I love my job.  For the past year I’ve been building iOS apps, and doing reasonably well with it.  Every day I get to have breakfast with my kids, walk them to school, then come home and work upstairs in my office.  Put in some good hours of work and then walk back to school to get the kids when they’re done for the day, another hour or so and then I’m down for dinner, with time to play and read with the kids before they go to sleep.

Life is good. 

As a solo developer, I get to make all the choices about the apps I make.  The flip side is, I have to make a lot of choices.  What apps to build, what devices to support, what languages, what should the interface be, what sounds to use, what graphics to use, on and on.  And after the decisions are made, then I have to actually do it.  All of it.  Sometimes it’s overwhelming and I have to push myself to get all the pieces in place to get an app out the door.  But when I do, it feels great.  Granted, I have apps that have been total flops.  Several.  But I also have some that have been well received and are making lots of people happy.  And that makes me happy.

Even when I was building web apps in the days of yore, I lived for watching how people used what I built, to see if they enjoyed it, to see if the energy that I put in to making something intuitive and easy to use would be worth it, instead of building it in a way that was easier to build or copied some other known design but was not easy and seamless and intuitive.

It’s no accident that my old boss, John Kruper, who was also a fanatic about building next-generation better-than-anything-else-has-ever-been user experiences, was also quite enamored with Apple products.  Setting aside the occasional misstep Apple has made, overall they still set the bar for how to build good experiences.  But more I think of it as they set the goal of what we should be striving for.

Sometimes, though, I still trip and fall flat on my face.  Like when I pushed out an update to Bubble Jewels XL this week that tried to improve things a little bit for everyone, and it had a horrible bug that made it crash on launch for 99% of the people that updated to the new version.  Ouch.  I put up messages that we knew there was a problem and would have a fix out as soon as Apple approved it, but still the 1-star reviews flooded in.  Ugh.  It sucks that Apple doesn’t have a system to roll back to the previous version of an app when this happens.  Now THAT would certainly improve the end-user experience of the AppStore…  (feature request has been filed, for what it’s worth)

And so for the few days it took for the fix to be approved, I beat myself up a bit, added a few new items to the release test plan that I don’t always follow 100% but boy howdy I sure mean to, and I stopped looking at the AppStore review carnage so I wouldn’t lose my mind.  And then yesterday the fix went out, and we got some nice thank you emails in from our dedicated players.  Thank you all!

While I struggle with how I could possibly have let a bug like that slip through (mental note – always do a full clean in XCode before testing final builds) I need to remind myself that these kinds of crash bugs happen to more than just me, and happen to bigger dev shops than me.  Just yesterday I saw that Carcassonne had some kind of crash bug with their long-awaited update.  They’ll fix it soon, just like I did, and all will be well again.

As for me, even with the occasional bumps in the road I’ve had so far, the blessings far outweigh the curses.  I’ll keep doing this as long as I can, and do my best to relish every day that I get to walk my kids to school.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some apps to write

For the (entire world’s population – my direct family) who don’t know about GIVM.com, it is a very cool (IMHO), Web 1.0-ish shared gift list manager. It was born out of the frustration of trying to coordinate xmas and birthday gift giving amongst family members, especially as the family(ies) grew from people such as myself getting married.

So, the GiftList was born, originally running at bratton.com/giftlist, and it has been running for six years now, with about zero problems. It’s also been running with about zero growth. *sigh* Granted, I haven’t really tried to market it at all, because of the hope that it would virally take off.

The big problem is that the viral analogy doesn’t work for gift giving, because most gift circles are just that – circles. They have very few branch points to virally spread the word. Okay, yes, in a perfect world, somehow overlapping families would spread the word, but it hasn’t happened much at all.

One of the most amazing things about GIVM is that I managed to snag givm.com a while back. Crazy! I love the name, and when I saw it as available, I was in shock for a while before I bought it.

So, last month I heard about Facebook opening up their “platform” API thingamdooey, and I spent a few long nights porting GIVM to run inside of Facebook. One big bonus was that I back-ported some of the CSS to givm.com, so now whether you use givm.com or the GiftList app inside of Facebook, they both look pretty good.

Overall the dev experience was fairly straightforward, but I lucked out a lot that my schema design matched up very cleanly with Facebook’s. And I rock, of course.

After a week or so of anxious waiting to be approved into the Application Directory, I was in! There are a few other gift list type apps available on Facebook, but none of them have the same usability that mine has. I’ve had six freakin’ years to make sure that grandmas and grandpas can use this thing! I know where most gifts come from, baby, and you’ve got to play to your audience.

Facebook? Grandparents? Hm, not quite a match-up there yet. And that of course is the cart before the horse problem I’ve got, which is that Facebook is supposed to grow from 20ish million users to 50ish million users by the end of the year. Okay, a lot of those will be older people, not just the current FB highschoolers and college folk, but it probably will be a slow growth curve for the gray set. Which means my GiftList is probably not going to explode with high user numbers on Facebook.

After 3 weeks, I’m up to about 430 users. Lots more than givm.com, but dust in the wind compared to silly trifles like X-Me…

Today is the last day, well, last morning, of the big ACM conference at my old stomping grounds, UIUC. I’m very surprised it wasn’t overrun with people from Chicago, like myself, who are fans of Joel Spolsky and Robert Cringely, not to mention groupies that want to fawn over some of the lucky winners/founders of some big dot-com and/or media success stories, such as PayPal, YouTube, and Red vs Blue.

But, apparently people in Chicago read the rest of the program list aside from Joel and Max and Cringely, and realized that the other sessions are very academic researchy, and not so interesting. At least, they weren’t for me.

So, what to do in the old stomping grounds with the extra time? Geeking out programming, of course, as well as hitting the best pizza places in CU. Garcia’s, Papa Del’s, and the hidden gem The Jolly Roger. Mm mm mm. Good stuff.

So what useful did come out of the speakers so far? Joel and Max were very inspirational, although with quite different takes on things. Joel is a smart guy and believes in some planning. Max is all about ignoring the business side of things _completely_ and just programming away for 7.5 days solid (his number) until you’ve got a web site that you can show to friends and they can tell you it sucks. Okay, rapid prototyping, I can buy that.

Joel talked about why some gadgets win and some gadgets lose, whether hardware or software, and attributed it to a magic combination of Making Users Happy, Think About Emotions, and Obsess Over Aesthetics. I won’t repeat his talk here, as some people already have heard it at other venues, apparently.

What’s interesting, and a serious oversight, is that both Max and Joel completely ignored marketing and how people will actually find out about your product. Joel ignored it because he was comparing things like iPods and Zens, which are from huge companies and so it is assumed they have a huge marketing budget. Max ignored the marketing side except for a short “use viral marketing” comment, which is a nice theory, but takes approximately a year for anything to happen.

Am I inspired? Yes. Anything earth shattering? Somewhat. I really need to spend more time making my six-year hobby project emotionally satisfying, as well as making it actually work. More on that later…