My first big project was a training system of my own design called XQuiz. It was the proof-of-concept for XQuiz that got me my first engineering job. The idea was basically Keynote, except the presentations were interactive. The client editor was written in Java, the server player in Flash, and the backing database, scoring system, and monitoring tools were typically written in JavaScript, XML, and the occasional Flash front-end.
So that was XQuiz — you’ve probably never heard of it. Quite aside from the fact it was internal software, it never really shipped. Oh, there was a 1.0 of sorts, but it lacked the fanfare or excitement of a real release because we all knew what had finally forced the shipping label was a not completeness, but doneness. Specifically, my own doneness at the company. I was moving on to pursue my dream to be a Mac developer. Shortly after I left, with no engineer to maintain it, they scrapped the whole system and moved to a third-party vendor.
It wasn’t too much later I was at Delicious Monster, which was just shedding its 1.0 team and forming its 2.0 team. It was during the ensuing three year period I began to utter the magical incantation, “after we ship.” Such sweet music to our ears! I’ll spend time with my wife. We’ll take a vacation. You guys will get a bonus. I’ll finally catch up on that pile of books, video games, and movies. After we ship, man. It will all happen after we ship.
Quite aside from the great pile of rain checks, I had my own fantasy plans for after we shipped. I’d planned to curl up in a swim-up bar pool at a resort in Puerto Vallarta and just spend a month soaking up the sun while I read through Donald Knuth’s “Art of Computer Programming.” I never made it down to PV, nor did I do a lot of the other stuff I’d planned, because we never shipped.
Oh, Delicious Library 2 shipped, and is doing quite well from what I hear, but by then I was gone, moved to the valley, doing my own thing. Lucas had also taken off. I didn’t get any kind of shipping bonus, or time off. I didn’t get to go to the launch party. In fact, it was rather like not shipping at all. Indeed, by then, I was already talking about “after we ship” for a whole new set of projects.
Which brings us to today. Three apps — Twinkle, Tap Tap Revenge, and Friend Book — crossed the finish line into the waiting arms of the App Store review committee. Most people assume the App Store will launch at 8 a.m. on Friday, somewhere in the world, since they assume the App Store will be included with iPhone OS 2.0, which they assume will be on the iPhone 3G, which comes out at 8 a.m. on Friday.
In other words, while my three babies are out the door, they don’t arrive at the doorsteps of their new users for another couple of days. So while we haven’t popped the champagne cork just yet, at noon on Monday, after very little sleep, I suddenly found myself with very little to do because we had shipped.
Understand, we had been working on this stuff for several intense months, but for me it was a so much more than that. I’d been waiting for after we ship for years. Such was the weight on my shoulders as I stood there, surrounded by the empty visages of comically large energy drink cans. I drove home, collapsed into bed, and slept — hard. I slept harder than I’d slept in a long time, and I slept for a long time — damn near 24 hours.
The next day I was at it again, going over everything we’d done, and everything we had left to do. Find the bug that somehow slipped by. Get the fix rolled out as 1.1 and have it ready when the App Store goes live. Call reporters, talk about the products. Make videos. Talk about the products. Write blog entries. Talk about the products. Oh, I should probably talk about the products.
The products
There’s an app called Twinkle out now in Jailbreak. Twinkle is a Twitter client that adds the ability to attach photos and location services. So you can see where people are posting from, and you can see, for example, all the tweets of people within a mile of you. It’s a great way to keep up with friends, including friends you haven’t met yet.
See if you can spot any vestiges of that app in the Twinkle we released for the App Store. Yes, the cool stuff is still there, but I had Mantia redesign the whole UI. I wanted to be able to see the whole message without zooming in, in a style that respected Jens Alfke, with word bubbles, and with your own responses on the other side of the screen.
Then I said, what’s the one thing that sucks most about Twitter? That would be Twitter, unreliable thing that it is. So, Twinkle uses the Tapulous network to move messages around agnostic of Twitter. It is at once a Twitter client, and a Twitter replacement. It may not be the holy grail of social messaging micro-blog buzzword-compliant two-collar douche bag technology, but it’s free.
Tap Tap Revolution is probably the most popular game on Jailbreak, but that may have more to do with the paucity of games. Lights Off is still popular, for Joe Heck’s sake! TTR’s sequel, Tap Tap Revenge, will earn its title as most popular rhythm game in the App Store. Note that this will be the second in the TTR series. Look for Tap Tap Radiation next fall.
The graphics and performance are both dramatically improved for having official API. The halo release of Tap Tap Revolution includes teaser graphics to whet your appetite for what is to come, but that’s just the beginning. Check out our awesome two-player mode that lets you share your phone with the cute girl on the bench, just as you would share your earbuds in a Jobsian paradise.
In the coming months expect to see exclusive content from popular artists, skins, and a high performance audio engine by Core Audio master Kevin Avila. As an aside, I’m trying to convince this guy we need to write a book together. Core Audio has a kind of beautiful logic and a paucity of good documentation. A book would really improve apps across the board, for Mac and iPhone.
Price? I don’t know, whatever books cost. Oh, price for Tap Tap Revenge? Well, see, here’s the thing about that: this game is good. Like, twenty dollars good. Trouble is, the whole idea of the original Tap Tap Revolution was that people could tap out tracks to their iTunes library. Then, when other people wanted to tap to that song, they could just download the tap track. It was a like having every song you love in your game.
The iPhone SDK doesn’t let us access your iTunes music. We’re able to provide content, thanks to some very talented artists who have donated music, and some licensing deals we’re working with on the back end. The trouble is, you don’t want to download music in our app that you can’t use in iTunes. You’d rather download music into iTunes, and just add it to the rest of your iTunes music.
I hope that some time in the future, Apple will let select apps with a very explicit need access the iTunes music library. I think Tap Tap Revenge is the perfect test case for such a program. Until then, the app is incomplete. So, we’re giving it away for free. Check out the new digs and get used to shaking your phone around a lot. Then, when iTunes opens up, we’ll talk.
Finally, there’s Friend Book. All of these apps have my name on them, in my position as Chief Architect, but Friend Book is close to my heart because I actually wrote it. This is an app born from a few cool ideas and a very real frustration with the address book.
Names are a hard problem. Working at Delicious Monster taught me that. At the end of the day, a computer can guess, but will inevitably make mistakes. Human intervention is required. This is exactly what you can’t do with the Contacts application on iPhone. Luckily, Apple provides an API on top of Address Book, so I was able to make a super address book. It works like Contacts, but it allows you to mass delete, copy and move contacts into groups, and merge contacts together.
Friend Book, like any book, has two inside covers. The front cover contains Face Dialer, a kind of Springboard for your favorites. The back cover contains Handshake, the revolutionary way to exchange contact information. You simply place the phones together and make a handshaking gesture. The phones use the accelerometer data to find each other in the cloud and exchange cards.
There are a few YouTube videos out there of the apps in action. We also have some desktop and phone-top pictures available on our site. Finally, you can find all three of these apps on the App Store, ostensibly Friday. If, when you’re running the app for the first time, you hear a loud “woohoo” from the general direction of Silicon Valley, do forgive me. That’s a shout six years in the making.
The movie posters hanging in the window of The Shop were, contrary to Louie’s blog entry, my idea, though Ash Ponders insists he was the one who gave me the idea. Could be! Either way, the sexy.
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
After We Ship
