Accidental Technologist

Musings about Entrepreneurship, Technology and Software Development

  • Home
  • About
  • Still River Software
  • Privacy Policy

Powered by Genesis

Vesper Quickly Becoming a Valuable Case Study

July 1, 2013 by Rob Bazinet Leave a Comment

Tweet

When I first heard about Vesper, a note-taking application for $4.99 that only runs on the iPhone, I was a bit skeptical. ?Vesper comes from Q Branch, LLC and consists of some fairly high-profile people including: John Gruber, Brent Simmons and Dave Wiskus. ?My gut told me these guys are leveraging their Internet fame to sell a lot of Vesper. ?I believe my gut was very wrong.

The trio appeared on an episode of the Debug podcast and John discussed this very aspect of marketing Vesper. ?He pointed out their fame would only take them so far and fame alone will not make this a successful product. ?In order to build a successful business from Vesper, they would need much more.?This was the turning point in my thinking and John was exactly right, they need to create a great product people will want and only then will they gain the momentum they want.

Since the release of Vesper, I’ve seen consistent discussion about the design and some of the decisions which went into its features. ?We can all speculate on it, but fortunately the Q Branch team has been taking it further with a level of transparency we don’t usually see in a high-profile iOS application.

Vesper is an application we can all learn from, starting with design to the thought process of feature implementation. ?The team is doing a great job of helping us see their process from detailed design discussions to open sourcing code they use. ?I hope they continue the level of transparency with the dialogs they have, I know I personally address they questions myself and often times don’t have an echo chamber to help me out. ?I often look at a good application and wonder how or why something was done.

Here are a few of the nuggets of information we don’t usually see, but are so valuable:

How to Make a Vesper: Design?- a great view into the history of Vesper design discussing all the different aspects of what goes into design. ?Each aspect of the application design is discussed, what made it in and what did not.?

Vesper is opinionated software. Every interaction, pixel, and line of code was carefully considered, and no work was too precious to throw away. I?d like to share some history of how Vesper came to look and feel the way it does.?

You can learn a ton about design, especially if you are not a designer and may not be aware of all the things needing consideration when building a beautiful application.

Open Source: DB5 – at times it becomes difficult to effectively work with non-developers on a project and collaborate in a positive way. ?DB5 is a simple idea solving a common problem in an elegant way. ?The Vesper team releases their tool to everyone who may face a similar problem. ?It’s open source so anyone can make it even better.

Brent Simmons Gists – a nice collection of code from the Vesper developer, someone who is a very experienced Objective-C developer.?

Technical Notes on Vesper?s Full-Screen Animations – a detailed look on animations, comparing the standard way most developers do it to how they did it with the logic behind the decision making. ?This is how a regular application can be outstanding, paying attention to these kinds of details reveals the difference between an artist and a laborer.

How should you handle beta testers for you application? ?Lots of ways to do it but this is how Vesper does it?as explained by Brent Simmons. ?Being very open about the tools that worked for a particular style and project is always very nice to know.

No developer is proud of a bug in their creation and most of us go to great lengths to hide the fact that they exist. ?It’s only human nature to not want others to know we have failed in some way. ?Not surprising, the Vesper team is open about this aspect too😕

Here?s a bug in Vesper. You can reproduce this easily.

  1. Start dragging a note from right-to-left to archive it.
  2. Before you let go, take another finger and tap the hamburgrabber button in the top left to open the sidebar.

Note that the sidebar opens and the note is still in a partially-dragged state. That shouldn?t be, but I didn?t think of it when I was writing the code.

You can figure out why the bug exists. When I?m writing a feature, I don?t necessarily think of all the interactions with all the other features. I try to, but it?s easy to get overly-focused.

I bought Vesper *because* of the openness of the team and I want to witness the evolution of this application. ?It’s refreshing and rare to be told a story you can witness about the crafting of a product. ?The Vesper story is just that, the story of crafting a great application. ?We are often pushed or expected to be producers, our parents and grandparents were the crafters of our time, proud of the things they created. ?It is time we show that we are crafters too.

The openness and transparent style of the Q Branch team seems like a winning approach. ?It will at the very least continue and grow the discussion of their application. ?If people are talking, they are probably buying?like I did.?

Let’s hope for more thoughts and reasoning from these guys in the future.

