Rewarding Our Users

Some of you have been using Second Shootr for over a year now, and we want to show our appreciation to anyone who's purchased and used Second Shootr in the last 12ish months. We really value your custom (and your patience with the 2.0 release).

Our offer is simple. If you write an honest review of Second Shootr 1.1.1 on the iTunes App Store, we'll give you a little gift of appreciation in the New Year when Second Shootr 2.0 comes out.

We can't yet tell you what that gift will be, but its value will be at least double what you paid for the app in the first place. You'll need to keep an eye on the blog and/or email newsletter to see how to claim your gift in the new year.

As always, if you have an issue or a query with your version of Second Shootr, we encourage you to contact support to get help. If you leave a review asking for help/complaining without contacting us first, we have no way of getting in touch with you to assist you!

If you haven't got Second Shootr yet, it's FREE in the app store until 26th November 2010. It then finally goes back to it's normal price (after being on sale for a number of months).

A reminder of what's to come:

This has been at the bottom of our iTunes description since August. Not may people have spotted it, so we thought we'd lay it out here. What's below is just the tip of the iceberg for what 2.0 will bring.

• The option to synchronise your data with another device.
• The option to input your Second Shootr data using a PC/Mac.
• The option to securely back up your Second Shootr data.

More info soon.

That's great in theory. However, we've got a couple of concerns.

1. It's only going to be available for users running Snow Leopard (and later, Lion). So if you've got an old Mac, you have to think about spending a fair wedge of cash on an upgrade. If you're a Windows (or Linux etc) user, you're just plain out of luck.
2. We're going to guess that Apple will want to vet every single app submission. They'll probably take at least two weeks to do so. This isn't so much of a problem on the iOS platforms, the apps are generally fairly small and it's fairly easy to spot and fix bugs during testing so it's not often that you have to submit fixes. Mac apps are usually huge and complicated, we can almost guarantee that they will have bugs. Will you as a user be happy to use buggy software for two weeks whilst Apple checks the patch? You could potentially lose all your client data in the process! Didn't think so.

The Mac App Store isn't fair

So, if Second Shootr was turned into a Mac app, the vast majority of our users would never even be able to download it. We'd have spent loads of cash and tonnes of time designing and building a desktop application that only a handful of people can enjoy.

That's hardly fair is it?

Don't get us wrong – in a few year's time, the Mac App Store will have evolved. There may be a Windows version and more people will have a Mac that's capable of running the App Store.  But we're not going to build a Mac App Store app now in the hope that one day everyone will get a piece of the pie.

What could we do instead?

We're not knocking desktop apps at all. In fact, we can easily see that a desktop app to enter and store your client and shoot data in would be fantastic.

In order to get there, our aim is to find a method of delivering a desktop application that doesn't just work on the most recent Macs, it also works on older Macs. Hey, why stop there, why can't it work on Windows and Linux desktops, laptops and tablets too?

The problem with traditional desktop applications is that they all run different code languages. A Windows application will likely use completely different code to a Mac application (for example). We're a very small company. Although Second Shootr (the iPhone app) is selling well... we're hardly millionaires (in fact, we've never taken a single penny from the money generated from Second Shootr, it's ALL gone back into developing new features) and we can't afford to build a desktop application for every single platform.

We're stuck between wanting to please everyone and keeping our accountant smiling.

On top of that, if we had a desktop applications for each platform. There'd likely be multiple, different bugs in each one and the whole thing will turn into a mess very easily.

There's companies out there that do deliver desktop applications this way, and we don't think they should be. Take Skype as an example. The Windows application is miles ahead of the Mac and Linux version. It's just not fair to the people who have to wait ages for the updated app because they prefer one platform over another.

What we need is a way of delivering one codebase to multiple platforms at the same time. This codebase needs to be really easy to update and fix should something go wrong.

There must be another way.

We'd be really interested on your thoughts. Feel free to add them to the comments below.

Why?

The more people that rate an application, the higher its position in the app store. The higher the position, the more users we get. The more users we get, the more money we have coming in to spend on improving the application according to your suggestions.

Long story short. If you spend two minutes reviewing Second Shootr now, we can spend cash making it better for you.

I'd like to encourage you to rate all your favourite apps on the iPhone, not just Second Shotr. Most iPhone developers are independent groups (like us) and they rely on good word of mouth to succeed. Why not rate one app every Friday?

So I apologise in advance if this doesn't interest you. We'll have more news on future Second Shootr as soon as we're ready to announce it.

Whilst Second Shootr was the brainchild of myself and my wife Helen, we specialised in Photography, not logo or application design and development. So we were kinda out of our depth when it came to producing Second Shootr. We very quickly realised that we'd need to hire someone to build the application for us, but we had some very strong ideas about how Second Shootr should work and we wanted to make sure we could get those ideas across to a developer.

