#zdo

First, let's get the bad news out. v1.1 went out last week and introduced a few new filters along with the "SF Pack". But, it also came with a few bugs, the most prominent of which was that nobody could do anything with the SF Pack filters. Added to that, people that were still on iOS 6 had the app crash on them whenever they tapped on a locked filter :( ZDO was meant to make videography easier for users, but instead made life miserable.

Don’t worry. Fixes are on the way!

iOS 7 introduced a few quirks around recording videos which caused ZDO to fail at recording videos the very first time the App is launched. Especially around accessing the Microphone the very first time an App tries to record a video, where iOS 7 has a new dialog asking for permission. And, for some weird reason, this causes the movie recorder to fail.

This flow went untested before the launch, and now that everyone seems to be having this issue, I’m pushing out a fix for it right away. I’ve already submitted the v1.1 build to the App Store, and hopefully it becomes available for download soon.

Of course, a point release is not worth a +.1 versioning if all it’s gonna do is fix bugs! That’s what the +.0.1 releases are for. So, it’s gonna include new filters as well. 8 of them in all. 3 free ones, and a new premium pack of 5.

Go ZDO!

There's a saying in CS that goes:

There are two hard things in Computer Science: Cache Invalidation, Naming Things, and Off-By-One Errors ;)

My last blog post was almost 4 months ago. And I believe I said I'll have the App out "next thursday" back then. Yeah... time flies :( When I accepted the offer at Shutterfly, my thoughts were that compared to a hectic job at a Startup, a job at a big public company (i.e, CORPORATE) would be pretty chill and allow me enough time to focus on other finer things in life, and to work on other personal projects.

But the only difference between Corporate Work, and Startup Work is the Quality of work – Not the Quantity. You get to work the same amount – if not more – but on relatively uninteresting things. Not that the actual work itself is uninteresting (BTW, uninteresting sounding work is sometimes the most crucial), but the overload with all the emails, and meetings, and emails about meetings (about emails) that go along with any Big Co gig. The bureaucratic friction and managerial politics could at times even make you wish that you were actually getting sh*t done in Congress instead. But, I digress! The point is that my biggest fear about starting on the new job came true – That I wouldn't find the time to finish up my work on my App, and I would stop working on it. And it's only gonna get worse next year, when my commute gets longer due to a building move from Sunnyvale to Santa Clara.

Well tonight, all that changes. I finally worked on the final bits of ZDO this past weekend, and hooked up the In-App purchase flow, which was the last remaining task, and hit "Distribute..." on Xcode just about an hour ago. Now, it's time for me to cross my fingers and wait for Apple to approve it.

If only I had spent these 3 - 4 days worth of work back in June, and submitted the App back then... I could've potentially blown people's minds with a slick never-before-seen user interface. But now, it's just gonna be an app that looks similar to IDEO's Spark that got released last week :/ (which, BTW, is a beautiful well-designed app)