iMakeCard. The history of the development of the New Year program

When December is in the yard, snow is falling outside the window and the heart starts to beat stronger in anticipation of the upcoming New Year holidays, you begin to wonder what it is to give to a loved one, a loved one or just friends who fill in the countless friendlist in one or another social network. Of course, you cannot buy all the gifts, but everyone wants to pay attention.

This is how the idea of ​​creating an iMakeCard application was born. In it, you can choose any card you like and wish for the recipient, and then send it by e-mail, or place it on a page on Facebook or on Twitter.

Idea

Orientation was chosen for the American market, respectively, “iMakeCard” became English-speaking. Of course, we understood that there are quite a few similar programs in the App Store and the main task was to find the “zest” that will become our distinctive feature. There were many such "highlights", but since the development time was only 1 month and we wanted to place the application in the App Store before the holidays, we chose the most useful and interesting of them, and most importantly, none of the competitors suggested this.
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First, the animation and high-quality art. Of the variety of postcards that could be found in other applications, there were simple ready-made pictures; beautiful but monotonous; those that you can collect yourself and even small videos (of course, without the possibility of any changes or additions). Upon reflection, we decided to make a bet on animated cards with the author's design, which was done by an experienced artist, all cards are available for screens with retina.

Secondly, a selection of ready-made New Year and Merry Christmas greetings. This innovation allows you to easily find your favorite request in just a few seconds, which eliminates the lengthy invention of intricate phrases, or template texts. The presence in the database of about thirty congratulations makes it possible to find the right words for any relative, friend, or colleague. If, however, the user has a desire to write something on his behalf - in the “iMakeCard” provides the option of typing manually.

Third, simplicity and ease of use. All of us sometimes faced with the fact that we liked the interesting and necessary program turned out to be quite difficult to use, with a large number of functions, buttons, explanations to them. Our main goal was to simplify the use of the program, so we left only 3 necessary steps: the choice of cards, the choice of text and “share with friends”.

Design

Design came up themselves, gathered in the evening after work in one of the pizzerias. As my former boss used to say: “The design was developed by professional programmers.” We decided to arrange everything under the tree. Here are examples of how it all looked on paper:


An artist for postcards and an interface designer, who was supposed to give a beautiful picture of our astrakhan fur, were found on freelance. This is how our drawings were transformed:




All this is accompanied by beautiful animations.

Development

We didn’t have any special problems with the development, in the team there are 3 experienced iOS developers, and I wrote on Objective-C before the release of the first iPhone. All software development took about 2 weeks in free time. Most of the time it took to develop a beautiful interface. We have always refused to use third-party libraries and decided to write everything ourselves, with the exception of the sharing framework in the social network.

One of the most difficult tasks turned out to be importing into gif, the standard methods allow you to save the gif file, but it turned out to be gigantic in size, I had to write the save myself. The fact is that the standard CGImageDestination does not know how to maintain the difference between frames, but saves each CDR completely. In addition, to complete the creation of animation, he allocates a very large amount of memory, sometimes the program even fell in this place. We tried to use the ImageMagic library, but it turned out to be wasted time - saving took up to 2 minutes.

The second task was to upload the animation to Twitter, but he does not allow it. A third-party service was selected - twitpic. But here, too, everything was not easy, after the upload, terrible artifacts were noticeable on the last frame. A letter to the support, the answer, but the problem did not dare. Randomly noticed that if you follow the full link for the downloaded file, then everything worked like a clock.

The program was developed without using ARC. The coverflow effect was implemented by the UIScrollView successor, and an additional handler is created to reflect the CATransfrom3D with a scale of -1 on the Y axis. History is also implemented based on the UIScrollView from the interesting mechanism for reusing cells in UITableView and loading pictures in a separate stream. All interface animations, such as flying images into an envelope or departing from History, are implemented on the standard UIView animations mechanism.

Sales

Now a little about the bad. After successful registration of iMakeCard in the App Store, a site was created with a brief description of the program and the opportunity to send support and suggestions with suggestions. A little later they shot the video and posted it on Youtube.



Already on December 13, the program was available in the AppStore. Immediately started promoting, tweets were bought from popular sites, reviews were ordered. But it did not bring much success:



The last two days the program is distributed free of charge, and we are going to distribute it further.

We will be glad to hear your feedback, questions and comments!
iMakeCard: itunes.apple.com/app/id486368622