The Zen of Trip Planning

If you ask ten people how do they plan their trips, you're perhaps going to get ten different answers. Not only that, but actually planning a trip will mean different things (and sometimes radically different) for different people.

For some, planning would be limited to booking flights and hotels, for others, it would be the housekeeping stuff (keeping your booking references and confirmations), while other people would prefer to create full-fledged detailed itineraries, splitting the trip days into hours and minutes.

Obviously, it is impossible to make an app or a service that would satisfy everybody. One size simply doesn't fit all in this market.

We didn't try doing this with Triply. Instead, we designed Triply around our own needs and preferences. The idea is that if it's useful for us, chances are good it will be useful for big enough group of people (unless it turns out we're some sort of weirdos, which is, in fact, quite probable).

So here are the basic principles and thinking behind the app user experience.

- Speed. This is important. There are multiple dimensions of speed, though. The most important is not the raw app speed,but instead, the speed with which you can create a trip plan. With Triply, you can literally do this in seconds, or if you plan to visit more places -- minutes.

— Simplicity. Simple is beautiful. And while it's always hard to nail the balance between function and elegance, we think we did a good job with Triply. For instance, we knew from the outset that we need to make the app do ninety percent of its job in the background, hidden from the user. If there were forms to fill or guides to download it would be useless.

— Limitations. While this doesn't sound as something to brag about, we strongly believe that deliberately setting limits to what you can do is actually beneficial for the user experience.

Try it out. It's free. Download it now on the AppStore: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/triply-discover-interesting/id720646508?ls=1&mt=8

Announcing Triply

How do you plan your trip?

OK, maybe planning is a bit misleading term here. By 'planning' I don't mean booking your flights, keeping track of booking references and other housekeeping stuff (services like TripIt do fantastic job in this area).

By planning, I mean more like 'How do you know where to go? How do you discover places worth visiting? How do you collect and keep information about them?'

The truth is, most people don't plan at all. This is why you still see people roaming through cities waving booklets and paper maps, while at the same time their smartphones rest in their pockets.

In fact, when asked about planning, most people will say something like "Planning? Nah, it's just too much of a hassle".

While there is no lack of travel apps available in the App Store, most of them simply take the ancient (and I do mean ancient) concept of a travel guide and put it in a digital form (yes, yes, there are videos and animations and some really nicely designed apps) but all in all, it's the same millennium-old concept, made digital.

Meet Triply -- the travel planning app we have been working on in the last 4 months.
The idea behind it is really simple: "Make planning a trip so quick, seamless and easy, that people won't even notice they create a trip plan".

It really works like magic -- you simply tell Triply the name of the city you're going to visit:

You will instantly see the most interesting places in this city (notice how we show you the most relevant ones so you are not overwhelmed with 3,675 things to do in London as in some other apps):

You can easily filter by category:

And you can specify a certain area of the city:

So with this simple interface you can do pretty powerful filtering like 'I want to see all the bars in the area of my hotel'.

Creating a trip plan is as simple as tapping 'Add to Trip' button. From your perspective, this is a 0.5 seconds job.

Behind the scenes, Triply will do some really heavy lifting without you even noticing.

Triply will find and download information from services like Foursquare, Google Maps, Google Places and Wikipedia, will structure it in a beautiful way and will store it safely on your iPhone.

Within seconds, and with minimal input from you, you will have beautifully organized trip plan.

I have been using this app a lot in the last few months. Obviously, I am heavily biased, but I can say it is one of the best apps in its category.

- It utilizes the most powerful APIs available on the Internet today;
- It has access to the World's most complete venue and places database (Foursquare's);
- It is simple, lightweight and fast;
- The ease of use is simply unmatched -- you can create a trip plan while waiting to board your plane or while enjoying a couple of WiFi minutes, sipping your coffee at Starbucks.

I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I do.


Triply is a free download on the AppStore.

Affordance

Dan Wineman has a great post on affordance.  You should read it in its entirety -- these would be 3 minutes well spent.

Affordance is one of the universal principles of design. Lego blocks' male/female surfaces naturally afford plugging them into each other. Door handles naturally afford gripping them and pulling the door open. It is a powerful principle when used properly.

And while the problem with the old (classic?) iOS was overusing (and abusing) skeuomorphism, the problem of iOS 7 may well be the lack of affordance. You cannot trade how surfaces look with how elements interact. They are not interchangeable. Interactions are dynamic -- they happen while you work with the interface...

