shipping & gimmicks
We launched option pricing for Big Cartel on Monday. We’ve been planning this feature since before I started at Indie. I did an initial backend implementation almost two years ago, but we weren’t happy with the UI designs. Then we started having to focus our time on scaling out Big Cartel… Now that we have more people, we were able to put a team on it full-time, and Chance, Eric and Lee really nailed it.
I spent the week wrapping up QA for the refactored theme model. Matt’s pounding on it over the weekend, but I hope to have that ready to deploy by Monday evening. There’s nothing customer-facing in this release, but it’s going to make it a lot easier to pull off some of the very nice features we’ve got in the works.
Last weekend, I dug into image rendering performance in iOS. I’m finally at the point where I can read Cocoa without too much thought, and I should be able to move much more swiftly from here on out. After playing with several of the iPad-based children’s books out there, I’ve got a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn’t as far as interactions. My main complaint with the books I’ve looked at is the interaction is fairly shallow and not well-integrated into the story. Rather than use interaction to help tell a story, they’ve just bolted on gimmicky stuff to poke at.
Interactions in When Comes will be subtle. I want to reward repeated readings, so every time the reader goes through the story, there will be subtle differences in the available interactions, animations, sound and music. In a way, readers will perform the story by continuing to reread it. I haven’t decided yet whether these variations will be random or (more likely) tied to reader’s previous interactions with the application.
Next week, I’m headed to New York for a few days. It’s been a while since I was last there, and I am looking forward to the visit. I’ll be attending “The Networked City” panel and keynote for The Festival of Ideas for the New City. Perhaps I’ll see you there?