Jeff has worked incredibly hard to finish off the Statuso iPhone Application. It is looking extremely good and working even better. We are both excited to start seeing some people (other than ourselves) use the application.

So, we have just submitted the application to Apple for approval. The approval process with Apple can *apparently* be a bit of an agonizing process if you’re unlucky – hopefully not the case for us!

Bare with us, we will be gracing the App Store soon *fingers crossed*!

Leeane

Tags: app store, development

Not long to go before Statuso can be submitted tot he iTunes App Store now.

Jeff is furiously sorting out some final bugs, whilst I am furiosuly trying some random stupidness to try to find any more bugs.

We have also started working on a bit of a marketing/distribution plan for Statuso. It involves working on the blurb of text which is shown on the App Store to describe the application, the app icon and also a list of websites/people we want to spam the release of Statuso to. Of course, each of those people will get coupons so that they can try Statuso for free.

We have also agreed on an inital release price of 99c (USD). We will have to see how this goes – but I think it is a good balance between effort put in and the value the end user gets.

Hopefully Apple don’t find any issues with the app which might delay it’s release.

Leeane

Tags: development, status, testing

Statuso is a collaboration between Leeane (who resides in Australia) and Jeff (who resides in England). They have never met, know very little about each other and only communicated via email and Google-docs for the entire Statuso project. You may be wondering how we managed to get together and start working on Statuso? Well, it makes a nice little story actually.

One day as I was driving my car to work, I (Leeane) had the idea for an application which allows you to update several status messages from one iPhone application.

So, I had the idea. What to call it? Just so happens I had a left over domain name (statuso.com) from another venture which I never got around to actually finishing (or starting for that matter).

Ok idea + cool name, what’s next? Develop it! Here comes the interesting part. You see although I *can* develop, I mostly do websites and from what I have heard, Objective-C can be a bit tough on those not all that great at Application Development. So I knew that if I didn’t work with someone else to do that part, it would never get done.

So I wrote a blog post on my blog which put the idea out there in the world. I did up some prototype screenshots and said to the world “here’s an idea, take it if you want to develop it, please give me a little credit though”. Just so happens that Jeff seen this blog post (not many people would have as the traffic is quite low on my blog) and then contacted me about actually collaborating on the project.

So we agreed that Jeff would do all of the actual development work and I would collaborate on the design and flow/logic of the app and make the website. We also agreed on a fair split for any profits. Having two heads to brainstorm and run ideas by has also meant that the finished product is a huge improvement on my initial vision of how the app would work.

So for the last couple of months, we have both been working away at the project. And now we are pretty close to releasing the first version.

Just shows you how the Internet can bring two random people together – and harness some entrepreneurship from opposite sides of the world.

Leeane

Tags: background, collaboration, development, idea