As I mentioned in an earlier installment of this series, one of the early decisions for Setlists was that it wouldn’t have constantly scrolling text, but rather more of a cue card approach, with one verse or chorus or bridge at a time on display. The singer would advance the text to the next part whenever he or she was ready, rather than having to try and program the timing of the scrolling just right.

But this led to another important consideration. How would Setlists divide up the text? My first thought was that we’d use a special character, as Teleprompt+ does for cue points. Place a “page break” character in the appropriate places where you want a page break. Simple, right?

But this had a few issues. First, it didn’t look so great, having these large extra characters in the text flow. It’s certainly not intuitive. And more importantly, it meant the user had to set up all of the breaks by adding these characters manually. You’d have to place the cursor where you wanted the break, and then tap a “page break” button to insert the character. This works fine for cue points in Teleprompt+, because you generally only add cue points to much longer speeches, and you usually only have a few cue points per script. But imagine a 300+ song catalog where you’d have to enter six to ten page breaks to each script?

So I tried another approach, where the user would drag a marker to indicate wherever page breaks should occur. This looked better, and it made it much clearer where page breaks would be visually while looking at the edit view. It’s also easier to drag a slider around than to pinpoint a place in the text and add a character several times. But it was still largely a manual process.

I thought maybe we could program a clever way for the app to automatically add breaks at certain intervals to new documents (every X number of lines, say), and then the user would just have to fine tune the breaks by moving the ones that were out of place.

But then I presented the mockups to Tim, and he said “Well, I could just detect wherever there’s a blank line, and automatically put a page break there.”

Looking at the way people tend to type out lyrics, this made perfect sense. Most of the lyrics you see out there are formatted like this:

I’ve got a rusty feeling deep down
So much I thought I’d lost what I’d found
My Soul’s been out of touch with me
And I was too blind to see…

I’m so sorry I’d been away
But don’t you worry I’m here to stay
Yeah I’m trading in the blues
for all the little things you do…

I’m so sorry babe, but I needed this time
To piece myself back to mine
Some say it ain’t much fun to feel out of place
If I could only make it through one more day.

People naturally put a blank line between stanzas, as you would with poetry. Placing an automatic page break on every blank line means that most of the time, the page breaks will be exactly where you want them with zero effort. And it looks exactly like you’d expect in the editor, without any extra visual clutter.

Now, of course, sometimes you have really long stanzas in songs, but then you just have to go in and add a blank line somewhere in the middle. For really short stanzas you can remove the blank line or just add a space on the blank lines in between to avoid having to flip pages too often. In either case, we’re talking about far less work than manually adding breaks throughout every single song.

It’s not going to work perfectly for everyone, but it will work very well for most singers most of the time.

All of my complicated UI solutions to the problem were trumped in a few seconds by an engineer who had a much simpler programatic solution. It pays to show your designs early and get feedback before you hit your head up against the wall for several hours.

More details about the creation of Setlists coming soon. If you want to learn more about all of the features of Setlists, visit the Setlists web site.

This is why Setlists doesn’t have text scrolling.

Before we made Setlists, I used Teleprompt+ on stage for my lyric prompting needs. I’d set up my lyrics as scripts, choose the correct one for the next song, and press play. And almost immediately, no matter how carefully I set up my script with the proper spacing, font size, and speed, the lyrics would be out of sync with my playing. Why? Let’s look at just a few of the possible reasons.

Drummers are human beings. As such, they don’t have internal metronomes that make them play in perfect tempo every time. Some drummers are better than others, but no one is perfect. Most, I’ll tell you from experience, play faster when they get nervous. You know when people tend to get nervous? On stage. You know when they don’t? When they’re practicing at home. So the tempo you set in the rehearsal room and the one you actually play on stage are likely to be two different numbers.

Now, some of you are saying, “We don’t have a drummer.” Or “We play to a click track.” Fair enough. If you don’t have a drummer, but you still have a human being (including yourself) setting the tempo, see the last point. For those of you on a click track, let’s do this experiment. You have an iPad on stage prompting your lyrics. You have an iPod or some sort of other device playing your click track, usually controlled by a different person. The click track starts, you press the song title in Setlists a few seconds later. Or worse, you pressed it earlier. Now what happens? The lyrics are rolling off screen before you can read them. You try and adjust by scrolling the text back a bit. But you swipe too far, and now the lyrics are behind. You adjust again. Meanwhile, your audience is watching a person play with his or her iPad instead of watching you sing them a song.

