blog | tapmates

Say Hello to iCamp

Today we would like to inform you that Tapmates has announced another product.
It might not be exactly the product you all have been waiting for - you still have to wait for the big news, Cookmate HD for iPad is on it’s way and from what I have seen so far it looks absolutely amazing!

Just check these dribbble shots for yourself: here and here. There’s lot of news to wait for - great recipes, including high quality photos and much more.

But back to the other product for now :-) As some of you might have noticed, we held an iPhone developer conference few weeks ago here in the Czech Republic, in Prague - iDevCamp 2010. And we thought it would be a good idea to create an app for that (as there was none yet :-)

So we have created iCamp. An app originally intended to provide our attendants a nice and comfortable way to follow the agenda, make the networking with others easy or simply allow to find out what is going on or who is the guy speaking right now etc.

The conference was a nice place to be at, thanks to everybody, but it’s already over. And as it could get a bit boring looking at the nice app till we kick-off the next conference, we thought why not to release it as a product for other conference organizers who might find it handy.

So here we go, from now on: there’s an app for that. You can contact us or visit iCamp’s product page if you want more information. You can also download the app with content of our conference - for free :-)

Happy conferencing to everybody :-)
2 weeks ago on July 16th, 2010
iDevcamp 2010

So the first conference we organised with help of Jakub Brabec is over. It took place in Prague, 19-20. 6. 2010 and was limited to 80 visitors. What was it all about?

At least here in the CZ/SK region, iPhone development is still at it’s very beginning. You could probably count the number of well established teams on the fingers of one hand. Maybe two. And that’s something we in Tapmates would like to change by contributing to the evangelization. There are plenty of cool people around, who just don’t know how to start, or have bad experience because of some major or minor fails they have done during development of their apps. We have tried to prepare the agenda of this conference aiming exactly on these people. To give them an intensive walkthrough, touching all the aspects of creating and selling an app. The idea was to visit also darker corners in order to make it a bit hardcore.

The big demand for an event like this was confirmed by selling most of the tickets within the first week.

Not to get our intentions wrong - we definatelly don’t think we are the only ones who know how to do it, or how to do it well - there’s probably only one guy here around who does - RNDr. Ondřej Čada - a legendary czech mac developer, author of many tutorials and publications, a true geek and a wonderfull person. We were glad he accepted our invitation, accompanied by other interesting people such as Robert Vojta from [:Izy:] Apps Development Group, Michal Šrajer from Inmite or Tomáš Mrkvička from Tapitu. These people joined our team with the goal to give our visitors some handy tips, introduce tools that might help and also share their experience from the world of frequent fails, marketing or sales.

Participants did get some nice examples of code connected to single presentations, including the iDevcamp.app prepared by our team, which is one of the very few complex opensource applications based on Three20, placed on Github (more about it later).

It was the first conference of such a type here, so we did not manage to prepare everything perfect. Designers probably got a bit bored while watching hi-tech presentation about advanced programming methods in Obj-C by above mentioned Ondřej Čada, developers on the other hand were probably playing tic-tac-toe during the design workshop. For the next season we will definatelly look for a better place allowing multiple parallel workshops, so that people could pick the topics they are really interested in.

We have collected a lot of feedback, mostly very positive - thanks to all for that. We will try to base on your responses and make the next season even better. There is definatelly lot to look for.

Thanks once again to everybody who came, to all the presenters and hope to see you all next year. Or maybe earlier? :-)
1 month ago on June 25th, 2010
Our coming out ;-)

Thanks to the remarkable success of Cookmate we are continuously facing potential customers craving for a cool app trying to challenge us whether we would be able to repeat the success on their project. To be honest, we originally didn’t intend to go this way. We were affraid that burning our creativity and our hunger for absolute perfection on projects that are not ours would be counterproductive.

But then - later on - while thinking about some of the ideas we found out we’ve been pretty dull. The world is full of ideas, some of them are splendid and we want to take a part on them. Cooperation on these projects can help us broaden our horizons and gives us the possibility to get in touch with interesting people and their visions.

So we finally agreed that remaining locked to our own business would bring us on a false track.

All of us have been part of custom development business in the past. Its regular practices were one of the main reasons why we left. We know this environment pretty well and hence know what we want to do different. Our goal is not to make Henry Ford (RIP) happy and proud of us. We will never produce apps as on an assembly-line. We want to approach custom projects in the same way as we approach our own. That might of course get reflected also in the financial matters and we realize that. But nothing is gonna make us change our minds. We are sure we can find our customers. The world is full of iPhone development studios that are producing apps in various quality and we want to be the ones on the absolute top.

We are still pretty excited about this new role we decided to accept. It’s amazing to watch how fast - thanks to this everyday stimulation - our team began to grow. There are 10 taping mates now! That gives us confidence that we are ready to accept any kind of challange.

