#72: Mistakes, Designing Icons and getting Acquired.
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Hello, and welcome to Developing Perspective. Developing Perspective is a podcast discussing
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news of note in iOS development, Apple, and the like. I'm your host, David Smith. I'm
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an independent iOS developer based in Herndon, Virginia. This is show number 72, and today
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is Thursday, August 16th. Developing Perspective is never longer than 15 minutes, so let's
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get started.
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The first topic for today is what do you do when you make a mistake? And this is my three-step
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process for when you encounter a mistake and how you deal with it. First, you identify
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the mistake. In this case, Sean P. Walsh let me know on Twitter that the developing perspective
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feed was kind of broken. And the interview I did with Bill Dutney that was posted yesterday
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was not showing up for him or showing up incorrectly. So the first thing you do is identify and
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thank whoever found it. So thank you, Sean. Two, fix and fix for the future. This is the
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key thing. The second part of that is perhaps the most important part. Often, and this applies
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universally to any kind of problem that's your fault.
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There is a fix that you can do to fix it right now.
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And then there's the fix you can do that will prevent that particular mistake
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from happening in the future.
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In this case, there was a unique ID problem in my feed.
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And so the easy fix would just be to change the unique ID for Bill's post,
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and it would just start working.
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However, the fix in Fix for the Future is improve my generation of unique IDs
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to make sure they're really unique.
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And that's what I've done.
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And the last thing you do is you apologize.
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I'm sorry, everybody.
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Hope you have got Bill's interview now.
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If not, I highly recommend it if you got this.
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But somehow, your podcasting software
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didn't quite catch Bill's.
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Definitely look it up.
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It should just be there if you refresh now.
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It's a really nice interview with Bill Dudeney,
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who is just an all-around great guy and really good at-- we
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had a good conversation talking about solving hard problems,
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debugging tools, and a topic that I've heard a lot of you
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ask me about, which is how to learn Objective-C
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and kind of that process.
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So we talked a bit about that.
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Anyway, so that's my three-step process
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for what happens when you make a mistake.
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Identify, thank whoever did, fix, and fix for the future,
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and then apologize.
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All right, the two main topics we're going to talk about today.
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One is designing icons and the process around designing icons.
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And the second one is going to be about app acquisitions
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and a little bit of the logistics around that.
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And so the reason I'm talking about designing icons
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is yesterday, or was it Tuesday?
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This week, I launched a new version of my recipe book
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with a brand new icon.
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And it was designed by the Icon Factory.
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I don't know exactly who at the Icon Factory,
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even much of that really matters.
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But the Icon Factory was the graphic design company
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that I ended up going with.
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And they did a fantastic job.
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Highly recommend them.
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If you are in the market for an icon,
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definitely contact the Icon Factory.
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They do great work.
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They've been doing great work forever.
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And can't say enough about them.
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The process went as expected, on time, on budget,
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all that kind of stuff.
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But more than necessarily I want to talk about the design
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of this particular icon, I want to talk about the process that
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is likely that you'll go through with any designer,
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with any graphic designer, whenever
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you're coming up with a concept for either a new app
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or updating an existing app.
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And so in this case, basically the process
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seems to work through maybe about a five-step process.
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And I'll kind of walk through them in step.
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So first, there's kind of the concept phase.
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And you can either do this with your designer,
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with your team, just by yourself.
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And really, the goal of this is to try and come up
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with a concept of what you want the app to look like,
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what you want it to vaguely be in terms of graphical elements,
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in terms of colors.
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Often what you're going to want to be doing here
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is looking at competitors' apps, both for the pros and the cons.
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And so to some degree, it's like if you're
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trying to do something that fits in to an existing thing
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and has good recognizability, that's
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good in terms of making it consistent
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with your competitors.
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There's also sometimes cases where
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you're going to want to do the opposite of what
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your competitors are doing, either in color or content
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to differentiate yourself.
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So as an example of that, say maybe you're
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making a Twitter application.
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There's a good chance you may want to have that have a bird
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as some part of the icon.
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While that's a little bit cliche at this point,
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it really helps people sort of recognize what it is,
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And they've kind of grown to expect that.
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And it helps users down the road, especially,
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when they're looking for their Twitter application
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on their phone, on their Mac, they see a bird,
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they think of Twitter.
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That's just the nature of that branding.
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And so being consistent with that is probably helpful.
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Now, at the same time, you don't want
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to get too carried away with that
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and be sort of looking just like someone else.
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Now, you're sort of-- you're starting to get into plagiarism.
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You're starting to not have differentiation.
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So but you're trying to find that good fit for what concept--
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does this icon represent your application?
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And I think also, I just think to keep in mind,
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is when coming up with a concept of an application,
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you often want to make sure that it matches logically
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the overall feel of your application.