But affordances can only help if they appear before you interact. You need to see the handle to mentally feel how to open the door, or even to know that it’s a door in the first place, regardless of how smoothly it’s going to swing open.

On Raising Money (part 1)

Be warned: I don't feel qualified to discuss the topic of raising money. We are in the process of  trying to raise a small seed amount for Triply and that's pretty much all of the experience I have on the matter. I have never tried to do it before. And even now, we are pretty much in the beginning of the process -- we have received a tentative 'maybe not' from the one and only accelerator we've applied to. So take everything I say here with a grain (or a spoon or maybe a whole bag) of salt. Also, raising money in Sofia, Bulgaria (where we're based) is light years away from the experience in the hot startup-friendly spots in the USA and Western Europe. At the very least, the choice is much more limited and you must be very careful with your applications as every single one of them is precious.

---

Raising money is hard.
Maybe it is easy somewhere or for someone but for most of the people trying to do it, it's a pain in the ass. First-time entrepreneur? Well, that makes things even worse.

In this and some of my next posts, I'll write about my experience, frustrations, joys and thoughts. It is intended to be more like a personal log of the pains I have with the process and the things I do to alleviate them.

Problem: the entire process of raising seems like quite a distraction -- you spend your days filling in forms, preparing demos and presentations, going to meetings, researching in Google and so on and so forth instead of, you know, working on your product. This might not seem like a big deal, but when you are 2 guys trying to push your project in their spare time it is a big deal.

Solution: Be positive and try not to lose focus. When you spend time preparing for an interview or doing a video, you are actually working on your product. It might be a work that is less visible and more indirect, but is still an effort that will improve your product and your understanding of whatever you are building. When you spend three hours in Xcode, chasing bugs and developing new features (and this is engineers' preferred way of spending time), the result is, more often than not, something tangible. You can see and prove the bug is gone and you can see this new view is now functioning. In contrast, when you fill in an endless form, typing answers to various questions, it may seem to you (especially if you are an engineer) like you are wasting your time. Believe me, you are not. Instead, try to get the most out of every single little piece.
Try thinking out of the box. Change the perspective: 

Why are they asking this question? What do they mean am I sure if this is the right team for the job? Is it really advertising the only business model I can think of? How do I say what are we doing in one small paragraph? Do we really need 6 months to get this up and running. Can't we do it in 3 instead?

Once you start doing this, you realize you are actually putting work to improve the product and the way you think about the product. It's not time flush in the toilet, it's time well spent.

It is very easy to lose perspective when you spend your days digging through code and debugging. You get caught in the fine-grained technical details and you can easily spend weeks working on something that could turn out to be not quite important. Use the time spent out of your text editor to step back and look at the bigger picture.

Go a step further. Once you finish an application form (or an email or a pitch presentation), go to the top and start over. Read again every question and answer it without looking at your previous answer.

Iterate.
Refine.
Clean it up.

This is a technique similar to the refactoring we do with our code. As with a piece of non-trivial code, a pitch or an answer to a non-trivial question is hard to make perfect the first time. Think of how you can improve it.
Think of the things you can throw out. Doing this will do you a great favor during the interviews. You will find it much easier to articulate your vision and formulate your answers.

Again, the most important thing is to remember that you are still working on your product and yourself. It is not a distraction. It is an investment.

Michael Heilemann On iOS 7

Thoughtful and worth reading criticism of iOS 7. If you are even vaguely interested in design and UX, you'll be fascinated by his points. And I do hope someone at Apple is taking notes too.

Thought-Provoking

Marco Arment has an insightful  and thought-provoking post on what iOS 7 could mean for developers. Go and read it here, it's well worth the five minutes it will take you.

Long story short -- we can expect some  interesting dynamics in the upcoming months. Everybody will have to change their app to look and feel right in iOS 7 and this is not going to be an easy task. Especially if you are big and established. Especially if you have to keep iOS 6 (and 5 and maybe even 4.3) compatibility. So there will be an immense opportunity for new and small developers to pop up with apps that look great and polished on iOS 7.

Thinking.

Meerkapp v.1.2 Submitted For Review

Today I have submitted a new version of Meerkapp for review. That was pretty quick. I hope it would go live in the beginning of the next week.

Meerkapp Update

It's been about two weeks since Meerkapp has been featured in AppAdvice Best Apps Of The Day list. Things have slowed down quite a bit since then (I was seeing 100~150 downloads/day back then) and Meerkapp has slip out of the Free featured list in the Entertainment category.

