A Mini Interview with Jeff Smith, CEO of Smule

Almost every iPhone user should be familiar with Smule. They’re the “sonic media applications” company behind the popular Ocarina application, where you blow into the iPhone’s microphone and use your fingers on the screen to control the notes you wish to play. Their latest creation, Zephyr, allows you to send messages to random people around the world by drawing on the iPhone screen with your finger. We caught up with Smule’s CEO, Jeff Smith, to ask a few questions about Smule and their iPhone development processes:

Mobile Orchard: Do you use any special tools or libraries beyond the norm to help you develop your iPhone apps?

Jeff Smith: We’ve built a comprehensive audio engine which is fundamental to what we do. This audio engine allows us to create unique sound on device or even in the cloud (for example, with Ocarina, you can send your songs to everyone over email, even if they don’t have an iPhone).

What was your first iPhone application and what were the biggest obstacles you needed to overcome to finish and release it?

Our first iPhone application was the acclaimed Sonic Lighter. The primary challenge we had with the Sonic Lighter was CPU processing requirements. Our first prototype required 210% of the CPU — which would prove difficult once the product was running on an actual iPhone versus the simulator! If you think about it, our physical model of a flame was quite complex and rendered 30 frames/second on the iPhone GPU. In parallel, our audio engine was running several scripts in parallel, one to produce the flame sound, another to detect your breath — you can blow out the Sonic Lighter flame, and yet a couple other scripts to detect Sonic Modem gestures — the product allows you to ignite other phones, transmitting the ‘ignite’ instruction over sound. Plus, Sonic Lighter sends a lot of data across the network, allowing you to see other people’s ignitions across the globe. So, we had some optimization challenges before we could release the Sonic Lighter. At this stage over 200K people have downloaded this extremely popular application.

As a developer, what new features would you like to see most on the iPhone or in the iPhone SDK?

We’re actually pretty happy with what Apple has provided with the second generation iPhone hardware and several of the enhancements in the 2.2 firmware. Candidly, they have been extremely responsive to issues we’ve reported. We think Apple is a world-class organization.

As a developer at one of the iPhone’s most esteemed new development shops, what advice can you give to other developers looking to make a mark in the iPhone world? What really counts?

I think the market for apps is maturing. I see the level of polish and execution for top selling applications continues to grow. My fear is that before long, it will prove a challenge for a couple of creative people to do this on their own. Yet that is part of the beauty of the App Store today.