Have you rated Second Shootr yet?

Yes, it's a bit shamless to ask, but if you haven't rated Second Shootr yet in iTunes, would you mind spending two minutes doing so?

Why?

The more people that rate an application, the higher its position in the app store. The higher the position, the more users we get. The more users we get, the more money we have coming in to spend on improving the application according to your suggestions.

Long story short. If you spend two minutes reviewing Second Shootr now, we can spend cash making it better for you.

I'd like to encourage you to rate all your favourite apps on the iPhone, not just Second Shotr. Most iPhone developers are independent groups (like us) and they rely on good word of mouth to succeed. Why not rate one app every Friday?

Creating an iPhone application from a photographer’s viewpoint

I was archiving last year's shoot data (photographs, contracts etc) and I stumbled across all of my early designs for Second Shootr. This may become the most boring and longest blog post ever written by me, but whilst I appreciate that this blog post isn't for everyone, I thought some people might be interested in how Second Shootr came about and I thought it would be nice to pop something down for posterity anyway.

So I apologise in advance if this doesn't interest you. We'll have more news on future Second Shootr as soon as we're ready to announce it.

Whilst Second Shootr was the brainchild of myself and my wife Helen, we specialised in Photography, not logo or application design and development. So we were kinda out of our depth when it came to producing Second Shootr. We very quickly realised that we'd need to hire someone to build the application for us, but we had some very strong ideas about how Second Shootr should work and we wanted to make sure we could get those ideas across to a developer.

With that in mind, we used Photoshop (something we know pretty well) to design each individual screen and show the user flow through the system:

Here's a larger version of the main client screen to give you some idea of just how crudely we designed the app (yes folks... that's a drop-shadow you see there!):

As you may have spotted, the current Second Shootr app shares some similarities to the design, but has taken it many steps further. The main two differences being the logo design and the colour scheme.

We didn't design the logo ourselves, nor did we come up with the colour scheme to use. Instead, we enlisted the help of an old friend, Tom, who just so happens to be a graphics designer.

He fairly quickly decided upon the black and yellow colour scheme for the logo and application, in his own words:

"Yellow as a camera equipment tie-in - like the Nikon strap? It also looks very functional (like rugged outdoors stuff you depend on) and like a help in an emergency, like a photography emergency!"

We figured that was a good a reason as any to stick with black and yellow, so Tom sent through some initial ideas:

Whilst it felt like a good start, we didn't feel that it was quite right. We liked the use of the camera aperture in the logo, but didn't quite feel that it was strong enough. Tom went back to the drawing board and came up with this:

© 2009 Tom Probert

We felt that this was much closer, we decided to drop the 3d-effect for simplicity and stuck with the black and yellow idea. The result is the logo that you're all familiar with today:

As for turning my half-baked ideas into a reality? We eventually decided upon a small, local company called utopia 365 to do the work. They were awesome - just took our ideas, combined them with Tom's graphics and added their own flair to produce the app you know and love today.

Second Shootr's come a fair way in it's first year (I recived Tom's initial logo designs this time last year), I guarantee Second Shootr will go much further in it's second year. It's an exciting time!