How much information is enough? And how much is too much?

In the context of PocketChris this was a question that I spent a lot of time trying to figure out.

If you have ever been on one of the workshops, you know that getting me to talk about photography is a lot easier than getting me to stop talking.

After having built several test versions with different chapter lengths and after carrying them around on my iPhone for a while, about 1000 words per chapter felt about right. Short enough to provide for a quick five-minute information snack, but long enough to feel like you got your money's worth.

This is actually a huge problem that a lot of writers face. Writing a lot of text is easy. Expressing an idea in many words is simple. Simple for the writer that is. It places most of the strain on the reader, who has to sift through more text to pick out the good information.

So less words in a PocketChris article does not mean that I was too lazy to write more. It means that more time has gone into making the chapter contain all the important information in an as easy to digest way and in as little writing as necessary. One thousand words to be precise.

There are audiobooks that cost a lot more in their abridged form just for that reason. Time is a valuable good in today's world as much as I don't want my own time to be wasted, I don't want to waste anybody else's time.

I didn't always manage to hit the 1000-word mark. Some of the articles are over 1200 words long, but I still feel comfortable that I've managed to boil things down enough to give you your money's worth.

I have often been asked why I don't just add new chapters as in-app purchases instead of doing several apps in parallel.

Here's my reasoning behind that:

Size vs. Ad-Hoc Download

I want to keep the purchase hurdle for PocketChris as low as possible. If an app is over 20 MB in size, you can only download it over WiFi or through your Mac that the iOS device syncs with. I have often ended up at a point where I wanted to impulse-buy an app, but couldn't because I was on 3G or EDGE. In some of these cases I forgot about it again and didn't buy it once I was back home.

Infrastructure

There are several ways to provide in-app purchases. One is to deliver the content with the app, but only making it accessible to the user once they paid. This could easily drive the app over the 20 MB limit. See above. An alternative way is to download content from a server after purchase, but that would mean to maintain server infrastructure, and potentially a lot of it, depending on how successful the app will be.

Psychology

Maybe it's just me, but I kind of like to buy something and know that I own the whole thing. The freemium model where you get the app for free and then buy advanced features as in-app purchase never really appealed to me, because it always tends to give me the feeling that I'm being cheated. I'd much rather deliver individual apps that are complete entities, and where you know what you'll get before you buy. The PocketChris model is very traditional: you can try it out because the first app is free (but still gives you great value), and if want more of it, there are other packages in the series that you can purchase.

Collectability

The collector's instinct is strong. A lot of People want things to be complete. The greater plan is to make PocketChris into its own little universe of apps that complement each other. iOS folders facilitate this with ease, and my hope is that PocketChris owners will have a PocketChris folder on their iPhone that they fill with good content over time.

» more PocketChris fun facts

» PocketChris website

I love reading Seth Godin's blog. He often puts up one of those little pieces of wisdom that make me go "oh, right, I knew that..."

This one is about the lizard brain and how it gets in the way of shipping stuff.

With shipping Seth means about anything that you produce, anything that gets out there and that can be criticized. By you, by others. It goes even beyond that, but we'll stick with this for the sake of this article.

Several years ago I underwent an important transition. I began to allow myself to not be perfect. To ship stuff that my lizard brain would've not be happy about. This lead to a lot of good things. I got more practice in shipping stuff and thus got better at it. With practice I became better at judging when things were ready enough to be shipped. And as a result I gained more experience in dealing with the things that frightened me.

I learned that people will accept it even if it's not perfect. People will even appreciate to see that you are a human being with flaws like theirs. You will not be ripped to pieces when making a mistake. As long as you own up to it and fix it.

Case in point: Today I got an email from my friend Andres in Argentina. He has an old iPod touch that is caught in iOS 3.1.3. No update possible. I though it was a good choice to release PocketChris Advanced with a minimum requirement of iOS 4.0. What I didn't account for was that iTunes on a computer will allow you to download any version of an app, no matter if your device supports it or not.

So here's a case where people potentially can spend a couple of bucks on something and then find out they won't be able to use it. Not a lot of people, but still too many.

Instead of spending a lot of time trying to think up each and every corner case that might happen, and in the process losing a lot of time, I decided to take a decision that felt right and go with it. As a result we now have a problem. But we also have an app out there that works for 99% of iOS device owners out there.

A quick conversation with Johannes who does the software dev on PocketChris and I knew we had a way to fix it.

