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Vesper Quickly Becoming a Valuable Case Study

July 1, 2013 by Rob Bazinet Leave a Comment

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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.

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

Vesper ? The First App for iOS 7

June 25, 2013 by Rob Bazinet Leave a Comment

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I’ve been spending a fair amount of time with Xcode 5 and iOS 7 lately. ?I can’t mention specifics, but I can say it’s a direction I am very happy to see. ?There are a lot of good things happening in there.

Charles Perry points out how Vesper, the note taking application for your iPhone, is a ?window into what users can expect from design in iOS 7:

As it turns out they were right on the mark. This style of clean, edge-to-edge design that emphasizes content and deemphasizes the interface was exactly where iOS 7 was headed. As Jony Ive explained in the WWDC keynote address, ?In many ways, we?ve tried to create an interface that is unobtrusive and deferential. One where the design recedes, and in doing so actually elevates your content.? And that?s exactly the effect we see in Vesper. Without toolbars, without even separator lines between table view cells, Vesper draws users? eyes to the content so they can quickly access their information and be on their way. This deference to content is going to be a hallmark of iOS 7 design and will be something for all developers to keep in mind as they plan for the future.

Charles has some really good observations that point out the parallel between Vesper and what users can expect in iOS 7 when it arrives in the fall. ?Considering who is on the Vesper team, I wondered how much they knew about iOS 7 redesign while putting Vesper together. ?I’m not the only one:

With so much of iOS 7?s new design anticipated by Vesper, it?s natural to wonder how much of this is coincidence. Did Q Branch get tipped off? Or is this just a matter of great minds thinking alike? Who knows. With this group of characters, it could be either or both. Ultimately, though, it doesn?t really matter. What matters is that now we all can see the new direction that iOS is heading. We know that in iOS 7, content is king. We know that in iOS 7, color and animation are more important affordances than ever before. And thanks to Vesper, we now know that it?s possible to combine these traits of iOS 7 to create a unique app that retains an individual identity while at the same time fitting into the rest of the iOS 7 ecosystem. If you?re one of the many now thinking about your own app and its transition to iOS 7, I suggest that you consider what lessons you can take from Vesper. It?s a great app, but I think we?ll soon see that it?s a great iOS 7 app as well.

I don’t use my iPhone enough to make a commitment to Vesper but an iPad version would be a quick purchase. ?Of course the $4.99 price tag might be a cheap investment to learn a bit about design.

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

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