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So for example, in my recipe book,
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this is an application whose UI paradigm
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is based around a cutting board with elements sliding along
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on top of it.
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And so for my icon, the icon is based on a cutting board.
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It's a wooden background designed with a 3D effect
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to make it look like a cutting board with elements laid on top.
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And for me, I found that to be pretty good in terms
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of being consistent, that you see that,
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and it makes sense in the application.
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If I'd gone with something that's a bit more abstract,
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for example, that may not really fit.
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Whereas when you look at something like audiobooks,
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there's another one of my applications
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where the It's UI is almost entirely native.
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And by native, I mean it's just using standard Apple
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controls for the most part with a few tweaks and adjustments.
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So for that, I have a bit more latitude
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in terms of how I actually design it,
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because the one is very-- if your application has
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a very strong design baggage to it,
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you'll have to match that throughout the application,
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or throughout your icon as well, to make them consistent.
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If you have a fairly generic UI for your application,
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you probably have a bit more latitude, I'd say,
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in terms of the actual concept.
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And then as you're working with a designer,
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the process from here gets fairly straightforward.
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Once you have a concept, you'll communicate that to them
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in various ways-- in words, in pictures, in just sketches.
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And then you typically give it to a designer,
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and they'll do wire frames.
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And wire frames are sketches, depending
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on how you're talking to.
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But these are just simple line drawings
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showing the overall structure of the icon,
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how it will vaguely look.
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And often this is where they'll throw out
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a lot of different concepts and ideas.
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So they'll say, here's--
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I understand you want a cutting board with some kitchen utensils on it.
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Well, here's a couple of examples of what that would look like.
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A lot of what this is trying to do is take it from a concept into an actual thing that you can talk about
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and be able to say, "I like this, but not that. I like that, but not this."
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And that's often really difficult to do in words, so by putting it into sort of these rough wire frames,
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that sort of really helps put that together.
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Once you kind of narrow in on a topic from there, then you'll move on to kind of, okay, rough mock-ups.
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And these are sort of, at least from my experience,
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this is where the designer kind of shifts from pen and paper
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into something like Photoshop or Illustrator
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or whatever they're actually going to make it in.
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And these are kind of-- it's almost
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like if you've seen a lot of 3D or 3D rendering and things,
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this is where you take the structure
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and you build it in the system and it
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looks like whatever it's supposed to look like.
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It's like, say you imagine it's Toy Story.
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You'll have a person with a hat and all that.
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But there's no real color or richness or texture to it.
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It's just a structure.
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And at this point, you're proofing sizes, layout,
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those kinds of things.
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And once you settle on that, they'll
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often then move to what I used to call a colored mockup.
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And this is where you're getting close to what the actual final
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thing will look like.
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And so it's that same concept or implementation
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that was in the rough mockup phase,
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but it now has richness and texture and color
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and is getting very close to what the final product will
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And at each step in this process,
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the designer is typically saying, what do you like?
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What don't you like?
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What should I change?
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And the goal really, as a developer in this process,
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is to try and make changes as early as you can.
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Identify problems, identify things that you're not
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going to want to do, things that won't work,
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as early as you can.
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Because the more you are invested
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into the process down the road, the harder
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it is for your designer to make changes,
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or at least the more expensive it's going to be for your designer
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make changes because they essentially
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have to start all over again.
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And so be very careful of that.
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And also it's something you want to be thinking of in terms
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of with your designer about the timeline, costing, et cetera,
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for your application.
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This icon is you want to make sure
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that you have some understanding of how many iterations you
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can do at each step, how long you can take.
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If you get all the way to the end, you're like, actually,
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I don't like it.
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What do you do?
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Because obviously they've spent a lot of time and work,
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and so you don't necessarily-- it's not really fair
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to be like, OK, well, let's start again,
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and that doesn't count.
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And then once you get to this phase,
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hopefully you like what you see, you know what
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it's going to look like.
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And then they'll typically start doing finals.
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And there's a variety of different formats,
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and especially for something like an app icon,
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because the app icon is going to be rendered
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into a variety of different sizes.
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I think right now in iOS, it goes from 1024 is the biggest
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down to-- I think it's 40 pixels.
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I'm not sure though, it's in that ballpark.
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It's a pretty small version of the icon.
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So what your designer is going to do is render the icon at
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those images, making adjustments as needed.
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Because obviously if you have a very rich and detailed
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version at 1024 by 1024 pixels, if you squeeze that
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down to 40 by 40, you're going to be losing a lot.
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And so often your designer will just simplify elements or
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throw things out or those kinds of things to make it
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work at the small stage.
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And if everything looks good, you say ship it,
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and off you go.
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And so that's kind of the process that I went through with my recipe book,
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with the Icon Factory.
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It went basically in that process.
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We had a few mistakes along the way.
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I ended up changing my mind about my recipe book.