Not something surprising here.
The thing is, the app really needs users to stay interesting. The built-in community is what Meerkapp is all about.
Currently I am trying to reach blogs / review outlets to get the app reviewed.

At the same time, on the technical front I am cooking a major usability update. It's not quite ready still, but I hope in a week or so I'll push it to the App Store for review. The thing is that currently it is really slow to load the picture stream. This is because it now works using a full-page synchronous model -- the app dials in the server and says something like: 'hey give me the second page of the newest pictures stream'. The server then goes to the database, does the various queries and fetches the requested page. With the page size being  20 pictures, this means that all twenty images are being taken out of the database, processes and sent down to the client. This takes time. Depending on the current load of the server, it could potentially take 15-20 seconds for a full refresh. Not a showstopper, but it gets really nasty if you scroll up and down a lot.

It just hurts usability. People (including myself, I know, it's a shame) are reluctant to start the app as they know they'll be faced with 20 seconds delay before actually seeing any doodle. Terrible.

What I am working on now is to make the server to fetch information about the pictures very fast, and then individual pictures are asynchronously requested by the app on demand. It works much in the same way as browsers work. Making it asynchronous means that the user would see almost an immediate feedback and pictures start to appear much quicker. There are still a thing or two I need to figure out, but as a whole the bulk of the work is already done.

Also, I am assessing how much it would take to make Meerkapp working on the iPhone. I'll obviously need to rework a lot of the UI storyboard but it shouldn't be a problem with the main bulk of the code.

Update: I am adding a link to AppScovery article I have posted about Meerkapp.
http://appscovery.com/article/meerkapp-ipad-drawing-doodling-app-deep-community-involvement-features

Meerkapp Submitted for Review

Well, 12 days and 15 git commits later, this milestone is already reached.
Yesterday, after some time spending scratching my head over how distribution certificates, app loaders and alike work, I have submitted Meerkapp for AppStore review.

And these were quite productive 12 days in terms of work done with a pretty good number of bugs fixed. Just take a look on the git log extract below.

All in all I am happy and hope it's all gonna be good and fine. Will see and let you know. Meerkapp has been taken quite a lot of my sleep recently. It turned to be quite a massive project for a single-person-that-works-in-his-spare-time type of developer. From icons to app art to client-side code to the protocol with the server, server scripts and database -- it's hell lot of a stuff to handle on your own. And not even working full time doesn't help.

--update: I have also reworked the front page of the Meerkapp website. Check it out here: http://meerkapp.com

Cheers.

--git log after 5th of Dec--

Date:   Sun Dec 16 18:55:04 2012 +0200
    Release 1.0
Date:   Sun Dec 16 17:51:48 2012 +0200
    Yet more fixes
Date:   Sat Dec 15 15:35:33 2012 +0200
    Fixes, fixes, fixes. Nasty issues arised -- and hopefully fixed. Still mem warning not clear -- tested for mem leaks and found none.
Date:   Fri Dec 14 12:33:34 2012 +0200
    Removed a hair in the wooden background
Date:   Fri Dec 14 10:31:20 2012 +0200
    Final fixes and polishments -- ui label texts etc.
Date:   Thu Dec 13 11:30:12 2012 +0200
    Polishments
Date:   Thu Dec 13 11:23:28 2012 +0200
    The first time app launches will display the featured page
Date:   Thu Dec 13 10:55:02 2012 +0200
    Final preparations and fixes before submitting the app
Date:   Wed Dec 12 11:30:28 2012 +0200
    Fixed the long-standing lurking problem of subtle resizeing
Date:   Wed Dec 12 10:41:30 2012 +0200
    Launch images
Date:   Mon Dec 10 12:36:04 2012 +0200
    Bug fixing of race conditions
Date:   Mon Dec 10 11:24:48 2012 +0200
    Brushes rendering made asynchronous for better performance.
Date:   Fri Dec 7 10:28:43 2012 +0200
    1. Another day -- another version of the glass shelf. 2. publish finished now makes a full refresh of the tableview as otherwise sometimes no refresh is done.
Date:   Thu Dec 6 10:46:37 2012 +0200
    1. UI polished -- the shelf drawn properly. 2. The view image screen shows number of likes
Date:   Wed Dec 5 12:31:06 2012 +0200
    UI polishments. Like count visible in the stream. Shelves.

iCloud Backup

Marco Arment shares his grandfather's experience with Apple Genius and iCloud (and PC-related stuff in general). It's worth reading.

