhaul of the UI typically only needed one or two days to complete.

This is maybe a good time to mention that each major subsystem within Cooqy typically only required about a day to complete, thanks to the productivity of OpenLaszlo. It’s a great feeling to not only be that productive, but to also end up with a rock solid cross-platform UI.

Cooqy started to shape up in May, culminating with some coverage by bloggers, including at ZDNet and GigaOM.

I continue to refine the UI and build out new functionality in June, finally resulting in some attention from Mothership eBay in a Cool Tool review.

It was in June that I remember really focusing on minimizing network traffic to the browser, finally getting a 50x reduction in network traffic for item listings as compared to eBay’s HTML website. Testing over a 56K modem revealed that Cooqy was performing up to 10x faster than eBay!

By the end of June, Cooqy as a full-page Rich Internet App was humming along nicely. The functionality was more or less complete, the UI design was more or less the way it is today, and traffic was growing as a result of the recent blog attention.