Inverview with the Tapbots, creators of Weightbot, winner of Best App Ever’s Most Original UI award
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The latest Mobile Orchard podcast features an interview with UI designer Mark Jardine (Profile) and developer Paul Haddad (Profile) of Tapbots (Profile) about their Weightbot app.
Weightbot is both a commercial success — having sold over 100,000 copies — and a beautiful example of creating a custom UI on the iPhone (Video). It won Best App Ever’s Most Original User Interface award.
The interview is in three parts: (1) the origins of the app, (2) creating custom UI controls and (3) promoting the app. The last part is virtually a step-by-step guide to successfully promoting an app — be sure to catch it.
You can listen using the Flash player below, download the MP3, or subscribe to the iPhone Developer Podcast using the instructions at the bottom of this post.
For easy scanning of the interview, here is what was covered and when:
- 1:55 – Avoiding the mundane and the tedious in utility apps
- 2:20 – Inspiration from Wii Fit and Wall-E
- 3:20 – Creating utility that “do one thing really well and are fun to use”
- 4:50 – Communicating the design for implementation
- 7:00 – Programming custom UI controls
- 8:45 – Making the “flicking” behavior of a custom scroll-like view work properly
- 10:45 – Moving the bounds of a view to create the spinning/scrolling effect
- 14:00 – Pre-launch buzz
- 14:40 – TUAW picking up the pre-release screen shots
- 15:30 – Viral buzz from a demo video on YouTube
- 15:45 – Getting on Daring Fireball
- 17:15 – More sales on the weekend
- 17:30 – Big jump in sales from getting on Lifehacker
- 18:00 – Mac Rumors boost
- 18:10 – New Years resolution bump / importance of Europe and the UK
- 18:45 – Making a good amount of money even when not in the top-100
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We hope you enjoy the podcast, and if you have any suggestions of who we should interview (or want to be interviewed yourself), use our Contact page or leave a comment against this post. Thanks for listening!
Mark Jardine was also the UI designer for Oakley’s Surf Report iphone app.
great interview! lots of things to learn here; the custom UI controls was perfect timing for me 😉
This is probably the most used iPhone app in my arsenal. I think its become successful because it doesn’t look like the other off-the-shelf iPhone UI. Thanks Tapbots you raised the bar for all designers!