So the fix is now in the app store, PocketChris Advanced Photography will be available on devices as low as iOS 3.1 and we'll work around the potential issues with that inside the app.

So there, lizard brain!

This discussion started with someone on Twitter telling me the name PocketChris was a bad choice and I should change it.

I then asked my followers if they thought the name needed changing, and got pretty mixed results back. The majority of the responses was to keep the name, but in general they fell into two categories: "The name is just fine" and "The name doesn't say photography clear enough."

Actually the name PocketChris hasn't been chosen on a whim.

Here are some of the thoughts that went into deciding for it:

a) it should be unique, so it can be easily found in a sea of photography-related apps
b) it should be playful and fun and likeable
c) it should be linked to existing brands
d) it should be photography related
e) it should be easy to remember

Pretty early in the design process we decided for PocketChris to be an app that is purely portrait oriented.

My reasoning behind it was that I think even though there is a lot of content to read inside PocketChris, users are most likely to use it in a casual way, either as a quick reference, or to read a few paragraphs here and there or to quickly show someone a concept.

In my mind this is done best while holding the phone naturally (e.g. in portrait orientation) and while using the thumb to navigate.

This decision also allowed me to prepare the content in a way that would look its best and not have to consider several different orientations.

» more PocketChris fun facts

» PocketChris website

Today on Dec/30/2010 I submitted the first version of PocketChris to Apple. The process involves having Apple review the app and then hopefully see it pop up on the App Store soon. Usually within less than 10 days, sometimes dramatically faster.

This feels a bit like a historic event to me. It's the first time I am actually selling an app, and the seemingly simple PocketChris user interface doesn't really convey how much time and effort was spent to make it that simple and easy to use.

The PocketChris Fun Facts on this blog might be a bit of an indication.

It's all in the hands of Apple now, the app is waiting for review and it might take a week or longer until you can finally get your hands on it.

PocketChris Advanced Photography will have eight chapters about various topics: Stability, Histogram vs. RAW, Metering, Perspective, Pattern Matching, Zone System, Sensor Sizes and Focal Length.

PocketChris will be available at an introductory price of $1.99, the regular price will later be $2.99.

I can't wait to hear what you think about it!

» Follow this link to see all PocketChris apps available on the App Store

Did you notice the clicking sound when you swipe the wheel inside PocketChris?

It was clear to me from the beginning that in order to make the app feel right, it would need acoustic feedback when you turned the wheel.

Apple has done a great job training its users to the subtle click sound when operating different controls. The scroll-wheel/ball in the Magic Mouse makes a clicking sound when you turn it. It's artificial (unplug the USB port and turn the ball and you won't hear the sound). Tapping the keyboard on the iPhone makes subtle clicking sounds to give you feedback. The iPod click wheel even has it in its name.

It's an acoustic cue to trigger a tactile sense. And it works.

So I have borrowed it from Apple.

The wheel inside PocketChris clicks. This gives it some weight. And some tactile component. Biggest issue: trying to find the right sound.

It've been trying a lot of different sounds, many electronically generated, some from the real world. I pitched up sounds from various areas to get the high-pitched click I was looking for, but I failed.

Until someone (I think it was Johannes) told me to try a mouse click. Which I did, and I was instantly in love. All it needed was some slight pitching up, a few test runs with different volumes to find the one that just felt right and we were there.

So what you hear when you swipe the wheel inside PocketChris is the click of an old Logitech mouse, recorded through an Electro-Voice RE20 microphone, run throughan Aphex 230 voice processor, then slightly pitched up using Wavelab.

» more PocketChris fun facts

» PocketChris website

There are reasons why the PocketChris user interface has the layout it has.

The SD cards give you large and hard to miss targets to tap on. This way mis-taps are virtually impossible and the app is very likely to do what you want it to.

In my initial concepts, the wheel in the chapter viewer was a slider that went up and down next to the right of the viewing screen. This would have put left-handed users at a disadvantage though, making it harder to use for them. It would also have taken away screen real estate from the picture viewer.

So the decision was done to come up with some sort of wheel in the lower third of the screen, which is the natural place your thumb would go when holding the device.

Initial wheel layouts were in a way that would allow the entire wheel fit inside the screen, but only once we made the invisible parts of the wheel seriously overlap the size of the screen, it came together.

The wheel being mainly behind the picture viewer also gives it a certain connectedness to the pictures, thus making it feel more logical that the pictures change when you turn the wheel.

