23 - The core thing

Things are out of our hands right now. Filippo is coding from a strict spec sheet. It's kinda scary, the spec sheet. It's like our dream has been annotated, analysed and rewritten into a text book. I'm hoping the magic that surrounds the idea isn't lost.

There's a bunch of stuff we're leaving out; a load of little animations that were in the demo video won't be there to start with. As well as some big and obvious features.

The core idea of Story though, will be there.

The core of the thing, is made up of three parts (I doubt this'll ever change):

1. Discover screen (where we feature the best stories out there)
2. Feed screen (everyone you follow, their stories appear here) 
3. Create screen (where you create your stories)

These are the three core things of Story that will be there in their rawest form from day one. Everything else is an added feature that isn't vital right now.

We're meeting Filippo next week for the first time since he started coding. He'll have 1 and 2 ready.

22 - Spice rack

I've always been keen on simple tech. Simple ideas executed well. I've always had a passion for clean ideas and clean design. Obviously Story is all of these things. Or is it? I thought so but when you lift up the hood...  

I have a 30 minute train ride into work each day. When I'm not coding, I fill these 30 minutes very easily thinking about what I need to do and what decisions need to be made to make a minimum viable version of our app. It was overwhelming at first. Everything from Amazon S3 bucket naming conventions to authentication methods were consuming my thoughts. There is an abundance of tools and frameworks and platforms I should and could develop this app on too, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. Which church do I worship at? Python, Rails, Node, PHP? MySql, PostgrSql, NoSql? Yii, Django, Codeigniter, Zend Framework? .NET? Joke. Eventually I left that candy store behind and decided to play to my strengths. Lightweight MVC PHP framework and MySql to build a RESTful API, Amazon AWS to handle hosting, storage, CDN, emails and a Github repo in a pear tree. This doesn't seem a bad start to me. 

What could go wrong? Well a number of things I guess. Will it scale? Yes and no. Will there be performance issues? Hopefully not. Should I care about these right now? Yes and no. I feel (maybe naively) that at this point there is no problem I can't overcome by chucking virtual machines at it. Having a nice flock of EC2 instances to handle any load actually makes me feel quite warm inside. So far, everything feels nice. My API is returning sweet little nuggets of json for consumption. I guess at this point that is all I can ask for. 

I'm sure at some point we will employ someone who will look at my little "spice rack" and shake their head like you do when your dad is making Ikea furniture. That will be a good day. In fact, I might take my little spice rack to some tech meetups and give it an airing. 

-Paul

21 - Emails

From Jamie the investor/mentor to me and Paul:

From Paul to Jamie:

From Paul to me a day later:

From me to Paul:

From Paul to me:

From John Gruber (!) to me regarding my 'Apple messing it up' thing:

20 - Apple are fucking it up

While Filippo's busy coding the app I'm going to explain how Apple are fucking it up and I'm not talking about the maps thing.

I got the new iPhone. You know, I need it. For the job. Anyway, I was just all chilling out looking up movies and shit when...

... Bottom button. Middle. As if I even need to point it out.

What is that? Swear to God I would sack every fucker responsible for letting that out. Whoever thought that was okay is not good at their job. In fact, they're bad at their job. And bad people shouldn't be working at Apple.

I feel like no designer would've let that happen. I've been in situations where manager fuckers stick their oar in and make design decisions and it's a scary thing.

Why doesn't it just say 'TV'? 'Music, Films, TV.'

They're fucking it up. Don't worry, I have a plan.

Me.

Cook needs to go. And be replaced by me. Thing is, I love Apple, but I love Story more so I'm only gonna be able to give it one day a week I reckon, maybe two. So maybe Cook stays. But as my number 2. Answers to me. Yeah. That's how we'll do it.

19 - Story Recap

Our company is set up. Team Story:

Our contract with Filippo is signed. Also in shot: my Mac, a pizza and a glass of Peroni:

We've paid Filippo the 'half up front' money. Here's Paul on the phone to his bank transferring the money:

We didn't realise that VAT wasn't included in the original quote so we've had to add 3K to the bill. That's not cool. But apparently we can get most of it back because it's through our company OR SOMETHING I DON'T KNOW!

There was a bit of panic when we wondered if Filippo's contract stipulated that we would own the code after he'd written it. If not then, when after we get funding and want to employ our own coder, Filippo could withhold the code from us. But it's fine, he's not gonna do that.

Here's me standing, looking cool:

18 - Adobe® OnScreen™

Today Adobe® announces the release of Adobe® OnScreen™

A spokesperson for Adobe stands behind a podium in front of a room full of journalists and industry people. He begins:

"Hey guys! Lets not beat around the bush. Adobe has been slacking for ten years now. We know you've noticed how your beautiful Macs running gorgeous Mac OS X are tarnished whenever you open an Adobe application. Sends your Mac straight back to OS 9 days, doesn't it."

His eyes dart around aggressivley. He goes on to say:

"We've never created an application designed solely for this digital age. I dunno, like, we made Photoshop and the other two but they're primarily for print. That was when print was big. Now, people publish mostly for the screen and we just couldn't really be fucked to make a whole new application."

The crowd shift awkwardly in their seats.

"We'd made three already. So we just kinda added stuff to those three we done. And we bought out the competition so we didn't really have to worry."

The spokesperson pauses. He lowers his head until his forehead is almost touching the podium. He raises one hand to his nose and inhales loudly while slowly moving his head horizontally. His head rises with a zapping smile, he shudders, and continues:

"We know you people out there are actually using Photoshop to design apps. Lol. I don't know how you do it but it's funny watching you go at it! I bet you'd all think Illustrator is almost perfect to design an app's UI but we did this weird thing where it's not absolutely pixel perfect, so when you paste your stuff into Photoshop to export the file (because you can't export from Illustrator lol) sometimes pixels shift for no apparent reason. Hahaha. So basically, you kinda have to use Photoshop to design everything which is fucking funny because it doesn't even have an art board!"

The spokesperson coughs and then is sick a little into a styrofoam cup.

"But yeah, today we thought fuck it. No longer. And we're putting you poor cunts out of your misery and have finally made an app designed for all your digital creation needs. It's called Adobe OnScreen. Now you guys can use one app instead of three. And it doesn't look like an inconsistent piece of shit either."

The spokesperson keels over and dies to rapturous applause.

17 - UI

I spent the night prepping the UI elements for Filippo. UI means 'user interface' which means the graphics.

Wanna see them? Okay!

Here's a bit of background texture:

What is that? Like expensive cartridge paper or something? A white treated leather? Nah it's pixels!

This is the nav bar on a transparent background (that's what the check represents, it's not part of the design):

Not sure if the nav bar can be transparent yet. I asked Filippo but he never replied.

Look at that one.

Have a bunch of these:

Wanna see my favourite though? Wanna see the magic? Look at this:

That is the transparent overlay that will turn any picture into a Story icon... Wanna see it in action? Okay, give me any random picture...

[Here you go Simon!]

Is that Ashton Kutcher? He'll do! Watch this:

And then the title would be overlaid:

Bam.