New section of our web was launched today. Check it out on our business page. Here we would like to let you have a look under the bonnet of what we are currently working on.

P.S.: and btw. our invoice team has some serious skills as well :-)
1 month ago on June 9th, 2010
We are going on stage

We all from tapmates have been very busy in the last few days / weeks. Not only due to some custom development (more on that later) and our beloved Cookmate HD which already can’t wait to be let out into the greyness of the foodie corner of the App Store in order to bring finaly some light! :-)

There’s one more thing we are working on hard. And this time we are up to something really big! As the real pioneers of the iPhone / iPad platform we realized it would be a sin not to share our knowledge and love to our work with others. While thinking of the best form we came across Jakub Brabec and the final idea was born. Let us introduce you the:

iDevcamp 2010

a two-day conference held in Prague fully focused on iPhones and iPads. The ultimate stream of practice and experience not only from the tapmates team but also from our valued friends and guests.

The main content should cover the complete development process - from the initial brainstorming, over the mockups, finetuning the design, programming, creating the supporting web parts, ending with preparation for release and marketing.

Bad news - there are only two tickets left. We must say a big and loud “thank you” to all the folks who signed-up so early after we released the first info - the huge interest suprised us and on the other hand confirmed our feeling that there is a big need for such an event.

Big thanks goes also to our general partners: Centralway and Sanoma Magazines Prague.

Looking forward to meet all of you who have registered. For those who missed the chance - there will be an iDevcamp afterparty - we all will be glad to meet you there!

Don’t forget to follow us on twitter @idevcampcz for the latest info and check out the iDevcamp.cz site - detailed conference agenda to be released soon (cz only).
1 month ago on June 3rd, 2010
What were we doing for the past couple of weeks

It might seem we are not that active as we should be but everyone in our team is doing their best! We try to answer all questions you have placed on our Twitter or emailed them to us. Beside the organization stuff we are working on three other projects and few commercial commissions for our VIP clients. I’d like to share some of the current information which I am at the moment authorised to publish to each particular project:

Cookmate

Cookmate is our major application and most worked on. Last week Apple approved our first but minor update 1.0.1 which brings completely new function such as option to share the groceries list or new option to share recipes via email. Currently the most time consuming activity is to arranging for a few set recipes from our contractors and suppliers. The next update will feature the following sets of recipes:
- Italian cuisine (about 50 recipes)
- American cuisine 2 (about 100 more new recipes)
- Vegetarian meals (about 100 great recipes)
We‘ll also add some of the new functions coming together with this update such as:
- the number of displaying pictures of that particular meal (recipe) already uploaded in the recipe’s gallery
- hidding of the unwanted recipes or ingredients
- very requested opportunity such as adding of your own recipe
Please see below the preview of the functions (or visit our Ember for latest sneak peeks):

Screenport

This is our latest baby. At the begining there was a simple idea of the tool which could possibly make the workflow easier for designers which are designing UI for the iPhone. We explored and extended this great idea of few additional functions. This app will be compatible with Mac, iPhone and iPad and it’s gouing to have a very particular web interface.

I am at the position that I can say no more information but just that the first Beta version where the main option is going to be the searching after the testers in segment of UI designers. Out at the end of March 2010.

If you want to be the part of this revolutionary application I strongly advise to sing up to our mailing list and you will be first to know what and when is it going to happen!

Project X

The state of thid app is right now in stage when still deciding what the app should be able to do and how it will work although the main idea wis pretty clear. Nothing as factual for existing activity you experience for example on the social network sites.

That’s all for now I hope I answered some of your questions. Please keep posting your questions on Twitter or Formspring.
5 months ago on February 9th, 2010
UITitleBar: black buttons

Short time ago we were dealing with an issue in one of our apps. It was not possible to switch the UITitleBar with custom background to black color, to achieve black buttons and not the standard blue ones. Unfortunatelly only setting the style on UIBarStyleBlackOpaque was not enough.

But finally I’ve discovered the following solution:
```
navigationBarStyle = UIBarStyleBlackOpaque;
navigationBarTintColor = nil;
```
6 months ago on January 20th, 2010
Exciting New Apps Coming Soon

We are currently working on a few very exciting iPhone and Mac apps. One of them is for web travel service that you may know. You’ll be able to stay connected with your friends, view articles, photos and videos! More information coming soon in near future on our blog! Here is the latest sneak peek of that travel app!

6 months ago on January 20th, 2010
People from Apple are also human

Apple refused our last update. Cookmate crashes when the user wants to create a picture and has no camera — usually via iPod touch. This bug was also in first version of Cookmate, which passed approval. That’s weird.

We re-sent fixed version again to Apple and hopefully will be soon on App Store near you also with new recipes available via In-App purchase.
6 months ago on January 12th, 2010

Project X