The click sound does the rest to drive home the mechanical nature of the app, adding a layer of perceived mechanics and weight to the wheel, almost like an intricate clockwork that is hidden behind the scenes of the app.

» more PocketChris fun facts

» PocketChris website

We tried a few different things for the chapter selection buttons in PocketChris, including CompactFlash cards, which, coming from a Canon 5D Mark II, are more familiar to me than SD cards, which tend to be rooted more in the consumer space.

In the end we went with SD cards though.

One reason was that it just fit much better into the interface and could be tiled much nicer in the portrait interface.

Another reason was that the target audience for PocketChris is more in the consumer than in the professional photography space.

So I put several SD cards on my scanner and sent the best ones off to Peter, and he did a great job making them into something that looked the exact right amount between being stylized and real.

One thing that didn't look right was the split second after you tap a card and it zooms up to you. If we used a small graphic, it would pixellate during the zooming and destroy the illusion. If we used a large graphic, the downsized version would get jagged edges and look wrong too.

What Peter and Johannes came up with together is pure genius: they built their own MIP mapping.

MIP mapping is a technique from computer gaming where you use the same texture in different resolutions depending on how far they are away from you.

Each of the buttons is actually two buttons, one for the small version in the interface, and one for the larger version while it zooms up to you. During the transition they are smoothly blended over to create a perfect illusion.

By the way, the SD cards come in red, blue and black, and there is a logic behind the choice, which should become apparent when more PocketChris apps are out in the App Store. Can you tell what the logic is?

» more PocketChris fun facts

» PocketChris website

If you read this article through to the end, you'll get the chance to win a free copy of the soon-to-be-released new PocketChris.

Here's a very typical Chris train of thought:

As PocketChris Advanced Photography I is nearing its release, I would really love it to get off to a good start.

One key way to achieve that is to have the free PocketChris Photography Basics on as many iOS devices as possible. Reason: the news system that is now in the v1.2 version will allow me to subtly remind every user of the free version that there's an advanced version available. And yes, it is really subtle, and it doesn't do push notifications, so you'll have to start PocketChris to get the notification.

Cunning plan, right?

It just hinges on one important thing: how many people have the latest version of PocketChris.

And here's how can we get PocketChris in as many hands as possible. Noticed how I said "we"? That's because you have a key role in this plan, you are my accomplice. This plan would be nothing without you.

The best way to get PocketChris in front of more people is to give it more visibility. On blogs, on Twitter, and on the iTunes store. As of writing this, the most important keyword "photography" returns PocketChris as #4 in the photography category. That is really really awesome!! Unfortunately the universal main results page of the iTunes store on the Mac and the PC only shows the first three results, and you'll have to click to see more. Getting into the sacred space of the top three photography apps is therefore really really important if you want your app to be seen a lot.

And here is how you can help push PocketChris up that ladder (and win something in the process): simply write an iTunes review. It doesn't have to be long, it doesn't have to be elaborate, it just has to be written.

» Follow this link to write a review in the US iTunes store
» Follow this link to write a review in the German iTunes store

Update: I changed the links above, let's hope they work now. Follow the link, then click "View in iTunes under the big icon. If the links don't work for you, you can also just go to iTunes, search for PocketChris and leave the review right at the product page.

On Sunday, Jan/2, five reviewers will be drawn from all those that have submitted a review between now and that date. That is two weeks from now. And those winners will receive an iTunes code for a free version of the upcoming PocketChris Advanced Photography I.

Can we do it?

I received several questions about if or when there would be an Android (or Windows Phone 7, or even WebOS) version of PocketChris.

I am completely thrilled that so many people want to use their smart phone to learn about photography! I believe that carrying an app like PocketChris in your pocket all the time is a truly great way to learn.

And I truly wish PocketChris was available on each and every current mobile platform.

But it isn't, and to help you understand why there is no version of PocketChris for your specific platform yet, I'd like to point you to this article on my private blog that might give you a bit of insight into all the thoughts and considerations that make an app like PocketChris.

The iOS App Store is bursting with apps. And photography apps are such a big genre, that they even have their own category.

Which begs the question: does the world need yet another photography app?

I've spent lots of time wading through the photography category, and while there are lots of fancy filter apps, photo taking apps, apps that swap faces, apps that show off someone's photography, ... while there are so many of that type, I found one type to be virtually non-existent: apps that teach photography.

I know I know, there are a few that try to use the iPhone as a teaching platform, and some of them come close, but none of them gave me what I was looking for.