With that in mind, we used Photoshop (something we know pretty well) to design each individual screen and show the user flow through the system:

Here's a larger version of the main client screen to give you some idea of just how crudely we designed the app (yes folks... that's a drop-shadow you see there!):

As you may have spotted, the current Second Shootr app shares some similarities to the design, but has taken it many steps further. The main two differences being the logo design and the colour scheme.

We didn't design the logo ourselves, nor did we come up with the colour scheme to use. Instead, we enlisted the help of an old friend, Tom, who just so happens to be a graphics designer.

He fairly quickly decided upon the black and yellow colour scheme for the logo and application, in his own words:

"Yellow as a camera equipment tie-in - like the Nikon strap? It also looks very functional (like rugged outdoors stuff you depend on) and like a help in an emergency, like a photography emergency!"

We figured that was a good a reason as any to stick with black and yellow, so Tom sent through some initial ideas:

Whilst it felt like a good start, we didn't feel that it was quite right. We liked the use of the camera aperture in the logo, but didn't quite feel that it was strong enough. Tom went back to the drawing board and came up with this:

© 2009 Tom Probert

We felt that this was much closer, we decided to drop the 3d-effect for simplicity and stuck with the black and yellow idea. The result is the logo that you're all familiar with today:

As for turning my half-baked ideas into a reality? We eventually decided upon a small, local company called utopia 365 to do the work. They were awesome - just took our ideas, combined them with Tom's graphics and added their own flair to produce the app you know and love today.

Second Shootr's come a fair way in it's first year (I recived Tom's initial logo designs this time last year), I guarantee Second Shootr will go much further in it's second year. It's an exciting time!

Testers will be required to have at least one non-jailbroken device and will be required to put Second Shootr through it's paces for a few hours over 3 days or so. They will then be required to articulate any errors in the form of an email to us so that we can fix them. We work fast, so we'd need our beta testers to be fairly snappy at responses.

Ideally, beta testers would be professional photographers who have real client data to put into the app, they should be UK-based, or willing to work to the UK timezone. Testers will be required to sign an NDA ensuring that information about Second Shootr isn't passed on to anyone else.

The beta phase is currently scheduled to begin around the end of September 2010, so you'd need to be available around then.

In return, we'll give our testers a free copy of Second Shootr, a chance to get first glimpse of what we're working on, and a few other goodies that we can't mention right now because we don't want to give the game away.

If you're interested in helping us out, please get in touch and let us know your device(s) UDID number and your device type (eg iPhone 3GS, 32GB, iOS4.0.2) - we'll let you know if we'd like to use you

If this isn't your thing, Second Shootr's coming... just sit tight for now.

In fact. Second Shootr is staying at this price (or maybe even lower!) until we release a new version of the application. Any updates to the iPhone app will be free if you already own it, so now seems an ideal time to grab Second Shootr if you haven't already taken the plunge.

Is £1.79 still too much for you? Perhaps you'd like a free copy instead? Just retweet THIS tweet in the next 12 hours, and you could win a free copy of Second Shootr.

Obligatory Small Print:

The free copy of Second Shootr is only available with a US iTunes account. If you're not from the US, you can easily set up a US account for free by following these instructions. Setting up a US account does not affect your already purchased apps from your regional app store.

Competition ends at 03.00 BST (GMT+1), 18 August 2010.

There are 5 free copies of Second Shootr to give away.

UPDATE: The competition has ended, but Second Shootr remains at £1.79 until we release a new version.

So, if you're from an educational institution, consider purchasing Second Shootr to help your photography students organise their shoots.

We have no release dates yet, but rest assured we're working as hard as we can to get this out to you folks. At the same time, we want it to be right, so we're going to take as much time as we need over this.

For those who need a little bit of visual proof, below is a screenshot of the development so far. Bear in mind that it's a work in progress, so the finished result is likely to look very different, but it might give you an idea of what's to come!

As I've said all along, once this is ready, the email newsletter subscribers will be the first to know. If you want to be one of those people, head to our main site and scroll to the bottom to sign up for our email newsletter.

On July 1st, Second Shootr cost US$6.99 (i.e. £3.99)

On July 2nd , Second Shootr will cost US$0.99 (i.e. £.59)

July 3rd: $1.99, £1.19

July 5th: $2.99, £1.79

July 6th: $3.99, £2.39

July 7th: $4.99, £2.99

July 8th: $5.99, £3.49

July 9th: $6.99, £3.99

So the sooner you download Second Shootr, the better the bargain! Please tell your fellow photographers, and feel free to tell the world via Facebook or Twitter.

Please note: Apple dictates when the prices change - presumably it follows American time, but we're not certain. Always check the price before you buy.