Naked Startup

Today's News - A young iPad app's journey from an Idea to App Store

First of all, apologies for the obtuse Seinfeld reference.

So Uncle Steve was kind enough to approve Today's News this morning. It is interesting to see how little time is spent in the actual review, just an hour, compared to how long you wait for a reviewer, 9 days. We've spent the last month working on Today's News - a different kind of news iPad app - and it is available for free on the iTunes App Store, starting today.

The Beginning A few months ago Andy showed me a site he stumbled upon called Today's Guardian, created by the very talented Phil Gyford. It was a very interesting take on how news must be presented on the web. The biggest feature of the site was 'finishability': you get the feeling that you are done with the day's paper without having to worry about unread counts, todo's or percentage complete bars. As a big fan of the Guardian (or more specifically it's weekly football podcast) myself, I was very impressed by the app as well.

A few weeks later we both got our iPads, and from day one we were completely blown away by the awesomeness of the media-consumption experience on the iPad. This may sound like fanboy talk, but websites genuinely look and feel better, and like Scott Forstall likes to say, it really did feel like holding the internet in your hands. It was at this point that Andy said "I would so love to have Today's Guardian on the iPad as a native app" and we made a mental note to ourselves that this would be an interesting project to do at some point in the future.

A few short weeks after this, we were done with Gameplan's paid-pricing plans launch and we decided that we could do with a little break from thinking about it, and thus began our efforts to start work on Today's News.

The Technical Details Today's News is powered by the Guardian's excellent Open Platform which gives us full access to their entire content, with the only condition being that we run their ads as part of our app. The iPad app however does not query the Open Platform directly, and instead queries a Rails-powered web-service that I wrote in a few hours, which periodically gets the "day's" news from the Guardian Open Platform and stores it in a relational database.

While Andy was in the UK, I did a rough-and-dirty prototype which basically used a bunch of UIWebViews (in simple terms slightly-underpowered MobileSafari instances) to display each story. It was functional, supported sideways scrolling and the scrubber, but had very little else. This was when Andy's input was crucial as we polished the app into a fairly useable and pretty app in about 2-3 weeks. After he got back, we went into over-polish mode and after a couple of days, we decided that using UIWebView wasn't going to cut it.

The Move To Core Text It was at this point that we discovered Core Text and realised that some of the premier apps on the iPad, such as iBooks (and possibly Flipboard) use Core Text to display attractive text in a fast and efficient way. The move to Core Text was more challenging than we expected, but the results in terms of look and performance are excellent. Today's News turned from the lovable, bumbling Mini Cooper of the sixties to the BMW-powered Mini Cooper of the noughties.

The rest of the pre-launch timeframe was spent fixing niggling crashes which enabled me to learn about memory management in a much more detailed way!

Andy also conjured up a brilliant logo and this is probably one of my favourite parts of the app. John Gruber recently opined that the quality of the icon is a proxy for the quality of the app, and so I hope the quality of the app lives up to the quality of the icon.

Marketing Details and our conversations with The Guardian Once we had a prototype I setup a simple website, wired it up with Campaign Monitor and used the excellent 140proof.com service to run a few Twitter ads targeting keywords such as "Guardian", "iPhone", "iPad", etc. and this got us some attention and some signups. We also also submitted our "MVP" to techstartu.ps and news.yc.

We were always convinced that we wanted to charge for Today's News - seeing how successful the Guardian's official app is and we also think good software needs to be rewarded! It was at this point that the Guardian got in touch with us, and clarified that we would be violating their Terms & Conditions if we charged for Today's News. We had some good-natured back-and-forth resulting in an agreement to keep Today's News free and deploy our Mobclix ads in the app to help cover our costs.

We finally submitted to the App Store last week and Andy put the icing on the cake with a kick-ass microsite as well as a screencast which goes does a pretty good tour of the app.

I personally had an absolute ball working on Today's News and I think both Andy and I are quite proud of our version 1. We already have a version 1.1 in the works that makes the released version look a bit clunky which will hopefully be on the App Store pretty soon!

Software for Startups - FreeAgent

This is the first in a series of articles describing the support system of products we swear by at Gameplan. If a product is in this series, we can vouch for its awesomeness. I spent much of last year running a solo web-design firm, with some help and co-operation from another couple of local designers.

One of the things that used to be a massive hassle was cashflow: estimating, invoicing and tracking what money was coming in and out. I started out manually creating and tracking sent invoices and estimates, but this was a massive 'extra headache' - who was I waiting on for approval or payment and what was I spending?

As a side note I even hand created templates thinking that a designer should have 'nice looking invoices', which was a big waste of time - don't do this, put your logo on a simple invoice and send it out. Invoices are for getting paid not proving how talented you are, save your creative effort for the project at hand!

I dabbled with a couple of 'on laptop' systems but was concerned about the single point of failure, plus the various solutions didn't seem to capture the 'what am I spending' part of my financial story.

Enter FreeAgent.

FreeAgent literally saved hours of time and headaches. It deals with the invoicing and estimating process and time recording in a straightforward way. In addition you also get useful graphs and charting of your business incomings and outgoings.

The most useful thing was tracking my outstanding invoices when running multiple concurrent projects, When you import your bank statements the invoices and payments are all automatically synced and marked as paid. This year they even added automatic reminders so the system can remind clients for you. Brilliant.

Being UK-based they interface well with the downloadable formats from the UK banks, but I emailed them a sample of DBS's awful CSV download and they added compatibility. That's what I call service! And they've done it again for another Singapore person. And when you import your CSVs it remembers payees, so the more you use it the better it gets.

While the last few months has mainly seen money leaving the business (a trend we hope to reverse soon!) I've still used FreeAgent to track our spending and do a couple of estimates for consulting work. When we kick in with receiving payment via PayPal, FreeAgent will link up with that too and track our incoming funds - super-awesome.

For me FreeAgent is better than the competitors because it treads the line between too complex and too simple and ends up hitting the sweet spot of doing everything we need and then getting out of the way.

I've since eulogized FreeAgent to a couple of people and everyone I've referred has been extraordinarily happy with it. Plus they seem like a bloody good gang of people solving a problem, hopefully like we are, so supporting them makes me feel good.

Why not give FreeAgent a try? If you use any of the links in this article you'll get 10% off (and so do I) and there's a 30-day trial... so double win right?