It’s been a fairly frustrating first month; circumstances beyond our control have demanded that Matt & I spend more time on our day jobs than anticipated! Plus I went on a jolly to the IFP Conference and took longer than usual to recover from the effects of the Champagne Reception! Getting old…
For all that, we’re almost ready to formally baseline our requirements, and have a pretty cool & comprehensive list of scenarios that we want to be able to support. From these scenarios, we have devised a screen inventory, and have started a collaborative review process of the various screen flows; all of this facilitated by iRise. I was warned that iRise had a steep learning curve, and I have to agree that I have found that to be true (plus I’m used to using Axure, and have gotten into the habit of expecting things to work ‘like that’). However, I’m really beginning to discover the power of this market-leading visualisation software now, and can’t wait to get down ‘n’ dirty with it to create an interactive prototype.
Matt & I have reached a bit of an impasse on hiring a graphic designer and dev team, and need to work through the options again in more detail. It boils down to this: do we hire a proper dev house and try to contractually protect our IPR, or do we go with an indie developer and take the risk? There are pros & cons to both solutions, but most concerning is that there doesn’t appear to be that many dev houses around with real iPhone experience, and we certainly don’t want to fund their on-the-job training! As Matt pointed out to me, most iPhone app developers have a mac-based, design-led background and tend to be independent, so the experience/ expertise we want doesn’t usually come with the corporate guarantees/ ethics and other fringe benefits (like proper project managment and resource planning) of dealing with a recognised software development company. We certainly don’t want to end up with a dev partner with these sorts of problems…
The knock-on effect of this stalemate is that we have had to let slip our milestone appointment of a graphical designer as, if we go independent, the UI design element will probably be part of the package. In turn, that means I need to reassess the level of fidelity I go to with the prototype, and the implications on our plan to user test the app/ proposition before it goes to build. I really, really wanted to have the supremely-important UI design nailed before build, but that might not be possible now. On the plus side, having a dev consultancy resource available during the design phase isn’t such a bad idea…
As we haven’t had time to get to grips with the iPhone SDK yet, we still don’t yet understand whether there are any limitations on the functionality that we’re planning for our app. Having reviewed our current competition on App Store, I don’t think we’re going to hit any functional barriers, but Matt is concerned about other potential restrictions such as app size and memory usage.
Whilst we’ve been distracted, the business side of the app got a little easier when Apple decided to drop the NDA clause in its agreement with developers. I’m glad I haven’t spent that much time to date on assessing the commercials with Apple! Matt & I have also agreed not to create a separate limited company for Moodoh (yet), as the overheads can’t be justified. So, for now, we’ll use my corporate entity, Vixalun Limited, and Moodoh will be a trading style. In practical terms, this means that Apple will pay our share of any App Store sales revenue to Vixalun Limited, so you’d better be nice to me from now on, Matt! On the subject of money, I’ve also had discussions with a prospective angel who may be interested in investing if the dev costs get too spicy for two!
High priority tasks looming on the horizon include:
- complete the first cut of the interactive prototype
- appoint the dev resource
- finalise the commercial agreement with Apple
- set up an alpha test panel
Let’s hope Month 2 is a bit more productive…
The Slate:
Total effort so far: 29 hours; Total spend: £114.50
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