Introducing Shares

Posted on April 6, 2012

Really excited to finally be able to introduce Shares. I started working on this app in November. It's come a really long way since then.

The Pitch

Recently, I bought some Apple stock. (Which, by the way, has been a fantastic investment.) I found myself looking at the price in the stocks dashboard widget then using Alfred's calculator to do the math to see my change. This got cumbersome quick.

I just wanted an app to see my overall gain or loss at a glance, so I made one.

The Process

The frist version was done in a Saturday. I drew 100% of the UI in code. I was super proud that there were no images in the app. Next, I hired Kris Mendoza to design a sweet icon for the app. He did a really fantastic job if I do say so myself.

A few weeks later, I had lunch with the fabulous Josh Brewer. Shares came up and I showed it to him. He has some ideas to take my silly design and make it super awesome, so we started working together.

Off and on for 5 months we worked on Shares when we had time. We are really proud of the end result.

That's It

I hope you give Shares a try. I'd love to hear what you think. Tweet or email me what you think.

This isn't my big idea that I quit my job to work on. Shares is just a little side project. If you're curious about my main project, head over to Nothing Magical. All of that is coming soonish though.

Image Optimization on iOS

Posted on April 3, 2012

Recently in IncrediBooth, I greatly decreased the size of the IPA we send to Apple. We were around 70MB before everything and ended up at 31MB. It was honestly really easy to shave that much off the app.

IncrediBooth is a universal iPad/iPhone app. With the last update, we added support for the new iPad's retina display. This made our bundle huge. IncrediBooth has a ton of full screen textures to help illustrate the physical metaphor. These images as 2048 x 1536 PNGs are just massive. Converting some of these to JPEGs saved a ton of space. It's unfortunate they don't load as quickly, but some PNGs that were 10MB+ were ~200Kb. This was a good first step.

Even after converting as much of the big textures as I could to JPEGs, I was still over the 50MB limit. My goal was to be under 20MB so older devices could download it without WiFi. I turned to my Twitter friends and found ImageOptim.

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Introducing Shares