Songs aren’t like speeches. There isn’t a constant pace of words throughout the length of a song. You may have a verse, then an 8-bar bridge that has no vocal. You have guitar solos. Instrumental interludes. Intros and outtros. Do you pause the scrolling and wait for the song to catch up with you? Or do you try and insert just the right amount of blank space between the lines for each song, painstakingly for each and every one of the three hundred songs in your lyric book, trying to get them all precisely timed?

A lot of times when singing, you don’t need to actually read all the lyrics. You just need a memory jog of the first line or two of a verse. If you’re one of these folks, then you want to advance to the next verse a bit before it happens, scan the first few lines, and then put your focus back on the audience. You can’t do this easily when the text is always moving. And when the text scrolling is out of pace with your song, it gets even harder to find that first line of the next verse.

The bottom line is that scrolling is a terrible way to read lyrics while singing. It’s perfect for giving a speech, but it’s no way to sing. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, you’ll end up touching your iPad more if you set autoscroll than if you advance the text manually.

There’s a reason members of symphony orchestras still turn their own pages when playing as they have been for hundreds of years. It’s the only thing that works 100% of the time.

So how do we solve this problem? We do what the pros do. We set our lyrics up like cue cards, showing the current part of the song only. When the next part of the song comes, we advance to that block of text. And so on. The singer only sees exactly what he or she needs in the moment. The text is literally no longer a moving target.

If you have footpedals, such as the awesome AirTurn BT–105, you can move to the next verse or chorus with your feet. Perfect. If you don’t happen to have the luxury of wireless pedals, you can have an off-stage tech with another iPad advance the lyrics for you. Set up a Jam Session, and he or she can be your personal cue card controller.

If you don’t have the luxury of an off-stage tech, either, well then you can advance the text yourself with a simple swipe. Is that ideal? No. But it’s a known quantity. You know that with one swipe a few times per song, your lyrics are going to be exactly right every time. No variables. As opposed to scrolling, which adds a giant, unpredictable variable to your performance and grabs far more of the attention you want to be giving to your music and your audience.

We are looking into options for the auto page turning in Setlists, and we hope to find something eventually that might help those who really, really want automatic advancement of lyrics. But we’re very sure that scrolling is not the answer.

Of course, if you think I’m nuts and you’d still rather scroll your lyrics, you can always try our Teleprompt+, which was designed for public speaking, and is thus brilliant at scrolling text.

We’ll have more to say about the design of Setlists in our next installment. In the meantime, if you want to purchase Setlists, or you just want to learn more about all of its features, visit the Setlists web site.

When it came to making the full-screen set view, we wanted to have it appear like a classic set, handwritten with a black marker, complete with a bit of duct tape. Anyone who has ever been in a band can immediately relate to this image.

Of course, to make this work you need a handwritten font. Unfortunately, when it comes to handwritten fonts on the iPad, Apple’s built-in choices are rather limited. Marker Felt? Bradley Hand? Even Noteworthy, which isn’t so bad for notes, didn’t really work for us.

And so in my early designs, I decided to go another route and use American Typewriter. I thought maybe this would harken to the days when I would type out sets on my Mac and print them. It’s easy to read from a distance, at least. But this wasn’t making me happy.

Then I saw on Twitter that the always astute Matt Gemmell was asking the twitverse for advice on fonts that could be inexpensively licensed for iOS apps. And he managed to find a great font called Hand of Sean, which I rather liked.

Great handwritten font for sticky notes etc: Hand of Sean. £12/machine for commercial design use, + only £30 to embed! niceandripe.com/fonts/hand-of-…

— Matt Gemmell (@mattgemmell) October 26, 2011

I had always thought that embedding a font into an app for sale would be prohibitively expensive, but actually there are a number of good fonts available for a small fee for unlimited downloads.

So I took a trip over to the web site of Nice and Ripe, makers of Hand of Sean, and I noted that they had a font I liked even better for Setlists, called Sean’s Other Hand. All of Nice and Ripe’s fonts are very inexpensive to embed into an app, and Sean’s Other Hand makes the Setlists experience so much better than American Typewriter.