Share this:

  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Email
  • More
  • Pinterest
  • Tumblr
  • Pocket
  • Reddit

Filed Under: iOS Tagged With: iOS, ios7, Vesper

iOS 7 and Seizing an Opportunity

June 13, 2013 by Rob Bazinet 1 Comment

Tweet

IOS7

The past few days have been filled with all things Apple and I have been drinking from the firehose all things iOS 7. ?Apple announced an anticipated upgrade to iOS on Monday but not just any upgrade. ?The new operating system changes the way users will interact with their iOS devices and will change the way developers approach developing applications for these devices.

I started a post yesterday with my thoughts on how this new update would greatly affect developers and designers as they created new applications and how existing applications would be facing a difficult path. ?I felt good about my thoughts until Marco Arment posted an eerily similar post as mine. ??

iOS 7 is very different and I’m very skeptical the upgrade path for applications will be smooth. ?As Marco says:

iOS 7 is different. It isn?t just a new skin: it introduces entirely new navigational and structural standards far beyond the extent of any previous UI changes. Existing apps can support iOS 7 fairly easily without looking broken, but they?ll look and feel ancient.?

Developers who created complex applications will be faced with a fork in the road; attempt a transition or start over:

I don?t think most developers of mature, non-trivial apps are going to have an easy time migrating them well to iOS 7. Even if they overcome the technical barriers, the resulting apps just won?t look and feel right. They won?t fool anyone.

A new paradigm means a chance to start from zero and build great things.

Apple has set fire to iOS. Everything?s in flux. Those with the least to lose have the most to gain, because this fall, hundreds of millions of people will start demanding apps for a platform with thousands of old, stale players and not many new, nimble alternatives. If you want to enter a category that?s crowded on iOS 6, and you?re one of the few that exclusively targets iOS 7, your app can look better, work better, and be faster and cheaper to develop than most competing apps.

Developers will be tasked with porting their applications to iOS 7 but it will be a difficult task. ?Design is completely different so not only will developers have to ramp up but so will designers.?

iOS 7 is a great opportunity to create new applications, taking advantage of the new way of doing things. Maybe this is the opportunity and *not* upgrade applications but start all over and build new experiences in iOS 7. ?Can we convince clients this is different enough that apps are worthy of rethinking the user experience, leveraging what’s new and building great experiences? ?Some will fight the idea. ? Some will refuse. ?Those looking not where the puck is but where it’s going to be, will embrace a rebuild.

I for one, am devouring all the material I can get my hands on for iOS7 include the new Human Interface Guidelines and the Transition Guide. ?I also have Xcode 5 running and installed iOS 7 beta on an old device. ? If you’re interested in a really detailed article on iO7 user interface differences, go read Matt Gemmell’s article.

I will be ready to help clients move forward from older versions of iOS as well as ready to guide them on new applications. ?As far as my applications, I will see how the transition goes. ?This could be an opportune time to redesign, retool and rebuild for the paradigm shift to iOS 7. ?

The design changes to iOS 7 are brilliant, very exciting times ahead.

Share this:

  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Email
  • More
  • Pinterest
  • Tumblr
  • Pocket
  • Reddit

Filed Under: Apple Tagged With: Apple, ios7, iPad, iPhone, marco arment, xcode

Recent Posts

  • How to Fix Rails Flash Rendering When Using Hotwire
  • Hotwire Fix for CORS Error when using Omniauth
  • Fix Installation of Ruby using rbenv on macOS Big Sur
  • RailsConf 2021 and the Future of Conferences
  • Fixing Out of Diskspace Errors on Amazon EC2

Categories

Services I Love

HatchBox - Easy Rails Deploys Fathom Analytics
Follow @rbazinet

Rob Bazinet (ruby.social/@rbazinet)
@rbazinet

  • Working to wrap up my current consulting gig by mid-April. I will be looking for the next thing soon. If anyone has… https://t.co/sg3cSV9yqM
    about 5 hours ago
  • I’ve been spending some time using Notion AI lately and it surprisingly good. Since all the rage lately is ChatGPT,… https://t.co/cUXFWIRCVV
    about 3 days ago
  • I think these steps are true for any target audience. https://t.co/0ht6rIzOW3
    about 3 days ago
  • I’ve been enjoying a show from the Magnolia network called The Craftsman. It’s mainly about woodworking but his phi… https://t.co/sWTUBbSsl6
    about 3 days ago
  • I found the resource I was looking for last night that is similar to https://t.co/Pyn0IIjRdP, it is… https://t.co/U7TMe77FMF
    about 3 days ago
  • RSS - Posts
  • RSS - Comments
Find me on Mastodon