During my senior year of high school I had the bright idea that I could make a living developing shareware – or at least pocket a few extra bucks that would make life a little easier. So I set forth on an idea that I had been throwing around in my head – a program that would allow you to easily create image maps for your web pages.

This decision was not made after examining the market and realizing there was a demand for this product. No, I decided to make an image mapper because:

A) I thought it would be fun to develop the moveable shape interface (shapes you can draw and then move around). It seemed like an interesting challenge for a visual basic app.
B) I saw some shareware image mapper that was selling for $15 and it royally sucked. I knew I could do better than that – and I figured I could make my product half the cost.

The development itself went pretty smoothly. I remember being at school, making notes on how I’d design everything. The pre-hype for the program also seemed to be pretty good. After my API Spy, Form shaper, and Mosaic app, a lot of people were interested in what I’d put out next – especially as a shareware app. I was even able to coax the then well known graphic designer Plastik into doing my intro graphic. So I had high hopes for the program.

However, when the release date came, I was getting kind of sick of the application and didn’t do much promotion besides posting up a notice on my main page. This wasn’t just because I was bored of the program, college was coming up and I had agreed to work for some start up (long story). So to make a long story short, I spent a lot of time making the program, but didn’t spend enough time promoting it. And because my audience at the time (VB developers, mostly prog developers) had no need or interest in the app, it didn’t make much of a wave.

I think I made a total of $100 after the first year, which kind of bummed me out. I realized I had picked the wrong application to make and I had not promoted it correctly. It left a bad taste in my month and whenever I think of the program, it sort of reminds me of failing. However, every time I actually open it up and look at it, I think it’s a pretty cool. It reminds me that I was a pretty good developer while in high school, and for some reason, I always forget that I was able to get Plastik to do the intro art, which blew my mind at the time. Anyway, I opened up the app earlier today and thought to myself “why did I decide not to post this??” So without further ado, I’m re-introducing this program for download. Below you’ll find some screen shots and links to two different zip files.

[Download] – The setup file.
[Download] – Just the exe and help file.