TiPb’s developer spotlights are like DVD/iTunes Extras for the App Store — a weekly look behind the scenes at the programers and designers that bring you the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad apps and games you love. This week Rene talks with Paul Haddad of Tapbots.
What’s your name? Paul Haddad
What’s your company’s name? Tapbots
Where are you located? Flower Mound, TX
What’s your website address? http://tapbots.com
What’s your Twitter name? @tapbot_paul and @tapbots
What apps do you make? Weightbot, Convertbot, Pastebot, Calcbot, Tweetbot
What apps, other than your own, are currently among your favorites? My favorite Apps tend to be Mac based: Transmit, VMWare, TextMate, VLC, TF2 :^)
How long have you been a developer? Professionally I’d say I’m a bit shy of 20 years, non professionally closer to 30.
How long have you been an iOS developer? Ever since the first iOS SDK came out.
Do you develop for any other platform in addition to iOS? If so, which one(s)? Minor Mac and server side stuff.
What primary computer setup do you use for your iOS development? I use two almost equally depending on where I am in the house. Macbook Pro 17″ i7 2.66GHZ 8GB RAM dual striped OWC 120GB SSDs. Mac Pro 8 core 3GHZ 5 striped 40GB OWC SSDs, Areca RAID controller, 30″ Cinema display, loud mechanical keyboard and kensigton trackball.
What iOS device(s) do you personally use most often? iPhone 4, iPod gen 2 and iPad 2.
What mobile devices, other than iOS, do you currently use? None.
What’s your favorite thing about developing for iOS? I’m a big fan of ObjC and the various frameworks and always have been. I don’t think there’s anything better out there.
What’s your least favorite thing about developing for iOS? Dealing with the entire iTunes connect provisioning setup and waiting for app approvals.
What feature would you most like Apple to add to the iOS SDK? Rich Text editing and general improvements to UITextView are at the top of my list.
What feature would you most like Apple to add to the App Store? Paid upgrades for major new versions. The current free upgrades setup doesn’t encourage developers to update their apps on a long term basis.
What do you do when you’re not coding iOS apps? I’m pretty boring I tend to always be working unless I’m out and about with the kids on the weekend. Lately I’ve gotten hooked on Team Fortress 2.
** Given Tapbots has such a distinctive, restrained catalog of apps, how do you decide which types of apps you want to make? Do you reject a lot of ideas along the way?** We try to focus on apps that we’ll use and sound fun to write. We’re not going to write an app for something that we’ll never do or won’t use because we wouldn’t be able to put our hearts in it. We actually reject a ton of ideas, for every app from us you see there’s probably a dozen that we thought about and decided not to do for one reason or another.
What should we look for from you next? We’re quite busy with Tweetbot but have started thinking about our next app. We’ve got two top contenders but haven’t quite decide which we’ll do yet. We keep saying we’re going to start soon but keep getting pulled away on other Tweetbot features.
Thanks Paul!
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