Blog*spark

For those of you who are developing iPhone apps, you might be wondering how long it takes for Apple to get back to you once you apply for the developer program. For us, it took about six weeks.

I am guessing that this period isn’t a big deal for most people. You need the license to (a) download your software to the iPhone, and (b) sell your software on the iTunes store. Most developers will use the simulator in the beginning, so there is usually plenty of time to wait for your license.

In our case, we had been using Mike’s personal developer license. It was only when we were getting ready for launch that we decided to get a new license tied to the name “Metaspark”, because we wanted that name to show up as the publisher in the iTunes store, and not “Michael Schiff”. So our decision to get a new developer license was kind of last minute.

Because we were in a rush, it was kind of frustrating not knowing how long the process would take. For those of you in the same boat, here is a timeline (below the fold):

More »

And just for yuks, here is an early mockup of the Note*spark design. As it turns out, even a small app like this requires some time to think through various design decisions. I’ll try to dig up an even earlier design if I can find one. (I think Mike sketched one in a notebook).

Early Mockup of Note*spark

The final design ended up being not that different from this version.

I did some screenshots of Note*spark today (which you can do by holding down the home key and pressing the sleep/wake button.. who knew?). I’ll eventually add them to the real website, but for now, I thought I’d post them here for those who are interested.

In preparation for launching Note*spark, we’re turning on all the web-based stuff. The web app is at http://notespark.net and the forums are at http://forums.notespark.net.

Have a look around if you are curious.

[update] — whoops.. forgot to migrate the database. it’s not up quite yet!
[update] — ok. it’s up….. I think.

Photo by Justin Marty via Creative Commons

Both Mike and I have run beta programs before, but never for a two person effort. In the past, my typical engineering team has been around ten software engineers and ten QA engineers for about 15 months, but I’ve been responsible for teams with as many as 25 software engineers + 25 QA engineers for 2+ years, and as small as 2 engineers + 1 QA.

For Note*spark, we had a team of two engineers + 0 dedicated QA engineers, which is similar to the smallest sized team I’ve ever worked with. But instead of taking a year to develop, we sprinted the whole way, working long hours for about two months to finish the server, web and iPhone pieces.

Once we were done with feature development, we almost decided not to do a beta at all, on the theory that two months of engineering was small enough for us for us to QA ourselves. And besides, we had written a bunch of unit tests, so there probably weren’t that many bugs left, right? Boy, were we wrong! By running a “real” beta, we found a ton of bugs that we never would have found ourselves.

Along the way, we made some decisions about how we thought we should run a small beta. We also learned some things specific to running betas for the iPhone. None of this is rocket science, but I thought I’d post what we learned in case it’s helpful to anyone.

More »