• Developer name: Benjamin Truitt
• Company Name:f-stopr
• Location:San Antonio, TX
• Apps at the App Store:2
• CompanyWebsite

About Dev:

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

I live in San Antonio, TX with my wife Ginger, our six month old, Jacob, and our dogs.  For my day job, I work at Rackspace Hosting, where I started as a Java Developer and am now working as a manager of application development.

As a Java developer, I’d played around with the Android SDK, and had been bitten by the mobile development bug.  However, higher priorities at work, and the (at the time) distant release date for any Android hardware kept my work in this area to a minimum.

About the same time that I found myself doing less technical work for Rackspace, the iPhone SDK came along.    At the time, my wife had the only iPhone in the house, and I knew I wanted one for myself.  So my initial plan was to earn enough from iPhone application development to pay for a new iPhone for myself.

Some friends at work had gotten me interested in photography and in the photo sharing web site Flickr.  When the iPhone SDK became available, I spent several late weekend nights developing an application that eventually came to be known as Pic Quickr™ for browsing Flickr photos on the iPhone.  At the time, I was calling it f-stopr: a play on words with Flickr and f-stop which is a technical photography term.

The day the iPhone 3G came out, I went to stand in line to get one for myself (an advance on future app store sales, I hoped at the time).  While sweating for 6 hours in the hot San Antonio sun, I got some help from the guys standing ahead and behind me in line, and we agreed that “Pic Quickr™” would make a better name than “f-stopr” for my application.  I’d already created a simple website with f-stopr though, so I ended up repurposing the name for use as my sole-proprietorship.

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

I am educated as a computer scientist, and had even done some work towards a masters degree in that field before deciding to focus on my career and family.

Since leaving school behind, I’ve tried spending some time on a few different projects outside of work to keep feeding the Learner in me.  I participated in developing a little bit of code for Drools, an open source Java project, I played around with the Netflix challenge and then with the Android SDK, and eventually settled on application development for the iPhone.  For me, it is a fun hobby that happens to pay a few bills.

About your Work:

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

I’ve got two applications in the Application Store: Pic Quickr™ and Lingo™.

Pic Quickr™ is a Flickr client that allows you to upload and browse photos using your iPhone or iPod Touch.

Lingo™ allows you to view the word of the day from several source on the Internet, and track how often you use these words throughout the day.

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

So you can boil my process down to this:  I am purposefully self-centered.

Step 1: Sift through the application ideas I get from friends and family and that I dream up, and ask myself which of those would be most useful to me

Step 2: I ask myself what features I would want in the application

Step 3: Implement exactly what I would want in the application

Step 4: Release the application to the App Store

Step 5: Gather feedback on how to improve the app, and jump to step (2), this time asking myself which suggestions would be most valuable to me as a user of my own application.

I fully admit: this is a very ego-centric application development style that would normally have no place in Software Development.  But this is what makes iPhone development so rewarding!  Because the size of the iPhone application market is so large, this strategy means that I am not only making applications that are useful to me personally, they are also attractive to thousands of other iPhone owners!

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

Right now I’m working on two things: one boring and one exciting:

The boring thing that I’m working on is improving the stability of my existing applications. This weekend I’m submitting new versions of my apps to Apple that should make them more stable.

The exciting thing I’m working on is a news application.  There are already some great applications in the App Store for reading news.  I am a huge fan of NetNewsWire for both my Mac and iPhone, for example.  USA Today has another nice news app.  However, none of these applications solve this basic problem for me: There is too much news and too little time.  The application that I expect to release in the second quarter of 2009 should take a big step toward solving that problem for iPhone and iPod Touch owners.

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

I developed a small application for the Palm Pilot in college, and that was a nightmare.  The most important reason application development for the iPhone is so successful is the excellent tool support.
I developed a couple of toy applications for the Android platform before switching to the iPhone SDK.  Android does many things well, in several cases, better than Apple’s iPhone.  Probably the two most important examples: Multitasking with background processes, and providing a mechanism to extend or replace any application.  At the end of the day though, it all comes down to ease of development.  The iPhone is just easier to develop for than Android, currently has a broader market, and is superior to any existing Android devices.

I hope that Apple learns from Android though and improves upon the current shortcomings of the iPhone SDK.

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

Most flattering: “It’s Flickricious!”, a comment made about Pic Quickr™.

About the App Store:

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

Favorites is a photo-dialer application that I use on a daily basis. This is a study in useful simplicity. In fact, the developer for this app wrote an excellent explanation about his process for refining the user interface of Favorites. You can find that post here: http://mattgemmell.com/2008/10/29/favorites-ui-design.
What makes Apple so successful with its products is that it spends tons of effort on making them simple.  Favorites and applications like it that focus on keeping things simple are a step ahead of the competition in the App Store.
iNeedStuff is a grocery list application that I use for every trip to the store.  This application learns where items are located in your grocery store over time.  It uses this knowledge to help reduce the all too common wandering ramble down isles that had previously defined my shopping experience.

I think that the challenge that iNeedStuff faces is keeping it simple in the face of complicated feature requests.

Any message to your fellow developers?

Two quick pieces of advice:

First, build an application that you personally will love to use.

Second, keep it as simple as possible.  It is much harder (and much better) to make a simple application than it is to make a complicated one.  Your app should do just a few things, but it should do them incredibly well.

These are both lessons I’m still striving to follow in my own development.

It’s been fun!

Benjamin Truitt

f-stopr

Thanks Ben for your time.