We finished the new app we were working on and submitted it to the app store earlier this week. Wether it gets approved before the AppStore-Haitus on the 22nd is another matter entirely.
The service uses a whole bunch of ‘modern’ technology like MongoDB and such. So there was a learning curve involved too, but the app took less than 30 days to do from conception to delivery, really a lot less as I had to spend a week visiting my dad who was in hospital.
We wanted to launch with Audio recording, Video, and a whole bunch of other post types but it was obvious half way through development that those were going to add weeks of work to the development schedule, so we’d completely blow christmas and new year.
So I made a decision - “lets do them next revision” - after the pressure is off and we’ve had a moment to reflect. Too many times I’ve seen the situation where too few people are trying to do too much work. We simply didn’t have the bandwidth to deliver on all those things right now, and having too many balls in the air at once means we’d have dropped a few.
And this is the crux of this post, I took the decision to release an app that does a few things really well than to release an app that does a lot of things badly. We can, in subsequent revisions add another ‘thing’ that the app does really well. Until, at some distant point in the future, the app does a lot of things really, really, well.
The fact that I had complete control to make that decision is like a breath of fresh air, there are no management to worry about focus groups, no one to cast down a dictate of ‘well if it doesn’t do <minor feature that very few people will use> then we can’t release’.
So, while its not perfect (yet) and theres absolutely no guarantee that it’ll change the world, it cost about $2000 to make (yes thats right two thousand dollars). Since I’ve bootstrapped my startup with $100,000 we can make another 50 of these before we run out of cash.
Loved Sync (by Max Hattler) (via Boxee)
Tescos seem to think everything is a tomato….
Except these which are not carrots…
And as a first post I’d like to point you to a new project of mine over on github called Reachability.
Its basically a ‘drop in’ replacement for the old Apple reachability, however it takes advantage of Grand Central Dispatch and Blocks to make your life a heckuvalot easier!
using it couldn’t be easier, see the example below:
// allocate a reachability object
Reachability* reach = [Reachability reachabilityWithHostname:@"www.google.com"];
// set the blocks
reach.reachableBlock = ^(Reachability*reach)
{
NSLog(@"REACHABLE!");
};
reach.unreachableBlock = ^(Reachability*reach)
{
NSLog(@"UNREACHABLE!");
};
// start the notifier which will cause the reachability object to retain itself!
[reach startNotifier];In addition your old code that uses NSNotificationCenter will continue to work too!
The project (Taken with instagram)