This rings so true (emphasis mine):

It’s easy for most of us around these parts to forget how badly technology still works for so many people. This is supposed to be the best we have today: an iPad, a routine OS update, an Apple Store, an automatic backup feature.

Too many things that are supposed to just work simply don't. And I am not blaming Apple here. They have been setting the bar in this 'it-just-works' thing for decades.

Scott Hanselman is right. Everything is broken. And nobody is upset.

Useful iPad Tip of the Day -- Force Reboot and a Bonus

OK, it might be trivial, but I admit I didn't know it (and kudos to Apple for that). iPad is truly, almost ridiculously stable device. Until today I really didn't know how to force it shutting down. And this is even more impressive given how intensively I am using the iPad to debug on it with Xcode.

Still, today the iPad got stuck with a black screen. I guess it was Xcode fault causing some sort of deadlock. The screen was completely black, except the top bar showing the clock, battery and the WiFi indicator.

It didn't respond to touches.
It didn't respond to pressing the home button.
It didn't respond to pressing and holding the sleep button (top right).

It did respond to rotation though (rotating the black screen and the status bar) and I was able to take screenshots of that black goodness (see below).

So how do you reboot it?

Press and hold for a few seconds both the Home button and the Sleep / Wake button. This forced the iPad to reboot. Problem solved.

Well, not so fast. Next time iTunes attempted to sync the iPad, I was greeted with a message that it cannot be synced as the required file was missing.

And here we come to the bonus -- simply shutting down iPhoto (on the Mac) solved my problem, but apparently some people had to manually delete the iPhoto cache folder as well.

iOS 6 First Impressions (Sounds Like Hours of Fun)

iOS 6 Has Arrived.

Last night I updated my wife's iPhone and my iPad to iOS 6. I didn't really have much time playing with the new iOS as both of the devices finished the update process around 12 a.m. (and I am an early bird who needs to rush to work in the morning) and I desperately needed some sleep.

So it's not a review. I'm just sharing my very very first impressions.

First of all, while everybody is freaking out about maps I actually like the new maps app. The satellite images of where I live (Sofia) are of decent quality (at least as good as they are in Google Maps although they seem a little more out-of-date), the addresses database, search and directions also seem to work fine (or at least just as well as Google's solution does).

I guess for locations like Sofia, Bulgaria the difference between Apple and Google maps is smaller than it is for places like NY or London for example. I cannot tell much about that though.
The point, however is, that I like the Apple Maps app.

Plus, this flyover thing is like freaking amazing. I can see myself spending many hours flying over cities around the world in the next few months. It's just great. Period.

No YouTube app. No good. I used it a lot. I know it has been old and all but I am going to miss it. Google added a new YouTube app for iOS 6 which is great but it's iPhone-only for the time being. No dedicated iPad app so the only option that's left is to use YouTube mobile site which, thanks Lord, is gorgeous.

And most importantly…
Wait…
Still here?

The iPad got a clock. A clock, folks. Finally. Apple has put a preinstalled clock app on the iPad. And it has an alarm! What more could a geek want?

I couldn't help but remember the old Mac vs. PC ad…
"Sounds like hours of fun."
Remember that?

Update: and now the Swiss Federal Railways accused Apple of copying their clock design without permission.

iPhoto for iPad

John Gruber on iPhoto for iPad:

I thought the understatement of the day was at the very end of Randy Ubillos’s demo, when he added, as a mere aside, that iPhoto is a universal binary that runs on the iPhone too.

Right.

The New iPad And Some Retrospection

Lots of hype about the new iPad. Yes, Apple didn't call that iPad 3, nor iPad HD. Just iPad. Many rumors turned out to be true, many turned out to be BS.

Many folks are disappointed, but as MG Siegler points out, "They’ll undoubtedly remain disappointed as they wait in line to buy the new iPad next week.".

I cannot help but remember a post I wrote about 5 months ago about iPhone 4S. (I wrote that without knowing that Mr. Jobs was about to pass away only a few short hours later). 

And do you remember this one? 12 reasons not to buy an iPad. Really?
And as much as I love Android, I can't see Android tablets (and the whole ecosystem of apps and experience) catching up anytime soon.

As Cook said "Apple has its feet firmly planted in the Post-PC future,". It's hard to disagree.