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Luckily, we caught that early enough in the process
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that I sort of-- in the early wire framing rough mock-ups phase.
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So we went back, and it wasn't a huge deal for the designers,
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because they hadn't really done the coloring, or the richness,
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or the multi-size stuff yet.
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So we caught it pretty early.
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But overall, the process went great.
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Hopefully, I've had a lot of good responses so far from my users
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that like the icon, and what it was replacing
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was something that I think I did with ClipArt or something
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back when the app first launched, which is kind of awful.
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So I'm glad it actually has something designed and proper
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in there now.
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And OK, so that's how you design an icon.
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Again, I highly recommend the Icon Factory.
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Other people I've heard are really good are Pacific Helm.
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I've heard they're really nice.
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And there's a lot of freelance developers.
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If you go in Dribbble, you can see tons and tons
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of freelance designers who will make great icons for your apps.
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It's for the last and the third and final topic for today.
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I'm going to talk about app acquisitions.
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This is also actually relevant to me.
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One of my apps was recently acquired.
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I'm not going to talk about the details of that yet.
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It's not yet public.
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Nothing major, nothing dramatic.
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It's one of my more minor apps, at least in terms
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of from a business perspective for me.
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It was acquired by someone else.
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And I thought it would be interesting to talk
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about the process of how that works
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and the rules that Apple establishes for the App Store.
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So really, if someone wants to acquire your app, which
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is for the concept what we're going to talk about is someone's
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going to take financial ownership and responsibility
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for the application, there's really
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three ways they can do that.
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They can do what you call, as you could call, a full buy,
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which is where they're not really buying your application.
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They're buying you and your company.
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And not necessarily, I guess, you
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is probably a negotiable part.
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But they're buying the company that owns the application.
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And so a great example of this was
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Tweedy, where Twitter bought 8bits, as best I understand,
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which was Lauren Brikter's company.
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And they took over his developer account.
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And nothing really changed in terms
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of from a user's perspective for a lot of that.
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The application just sort of kept running
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and was rebranded.
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And they took over the whole account.
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That works only really well if the person
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doing the acquisition wants to buy your entire portfolio.
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Or if you have one app that's easy,
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they just want to buy that app.
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But the problem is they're also taking control
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of all the other apps, all the other parts.
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So for me, that would be tricky if someone, for example,
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wanted to buy my recipe book.
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I also have audio books.
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And so what would you do in terms of-- if they bought
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the whole thing, they're buying both parts,
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which may not necessarily make sense for the person doing
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the acquisition.
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So that's one way to do it.
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The second way-- and this is the way that, unfortunately, it
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tends to happen most often in the App Store--
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is that you essentially have to end of life your old app
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and resubmit it under their developer account.
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So it's the same app just moved over.
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And the reason you have to do that is Apple currently does not allow apps to be transferred
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from one developer account to the other.
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Specifically, if you look in the iTunes Connect FAQ, they say, "No, you can't transfer an
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app to another developer account on iTunes Connect.
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You can add that app to another account, remove the app from your current account, and upload
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it as a new app to iTunes Connect."
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And that's direct out of Apple's documentation for "Is it possible?
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Which is a little awkward.
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I'm sure there's good reasons for them to do it.
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I really wish they made this possible.
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It doesn't happen enough that I feel
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like it would be overly burdensome for Apple
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to allow them to just change an app from one developer account
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to the other.
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Ultimately, my guess is really it's just
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there's one number in a database somewhere that
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changes from this developer to that developer.
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But for whatever reason, Apple doesn't do that.
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So if you want to do a typical transfer,
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you have to essentially end of life one of your apps
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and submit it to the other one.
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This is really awkward for a user
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Because if it's a paid app, they would have to then repurchase it in order
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to get future updates and things.
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So often you'd need to do it with a major update or something that
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would be a logical break anyway.
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So if you were going from a version 2 to version 3,
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that would be an opportunity to do it.
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But otherwise, it's always a little tricky.
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But that's kind of what you're stuck with.
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And then the last way to do it is basically
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that you would continue to manage the app,
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but someone else owns it within your store, which is kind of awkward
00:14:23
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but can work, where it's still being sold under your name,
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but someone else is responsible for the money that they get,
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as well as the updates being done to it.
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It sort of works.
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But basically what you end up doing,
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if someone wants to acquire your app,
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is you're going to pull your app from the store,
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and they're going to resubmit it under their account.
00:14:40
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If that doesn't work for what they're doing,
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then ultimately right now, they're
00:14:44
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going to have to purchase your entire developer
00:14:46
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account and your entire developer portfolio.
00:14:49
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All right, that's it for today's show.
00:14:51
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As always, if you have questions, comments, concerns,
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I'm on Twitter @_DavidSmith.
00:14:55
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And otherwise, I hope you have a good weekend.
00:14:57
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Happy coding, and I will talk to you next week.