#devgeeks

The side project I have been working on for the last two months is finally live.

http://pixfor.me

Pixfor is, in many ways, the 21st century update on the idea of leaving disposable cameras on the tables at weddings. It is also a great deal more than that.

It's a combination of an app (currently iOS only) and a SaaS web site. 

OK, I know that's a terrible song, but this is the beginning of something different for me.

No longer content to just write software for other people, I have decided to have a go at creating my own product. I struggled to come up with an idea that was both interesting to build and thought people might actually have a use for. Then one night I came up with the idea for Pixfor.

Pixfor is not revolutionary. There, I said it. There are other "guest photography" apps available for the iPhone right now. Most have fairly mediocre UI/UX, and nearly all are terribly mired in the one niche – weddings – but they could still be used for other things in theory... I suppose.

However, I am hoping that even though many of the Pixfor concepts are available elsewhere, Pixfor comes together as an altogether more interesting and useful tool than those already out there. I see Pixfor useful not just as another guest photography app (with a much better pricing model, mind you) but as a much more generally useful online shared photo album.

Apple's Photostream is awesome. I love it. Combined with an Apple TV it becomes every bit as magical as Apple claim. Unfortunately, it's kind of a shame that only my photos go into it instead of mine and my wife's (as an example). We take many many of photos of our kids, as I am sure most parents do, but unless she actively sends me one of the ones she takes or we sync her photos to the same iPhoto album as I use (annoying, but possible)... I might never see and enjoy those photos.

If I set up a "Family album" for us in Pixfor and we both checked in to it... we could use the Pixfor app to take photos of our kids and they would all just automatically be available for either of us to look at at any time here at pixfor.me. I could then easily share one of the photos my wife took on my Twitter stream, etc.

It's been almost two months since my last post, but that's because I have been working hard on a new app. In fact, an entire new product.

I'll be able to post more soon including some of the custom plugins I wrote for the app.

It's a camera-based app at heart so I needed a custom camera overlay view as well as some changes to make the camera more responsive (there was a horrible delay after clicking the "use" button in the core PhoneGap Camera API).

I am hoping to find a way to make the camera functionality open source and abstract enough that it would be useful to someone else.

I have decided to move the blog to tumblr for a few of reasons.

I was sick of managing the comment spam on the previous WordPress blog

I was sick of managing the software/security updates on the previous WordPress blog

I wanted an easy way to post to the blog when I was out and about on an iOS device using Markdown 

I wanted to see how well Tumblr works for a blog with it's own domain, etc

I wanted to learn how to theme Tumblr 

So far it seems to be going OK. Some things are certainly easier (less maintenance, easier posting) but some things are more tedious (static "landing pages" for the apps, etc).

I will be updating the theme a bit at a time. Cleaning up the posts so the images are no longer coming from the previous WordPress blog, extending the theme to include comments/discussion/likes/etc and adding more social media integration (apart from just Twitter).

So what we have here is a failure to communicate update...

Between moving house in September, the birth of my beautiful daughter Ivy in October and entering a new start-up phase at my “day job”... I just haven’t been keeping up with this blog.

I mean seriously.. the last post was about the Brisbanesounds app not having been approved yet. That app has long since been approved and is going quite well.

I am in a post release slump…

I can’t work on the 4ZzZfm app anymore until either some bugs are found or the new website goes live and I can start adding features for the next version/update.

So now I am wondering what my next devgeeks iPhone project will be?

Since releasing the 4ZzZ app, I have been contacted by a few people who seem interested in getting an iPhone app made. I have replied to them all asking what they are looking for so I can determine if I want to do it – or if I can do it, for that matter… I am still very new to this.

No one has gotten back to me yet so I feel a tad in limbo.

I know what I should probably be doing is going back to the books and iTunesU videos, etc and learning more about iPhone development so that when the next project DOES come along I will be ready… but it was just so much more fun making something real rather than just doing tutorials, etc.

*sigh*

I have decided with the reactivation of the Devgeeks name through my interest in iPhone application development that the devgeeks.* domains needed a facelift and some actual content.

So here it is. The new devgeeks.org site.