How We Created the #27 iPad App in One Week.

20,000 downloads in three days, #28 on the day of iPad release, a hundred reviews in 72 hours- Free Books for iPad is off to an incredible start! Here’s the story of how we built it in a week.

As soon as the iPad was announced we knew it was a perfect fit for Free Books- an entire device ideally suited for reading? A beautiful screen? Multi-touch controls for a fantastic browsing experience? Score!

The issue, though, was that we simply didn’t have the content to fill a big screen. All our covers were being automatically generated from a bunch of Photoshop templates, with mixed results. We also didn’t have descriptions for any of the books- how the hell could we fill the space? Our app focused entirely on making 23,469 classic books as easy to browse, download, and read as possible- how could we use the iPad screen to make it better?

I immediately started working on getting descriptions and covers, bringing on two illustrators as contractors, and a writer friend of mine to create some great descriptions. We needed content, and we needed it fast.

Our first mockup took our iPhone app and translated it to the iPad:

Web-sitey, plain, weird colors. It just didn’t work. We played around a bit and got to this:

Still not working. Fate intervened. As we played with mockups, our Free Audiobooks launched and took off like a rocket. The downside of fast growth out of the gate, though, is that it always exposes issues in need of updates.

We kept content creation going full tilt and focused our development efforts entirely on the iPhone.

We decided porting to iPad wasn’t very important, since Apple likely wouldn’t accept apps until after the iPad shipped- they would include some ‘blessed’ applications from preferred partners, like EA and The New York Times, to be sure, but for everyone else they wouldn’t want to risk app crashes marring launch day. Get some high quality apps from partners, show off the platform’s potential, to reviewers, accept apps starting a week after iPad release. Bada bing bada boom.

Seems reasonable, right?

The Email arrived on a Saturday, announcing a very non-Apple approach to the problem. Apple was, effective immediately, accepting iPad applications for inclusion in the launch of the iPad App Store. And, more importantly, those applications would need to be submitted by the following Saturday to be accepted.

What I hadn’t considered is the brute force approach- Apple would accept applications from everyone, and then test them on physical hardware on their end.

So, we had a week.

Step one was throwing everything out- to be included on launch day we simply did not have the time to bring over all the functionality of our iPhone app. We had to ask ourselves what really mattered. Here’s what we came up with:

We didn’t have time to do anything but the core of the app- browse, view, download, read. Deleting books? Not critical. Emailing? Not important. Search? Nice to have, but our stats show that most people browse more than they search. No, we had to keep it as basic as possible. Cutting out functionality, we came up with this:

Which evolved into this:

At last, we had a workable layout. It used the screen space to great effect, flicking and tapping through the collection in a super visual way, showing off all those high resolution covers, letting the descriptions stand out in our collection of Top 25 books. And so we got to work.

Tests, demos, descriptions, bugs, layouts, ideas, concepts- the week following The Email was a blur of activity, leading to…

Boom.