Obuchalka. The story of the iPhone manual

Prehistory

We are employees of one of the very first companies that appeared on the market for sales of Apple equipment. For over 18 years, we have delighted residents of Rostov with innovative developments and advanced Apple technologies. In addition to sales, we have a successful support department in our company that helps users to master and fully utilize our products.

After analyzing the main issues that customers have come to us, we realized that most of them are of the same type and can be completely resolved by users on their own. This gave us the idea of ​​creating visual instructions with which any user could easily adjust work with the iPhone.

The first steps

We took the idea to create an application for Windows and Mac. We tried to make the videos simple and understandable, despite the fact that they were voiced by our employees in "home" conditions. In order not to delay the development of a cross-platform application, we chose the Appcelerator Titanium platform.

Initially, we wanted to make the product accessible, informative and easily perceived, although it was worth a lot of work. Video tutorials and instructions were rewritten several times in order to achieve the best possible result. There is no denying that we have gained a lot of experience.
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After several months of painstaking work, the application got to its audience.

The very first version for desktop computers

To assess the result of our efforts, we immediately began to collect feedback. It was joyful that there were a huge amount of positive feedback and thanks. Listening to the wishes and comments, we continued to refine the application.

Adaptation for iOS

As time goes by, and after almost a year, we noticed that the iPhone and iPad began to replace stationary computers and laptops, and some users became unavailable to our application, as there was no computer to install it. It was decided to release a separate application for iOS. The first step was a product for the iPhone. Everything had to be created from scratch - new videos, instructions.

The target audience was selected new iPhone users. Basically, difficulties arise at the beginning of work with the device and our application was created to help in difficult situations. In fact - we collected useful tips, answers to frequently asked questions, instructions and video tutorials that will help set up your phone “for you”.

How to create a video

When creating videos, we had a choice of how to implement it. At first, we tried to shoot actions from the iPhone to a separate camera, as Apple does, but the quality did not work very well (to put it mildly) (we didn’t want to shoot the studio yet). Then they tried to make videos by recording video from iPhone, transmitted via AirPlay Mirroring via Wi-Fi, presented in iOS 5 on iPhone 4S. Almost immediately faced with the fact that a) a blue bar constantly “looms” at the top, which somehow needs to be disposed of, b) AirPlay Mirroring is interrupted when using some standard programs (in particular, calls), and c) you need to impose a separate animation of behavior fingertips.

I had to bite the bullet and install a jailbreak in order to use the excellent Display Recorder program, which is not available in the App Store. This greatly simplified video recording, since the program not only makes a quality recording, but also imposes a “white circle” that repeats all the movements of the fingers. Further processing of the video took place in an excellent program ScreenFlow , which we have long used to create screencasts.



When creating the first batch, the video had to go on a lot of compromises and concessions in order not to delay the release of the program. For example: in all videos the same music track is used (composition, whipped up in GarageBand). But we decided to fix all these shortcomings in the next versions of the program.

In the end, the question arose about the storage of video. The idea of ​​storing video in the program itself was refused almost immediately, so as not to inflate the size of the application (even on average, this added + 50MB to the size). We didn’t want to do our own video server yet, so we decided to try via Dropbox. The result was surprisingly very good, and the video can be watched even at the average speed of the mobile Internet.

Design

First, there were ideas to find a team of your own designer or give a job to a freelancer. But then they decided to try their own strength. In my opinion, it turned out very well, considering that none of us is professionally engaged in design.

It turned out that it was not a problem to find graphics, I really liked Glyphish , which I met in many applications on the App Store. And the price was pleasantly surprised.

App Store

The selected name does not claim originality, but fully reflects the essence of the content - Obuchalka.

We worked on the application for 3 months, in parallel carrying out the support of our company's clients. In early June, our program was ready and sent to Apple censors.



The application was surprisingly very quickly approved (only 5 days) and on June 10 it appeared on the shelves of the App Store. Then a pleasant surprise was waiting for us - Obuchalka quickly rose to the Top paid section of Education, and then to the general Top 100 paid got. However, as it turned out, this doesn’t need a lot of sales, so swimming in champagne had to be postponed;)

Now we try ourselves in a new field - marketing. The initial surge was achieved by simply sending links to friends and posting the news on personal pages on Facebook and Vkontakte. Then we put the news on our website and included it in the monthly newsletter for our customers. It turned out that staying in the top is a hard and daily work.

But we are not going to stop there! We still have enough volume information base which I would like to present to iPhone users. So the second portion of video tutorials is already in preparation. As they say - “Stay tuned”.



The tutorial is available in the App Store at this link . We are very interested in user reviews to understand which direction to go next.

UPD. Arrived promotional codes, parse:
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