Oh no! I’ve started blogging!

Hello and welcome to the semi-official Kabuki Vision blog.

Let me start by telling you a little bit about me.  My name is Adam Shaw, and I’m the founder/developer/tester/tech supporter/marketer at Kabuki Vision (yes, as a small independent developer you get to wear all the hats!).

While I’ve been writing software for about 15 years now, I never immersed myself into the world of Cocoa goodness until I started developing for the iPhone.  It’s funny because I had actually been a Mac user all that time, and I often thought about developing Mac applications in my spare time, but when you spend all day programming at your “real job”, it can be hard to get momentum on other projects.

That all changed when the iPhone SDK was announced.  After playing with the SDK a little bit, it was pretty obvious, even at that early time, that iPhone apps were going to be a Big Deal.  On top of that, I found myselfloving the SDK, Cocoa, and Objective-C.  I was hooked.

It took me a few months to figure out what app I wanted to write.  Remember, at this time there were NO 3rd-party apps at all, so on one hand there were lots of options.  On the other hand, there was nothing BUT options, and I had so many ideas…graphing calculator?  Voice recorder?  Remote control?  Photo editor?  These seemed like the big obvious ideas, which, in retrospect, every other developer had as well.  For me, the problem with each of these ideas at the time is that I personally didn’t care that much about them…I figured that in order to stay motivated, I needed to create an app that solved a problem that I myself had.  And that’s when I came up with the idea for doing a notes app.

I hated the built-in Notes app from the first time I used it, which was the day the original iPhone was released.  Way before 3rd party apps were even a gleam in any developer’s eye.  Sure, you could use it to take notes, but there were some very specific things that bugged me:

1. It used the first line of the note as a title.  While I do know that some people actually like this “feature”, for me, it’s never what I want.  The first line of my note was almost never appropriate as a title, and the idea of having to purposely write a special “title” line as the first line of the note drove me crazy.
2. No categories.  I understand that Apple was going for simplicity here, but for me, having all your notes in a big list becomes unmanageable after the list grows more than a couple screens.  I wasn’t looking for any complicated organizational scheme, some some basic categories (work, shopping, etc.) to store my notes in.
3. The notes were just text.  Using Marker Felt font.  Now of course, the main purpose of a notes app should be for text, that makes sense.  But this is the iPhone!  We shouldn’t have to suffer with the same old “regular” notes like all the other smart phones!  We want our notes to look amazing!  We want images!

And so NoteMaster was born.  My goal was simple:  create a notes app that I would want to use.  I focused on creating an app with all the same features as the built-in Notes app, but fixing the three major things that bothered me, and adding features like inline images and headers.  A lot of time and hard work later, NoteMaster version 1.0 was released in late November 2008.  Now it’s a little over a year later, and version 3.0 is about to hit the app store.

Since 1.0, we’ve added note sorting, html email, syncing with google docs, font selection, note backgrounds, hyperlinks, and a huge assortment of tweaks and improvements.  I still use NoteMaster as my personal notes app every day, and I’m very excited about all the great features we have planned for the future.

In future posts I’ll go into a bit more detail about the early days of planning, designing, and developing NoteMaster.