Why the Mac App Store (probably) isn’t for us (yet)

For those of you who don't know, Apple announced today that they're bringing a form of the iPhone App Store to the Mac. This will allow people to browse and download Mac apps in a couple of clicks.

That's great in theory. However, we've got a couple of concerns.

1. It's only going to be available for users running Snow Leopard (and later, Lion). So if you've got an old Mac, you have to think about spending a fair wedge of cash on an upgrade. If you're a Windows (or Linux etc) user, you're just plain out of luck.
2. We're going to guess that Apple will want to vet every single app submission. They'll probably take at least two weeks to do so. This isn't so much of a problem on the iOS platforms, the apps are generally fairly small and it's fairly easy to spot and fix bugs during testing so it's not often that you have to submit fixes. Mac apps are usually huge and complicated, we can almost guarantee that they will have bugs. Will you as a user be happy to use buggy software for two weeks whilst Apple checks the patch? You could potentially lose all your client data in the process! Didn't think so.

The Mac App Store isn't fair

So, if Second Shootr was turned into a Mac app, the vast majority of our users would never even be able to download it. We'd have spent loads of cash and tonnes of time designing and building a desktop application that only a handful of people can enjoy.

That's hardly fair is it?

Don't get us wrong – in a few year's time, the Mac App Store will have evolved. There may be a Windows version and more people will have a Mac that's capable of running the App Store.  But we're not going to build a Mac App Store app now in the hope that one day everyone will get a piece of the pie.

What could we do instead?

We're not knocking desktop apps at all. In fact, we can easily see that a desktop app to enter and store your client and shoot data in would be fantastic.

In order to get there, our aim is to find a method of delivering a desktop application that doesn't just work on the most recent Macs, it also works on older Macs. Hey, why stop there, why can't it work on Windows and Linux desktops, laptops and tablets too?

The problem with traditional desktop applications is that they all run different code languages. A Windows application will likely use completely different code to a Mac application (for example). We're a very small company. Although Second Shootr (the iPhone app) is selling well... we're hardly millionaires (in fact, we've never taken a single penny from the money generated from Second Shootr, it's ALL gone back into developing new features) and we can't afford to build a desktop application for every single platform.

We're stuck between wanting to please everyone and keeping our accountant smiling.

On top of that, if we had a desktop applications for each platform. There'd likely be multiple, different bugs in each one and the whole thing will turn into a mess very easily.

There's companies out there that do deliver desktop applications this way, and we don't think they should be. Take Skype as an example. The Windows application is miles ahead of the Mac and Linux version. It's just not fair to the people who have to wait ages for the updated app because they prefer one platform over another.

What we need is a way of delivering one codebase to multiple platforms at the same time. This codebase needs to be really easy to update and fix should something go wrong.

There must be another way.

We'd be really interested on your thoughts. Feel free to add them to the comments below.

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!