Polar Bear Farm

On the 24th of October we will be celebrating our 1st birthday. I thought i’d write a little about how the company started and the experience up to now, not only because hopefully it may be interesting to others, but also because in the day to day business of getting things done, you often forget to sit for a minute and reflect on where you’ve come from. Being the first commercial developer for the iPhone and iPod Touch has made this last year one of the most interesting and enjoyable of my life. I started out a year ago, releasing a small application called “Search”, it was the first application to allow people to search contacts and calendar events by keyword on the iPhone, a feature which is still absent from the phone. It instantly became popular amongst the jailbreak community. At that stage, there was no official SDK, no documentation on how to develop, just header files dumped from the framework binaries from the phone, and the foundations of the iPhones desktop operating system counterpart to go by. But that’s only half the story, none of this would have been possible without the talented and dedicated people who spent countless hour in first jailbreaking, then building a toolchain for those who where chomping at the bit to develop for this platform. While we supported the jailbreak community, even sponsoring a significant repository for applications when it was threatened with closure, for us, jailbreaking was not a rebellion against Apple’s control. It was simply out of a passion for the platform, that we couldn’t wait to write applications to make the phone even better. We assumed that Apple must have been preparing official means of native app development, that was what we were wanting and hoping for, but in the mean time, we couldn’t wait.

Search was such a success, that a week after it was released I decided that I wanted to go take this to the world and exhibit at MacWorld ‘08 in January. I called long time friend Guy Horrocks who had always been interested in entrepanurial startups and asked him if he’d be interested in coming on board and help build this company. A week later we had a 10′ x 10′ exhibit booth booked in San Francisco for MacWorld 08. So we were two guys from the bottom of the world in New Zealand, where the iPhone wasn’t even legitimately available, flying half way around the world to San Francisco to attend the worlds biggest Apple conference, exhibiting software for the worlds most revolutionary mobile platform, which had no SDK, no official way of distributing the software, without even knowing whether there would be native 3rd party support in the future! Looking back on it, it was kind of a cheeky, and risky move, but one which i’ve never regretted.

In the few months before the show, I was playing with various aspects of the phone and software, but the thing I was most interested in, was finding out what the limit of the power of this device was. I spent hundreds of hours playing with layer kit (core animation as it’s now called) in particular the CoverFlow interface. Hours were spent trying to reverse engineer the methods used by the iPod app on the phone trying to get a customizable CoverFlow interface we could use in applications for non music uses. I eventually gave up trying to figure it out, and wrote my own CoverFlow version from scratch, using layer kit. (As it turned out, my previous code which tried to use existing API’s was only a line of code away from fully working!) I even managed to get live video playing in a CoverFlow style interface. The abilities of the phone shocked me. This lead me into thinking about video recording on the phone. Apples iPhone presentation demo rig which mirrored the iPhone display on an external display, and later the Aspeslagh Bro’s (Ecamm) video streaming hack demo, triggered a video obsession in me. Could the iPhone record video? This was a huge technical challenge, after a couple of weeks of sustained work, reversing various frameworks, looking for hints and methods which may be useful, trying many different approaches. The biggest challenge being, how to actually get pixel data to write to the iPhone’s flash memory. I finally cracked it at 5am one morning, after working trough the night and several straight days. An immensely satisfying moment which went on to produce ShowTime, the first video recording application for the iPhone, which was ready for release just a week before we left to exhibit at MacWorld.

MacWorld exceeded all our expectations. Interest in what we were doing and our applications was through the roof, especially from Apple employees. The days, while long and exhausting, were encouraging for the future in this industry. These two applications, Search and ShowTime, were and are still two of the most requested additions to the iPhone, and it’s those two products which truly launched us as a serious iPhone development company, before any sight of the SDK. Search went on to reach over half a million downloads, and ShowTime well over a million downloads, including a significant number from within Apple, in what was an ‘underground’ hacking market. A feat which we’re immensely proud of.

Since then we’ve been lucky enough to have worked with some of the most interesting in the community, travel to various places, and meet with some of the biggest brands in the world! On the back of MacWorld we formed a close relationship with a company called GoGo Apps (now known as Tapulous), after meeting CEO Bart Decrem at the show. Since then we’ve worked along side them writing the initial jailbreak version of Twinkle (a Twitter client with a heavy focus on location), camping out at their Downtown Palo Alto office for the month around WWDC and the lead up to the App Store launch, we had the pleasure of working with their team which at the time included Sean ‘iApp-a-day’ Heber, Thomas Muldowny, Mike Lee, Louie Mantia, and others. We’ve also had the opportunity to travel to various large corporate headquarters and conferences.

Now with our existing products on the App Store, Telegram, Dictaphone, Note Pad, and Duck Shoot and with some longer projects simmering away, we’re thrilled to be celebrating our first year as a native iPhone developer, making us one of the oldest around! Keep an eye out closer to the 24th of October, as celebration plans launch into full swing. So from the team here, Guy, Cody and Myself, thanks to those that have supported us from the jailbreak days, through to our App Store transition. You’ve helped build this company from the most unlikely beginnings! Stay tuned, we’re just getting started!

Layton Duncan