#xoxco

Our pal (and XOXCO part-timer) Michael Way shows off his ability to magically conjur a Packagr logo. The future is very bright indeed!

The new iPad version of XOXCO Dispatch hit iTunes yesterday, and it is currently featured prominently in the newsstand section of the app store! 

All of the back issues, now in a fancy, sliding iPad magazine format, are available for free in the app, and there are a bunch of goodies lurking in them like free copies of my low polygon app. And of course essays by Adam and I, cool illustrations by Bushra, and lots of links to nerdy stuff.

Now, our zine is available as an email, as an ebook on your Kindle (and other readers), or as a universal iOS app... all published and controlled in one place: Packagr.

Our multi-platform, multi-format publishing tool Packagr was featured on the most recent episode of Jeffrey Zeldman's "The Big Web Show."

I hate to be humble, but it turns out that Katie and I are the best parents in the world, and our daughter Zelda is already turning out to be way above average in all measurable categories. At just five weeks old, she is already wearing Paul Frank socks.

One of the other regulars at Once Over told us, after gazing at Zelda for a few minutes, turned to us and said, "She really is quite beautiful, for a white baby."

...

I have been drawing a lot lately. I got a cheap stylus from Amazon, and it has completely changed the way I use my iPad. I now doodle constantly in one of my drawing apps. I draw stuff for work too, user interfaces and crazy box-arrow-cloud-question marks. I am piling up virtual notebooks of stuff. I feel bad for all my fancy Japanese paper notebooks that will never get used.

My favorite feature of tablet drawing is being able to delete my drawings. There is no opportunity cost with tablet drawing - I can pour new pages into my journal whenever I want, and I can throw away as many pages as I want without creating any trash. I can draw anything, as much as I want, as big as I want, and only keep the bits and pieces I need.

Before I draw anything worth keeping, I always draw 20 amorphous blobs first.

...

In between drawings, I have been keeping amazingly busy with work at XOXCO. The whole team has been embedded inside a big corporate client since mid-March, and we've been secretly working on a prototype product for them. It has been going very well, though we are aching to flex our product design muscles more than we've been able to. Meanwhile, we are fielding an array of potential clients, meaning that whenever I am not writing code or bouncing a baby, I am on the phone, telling someone how amazing we are.

Most of the time, people seem to believe me.

Since Adam rejoined the team, we've been talking about and working on a new, more focused pitch to make to prospective clients. We set aside time each week to hone and design this pitch in preparation to send it out to everyone we've ever worked with. Ironically, we've been so busy with work that comes to us from referrals and return clients, we haven't had a chance to make much progress. Last week, we finally spent a few solid hours working on it, and I can now move forward on the layout.

I firmly believe spending time looking inward at your own processes and identity are an important part of delivering value to clients. We have to know what we do, how we do it, and why we do it so that we can present our solutions to clients with confidence.

I'm also dying to get the XOXCO blog set up and beautified so that I can start posting more stuff there. I imagine a combination of code, weeknote-style updates and interesting links we find in our daily research and education. I've been spending a lot of time with blogs from companies like BERG and the Really Interesting Group. I want a place where we can share stuff that adds context to who XOXCO is and what we're about, and allows us to demonstrate and explore our areas of expertise in public.

Boy oh boy, this has been a busy week already!

Last night, the new version of Make Pixel Art hit the iPad app store. This morning, the Make Pixel Art for Chrome was updated as well. As part of these launches, I've also made some changes on the server side to make it easier and faster to find the latest pixels that have been submitted to our pixel library.

We're also counting down the days until our iPhone app, Pixel Pix is released. If the review process takes the same time for this app as it did for the iPad app, it will be in the iTunes store on Friday afternoon.  Katie is reaching out to the press and some potential partners about our launch, and I am busy finishing up the website and making galleries of example images.  I also need to record proper demo videos for both apps -- something I find particularly difficult because it involves talking and drawing at the same time.

I hope you are excited for the massive tsunami of Pixel Pix-created images to hit the social media wetlands. You may want to reenforce your levee system now!

In the meantime, Damien, one of our engineers here at XOXCO, has been hard at work building a prototype of what may turn into our next product. Though Damien has contributed to all of our products and projects since starting more than a year ago, this is the first product that he brought to us as a completely new idea.

This is a big milestone for me, as my initial goal for XOXCO was to create an environment in which many products could be conceived and brought to fruition -- not just by me, but by everyone in the team. That Damien was comfortable enough with his place at XOXCO and the way we do things to bring his brand new (really great) idea to us is a definite sign that we're heading in the right direction.

I read a lot of things about new "startups" or "labs" whose goal it is to iterate quickly and release a lot of products to "see what sticks."  However, I feel like I never actually see any products launching from these groups, sticky or not.  Obviously these little labs can't launch EVERY idea, but I think more of their attempts could be made public -- even if the product ends up on the trash heap.

Since becoming XOXCO, we've launched SendTab (actually three separate clients for iPhone, Chrome and Safari AND a cloud server), PeoplePods, Make Pixel Art, and Stay Useful.  Soon we'll add Pixel Pix to that list, and then Damien's TOP SECRET PROJECT as well.

On top of that, we've launched brand new products or built sites for MediaBugs, NeighborGoods, Dooce, The Zeitguide, The Rumpus, Marimekko, Fugaboo, Helsinki Design Lab, Safari Books Online, KIA, a major league football team whose name I can't remember, The Discovery Channel, and The Grammys.

AND we've released half a dozen popular free jQuery plugins that have been widely adopted.

We've built with Javascript, PHP, and Objective C. We've built things using Drupal, Node, Mongo, MySQL, local storage, SQLite and Phonegap. We've built Chrome plugins, Safari plugins, iOS apps, HTML 5 apps, become experts in canvas drawing, and responsive design.

We've done all these things without external funding, and we've done it with a team of just 3 people.