It’s been a bit quiet here lately…I’ve been finishing up work on iClip 4 and finally released it, Jason’s had a couple of contract work obligations to finish up, and Austin’s been slaving away on the big 1.0 release of Disco which was just released today.
I’m happy to say that we’re now in full-blown My Dream App development of the apps. On Wednesday Jason flew in from Arizona and Austin bussed in from Western Massachusetts to head up to my house in the White Mountains area of New Hampshire. They’ll be up here for a bit so that we can all collaborate in a better and more interactive way than we do via the Internet and phone.
Virtual Reality
Communicating via the net has its plusses…you can work with others based on who they are rather than where they are. My Dream App simply would never have happened if it wasn’t for things like iChat, email, and Martin’s SubEthaEdit.
The big downside to the net, though, is that the interactions simply aren’t as rich as they are in-person. In a single day here, the three of us banged out most of the pending UI details for Atmosphere. If we did this via the net, it would’ve taken days, if not weeks of back-and-forth communication.
There’s something cool, yet somewhat disturbing, when you can argue about a sheet’s default button during a Malaysian feast.
Coming up…
Jason should be posting here soon with an update on some of Atmosphere’s UI refinements. We’re really satisfied with what we’ve come up with…it’s guaranteed to be delicious. ;)
And it looks like we may be finally be nailing down a graphic designer for Cookbook. Austin and I had a Skype chat today with a superb candidate to try to work out the details. I’m glad to say that it went very well.
It’s taken a while to find the perfect “fit” with a designer but we’re now one giant leap closer. Hopefully we’ll be making a big announcement about this shortly.
Fun and Games
One thing that’s vital to My Dream App being a success is that the whole thing must be enjoyable and fun for us. Plain and simple…if it’s not fun, it’s not worth doing.
We’ve setup a My Dream App flickr account to document some of our experiences. To help keep development progressing, we’ve been supplementing the “marathon coding frenzies” with healthy doses of hiking, Wii-ing, fooding, movies, etc. So far, the whole thing’s been a ton of fun. One of my favorite pics in the group is of an attempt to fix a Disco smoke bug from a mountain top.
Stay tuned for much more…
