• Developer name: Gary W.Longsine
• Company Name: illumineX
• Location:U.S.A
• Apps at the App Store:1
• Company Website

About Dev:

Tell us a little about you, and your current company.

illumineX was founded in 1998. We make our living as consultants, building custom software for the web, Java, and iPhone. We build consumer software for the Mac and iPhone because we love the platform.

Most of the developers I work with at illumineX have deep roots. Together, we’ve built e-commerce engines, software distribution systems, urgent messaging systems, boring business apps, and all sorts of stuff.

About your background: what did you do before taking up iPhone development?

I still do information technology consulting for enterprise and government customers. On the ground, that means I figure out how to solve challenging problems with interlocking and sometimes conflicting objectives and technologies. I manage systems integration and software development projects and help my clients secure their networks, save tens of millions of dollars a year on IT costs, and reach other business objectives with information resources.

About your Work:

What apps have you developed so far? Tell us about your apps in brief.

Our first iPhone application is iBlogger, an editor which works with all the major blog platforms, and most of the minor ones. In addition to that we have some Mac software, notably ecto, the award-winning blogging client on which iBlogger is based, which we acquired from its original author last spring. We have a game pack for the Mac, too, which has a lot of fans.

Which one of your own apps is your favorite, and why?

We get so much praise from iBlogger it’s hard not to like it best. People tell us all the time about how they tried all the other iPhone blog applications (some of which are free), and finally bought iBlogger, and how much they love it.

Of course, a lot of the systems we’ve built over the years were done for other organizations. Although many of those apps were intellectually stimulating and maybe even fun to work on, we don’t get many fan letters about how cool, say, a distributed alert system is, despite tens of thousands of daily users. So iBlogger is really great for that. The constant stream of positive comments from our iPhone customers is fun.

How do you go from idea to app? What’s the process?

When we build a new app, we start by researching the problem domain, finding some real world users, and brainstorming. We identify a core feature set, look for reusable components in our archives, or in the world at large, and start building the core of the app right away. This is critical. It’s easy for development teams to spend entirely too much energy planning. The design of most software systems, even where the problem at hand is really complicated, benefit from early exploration in code. This can and should take place as a part of the planning process.

One we have a core feature set in place, we exercise the app with real users, get their feedback, and make improvements. With a new app, particularly on iPhone, it’s critical to spend some time thinking about what’s really required in the app, and what’s optional. It’s easy to clutter up an interface on iPhone. The apps that generate praise from users often take the most amount of work, designing simple interfaces, automating things that might need user input in a desktop app, and so forth. They look simple, but it took a lot of work to make them simple. We tend to work in very short iterations, with small teams of great developers and really sharp users. With iBlogger, we were lucky to have some really experienced bloggers using early versions of the app, prior to release.

Any exciting stuff you are working on? Give our readers a hint of what to expect from you next.

Well, if we had submitted a fun little arcade game, suppose it was called iFlinger, where players could throw a virtual cartoon shoe at a cartoon caricature of former U.S. President Bush (with other public figures to come in future versions), and if iFlinger had been rejected by the iTunes Secret Ministry of iPhone App Approval and Rejection, I’m not sure that I’d be allowed to say that.

The iPhone Developer agreement basically says, “If Apple finds you to be too annoying, or really, if Apple just wakes up on the wrong side of the bed one day, Apple can cancel your developer agreement”. I can’t afford to irritate them like that, so I’m reluctant to say to much about how completely f^x0r3d their application approval and rejection process is. For example, I’m reluctant to say that they don’t respond to polite requests for clarification or guidance on how to modify an app to bring it into compliance with whatever mysterious and vague clause they cited in the initial rejection. I’m even more reluctant to suggest that people lobby Apple on our behalf to get our application approved, or appeal to the giant internet engine of negative publicity, like the “fart noises” app people did. Of course, people have accidentally found iFlinger’s score keeping web site ( http://iflinger.com ) and have started asking Apple when they can have iFlinger on their iPhone. That wouldn’t be my fault. Word seems to have leaked out from our beta testers, and the users who gave us the idea for the app. I’m just crossing my fingers and hoping they approve iFlinger, rather than yank my developer agreement out from under me.

Do you develop for other platforms? How do you compare the iPhone development platform with other platforms?

The applications we build and sell for illumineX are for Mac and iPhone, with some Java back room server components.

For our clients we do all kinds of stuff, but mostly Java on about any platform, and iPhone mobile solutions with Java or other back room server platforms. Our developers have an unusual amount of experience building really insanely scalable distributed systems, client/server and web applications that run on many platforms, including Windows, Linux, Java, mobile platforms like Palm, Blackberry, and Nokia, and enterprise server platforms Solaris, AIX, and other UNIX and big iron systems. In the mobile space, iPhone development is certainly the most fun. The other mobile platforms have a lot of catching up to do both in terms of the capability of the platform and the developer tools.

Tell us something about how users are responding to your apps. What’s the most flattering comment you have received? Or the weirdest?

Thousands of bloggers are using iBlogger already, and we get lots of really great feedback from them. Almost every day somebody tells us they tried every other blogging app and then tried iBlogger and how much they love it. It’s amazing how many people do full fledged reviews of things like iBlogger and ecto (the Mac blogging client that iBlogger is based on). Even video reviews! The feedback is amazing.

About the App Store:

Name two iPhone apps you consider are cool, excluding the apps you’ve developed. What makes these apps stand out?

I like “I Dial, You Drive” which is a brilliant concept — you make a list of people to call, and it dials them for you, while you’re driving. Marvelous. If I commuted, I’d use it every day.

I also love Shazam, because it’s like magic. It reminds me that iPhone is from the future. My five year old cousin likes Cannon Challenge, which is a really simple and fun little artillery game. He’s becoming more familiar with physics and counting, as a result of zillions of hours of game play. There might be more efficient ways to learn that stuff, but probably not more fun.

Any message to your fellow developers?

Well, for new iPhone developers, maybe. Other folks who started early like we did already know this, but if you’re just starting, read the writing on the wall. It’s extremely unlikely that you can build an iPhone app for which the market will pay more than ninety-nine cents, so don’t build anything that requires technical support. iBlogger is an awesome app, we love it, our customers love it, but we’ll never get back what we already put into it — it’s basically a hobby, supported by our other apps.

Of course, with Apple rejecting our first game, that’s a bit of a risky strategy, too, I guess. Be prepared to spend lots of time and money building something that gets rejected. You gotta budget that in to your plan. It seems to happen more often than you would think. Almost every developer I know who’s building interesting apps, has a tale of an app rejection. At least until Apple fixes their entirely borked process for getting apps reviewed, it’s a cost of doing business. Unfortunately, you can’t always predict what will get rejected, until you’ve spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours. So plan for it.