And so the set view for Setlists went from this:

To this:

And the icon for Setlists went from this:

To this:

We think this was a major improvement.

If you’re an app developer, and you think that using a custom font might help make your app more effective, consider paying for embedding. There are lots of good choices out there that won’t break the bank.

More segments on the making of Setlists are coming to the blog soon. Meanwhile, you can find out more about our newest app on the Setlists web site.

Teleprompt+ has been an amazing success for us over the past two years. We’ve listened to our customers and added so many great features that we lost count. All while sticking to our clean and simple interface. And we have amazing plans for even more coming soon.

But a funny thing happened late last year when we took a look at our feature request list and the stats from our web site. We noticed that a very large group of our users were musicians. Singers who wanted to keep a song book of lyrics to prompt while singing on stage.

Literally every day, people were coming to our web site after having searched for a way to use an iPad for lyric prompting. They still are.

I found this both odd and interesting, because I was amongst those musicians taking Teleprompt+ to the stage. And if I was honest with myself, the app always felt much more public speaking oriented than musician oriented. It got the job done better than anything else I had found, but it was clear that Teleprompt+ was designed for speech prompting, not lyric prompting.

So how to meet the needs of the singers? We could have crammed a bunch of music-oriented features into Teleprompt+ and muddled up the user experience for everyone. But then late one night during one of our regular iChat sessions, Gene said, “We should just build a completely different app for the musicians.”

Well, you can’t say things like that during a Bombing Brain meeting and not expect repercussions. For the next week, I had this new app on my mind so much that I had to start sketching to get it out of my head. Before I knew it, I had a fairly decent UX outline and was even designing possible icons and the basic look and feel of the app.

I started out thinking the app would be very much like Teleprompt+, and probably even be able to share a majority of its code. (Ahh, the naivety of a non-programmer.) But the more we refined it, the more it became evident that Gene was so right to suggest this was a different app. This needed to be a very different experience, tailored for a completely different audience with very different priorities.

When I brought my rough ideas to the other guys, I was worried not that they wouldn’t like it, but that it would be a long time before we’d be able to develop it. I couldn’t wait to use this app myself. But we had other projects that were already too long in development. How would we find the time?

But the guys liked my crude structure so much that we decided we’d plug away at it and try and give it some serious attention for a release sometime in 2012.

So we kept refining, and Tim started coding on breaks from other projects. Slowly, but surely, it started taking shape.

Before we knew it, we had a basically functional app on our hands. And the rest came together from there. Bit by bit, the three of us plugged away, preparing not just the app itself, but all the other hoopla surrounding a new release. The web site, documentation, marketing and instructional videos—most people don’t realize how much collateral material needs to be created beyond the app itself. It’s an amazing undertaking getting an app on the App Store, if you want to do it right. If you think about the hours involved, and the likelihood that you’ll fail to get the app enough traction to make it financially viable, you’ll probably quit before you begin.

There are lots of little details that we’d like to share about the Setlist development process. We always love reading stories about how our favorite apps are made. So over the coming weeks, we’ll be pointing out some more particulars about how Setlists came to be what it is. Hope you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed living it.

Meanwhile you can find out more about Setlists on the Setlists web site.

Mac SE User’s Manual

We both eventually learned to manipulate this amazing new device. We just got there in different ways. And he often found shortcuts and other tricks that I didn’t, because he had taken the time to go through the whole book and read about the finer details.

These days, you rarely see smaller app developers making user manuals for their products. “The app is so easy to learn” goes the thinking, “that documentation is no longer necessary.” But we don’t really subscribe to that theory at Bombing Brain. We know there are still lots of users who feel more comfortable when they have something to read.

Sure, maybe 80% of our customers launch the app and start playing around until they figure it out. But I keep thinking about my dad, and how he likes to “read the manual.” He likes to make sure he knows every little detail about the way a thing works, so that he can feel certain he isn’t missing anything. Should we be forcing these kinds of customers to tinker around uncomfortably instead? And should we be using the “it’s easy enough to figure out” philosophy as an excuse to not bother writing up proper documentation?

We don’t think so.

Writing good documentation is hard work. It’s time that you could otherwise be using to write new software or squash bugs. So of course you want to be sure anything that takes so much effort is worth it. But we think it always is.

Early on we created user manuals for our Teleprompt+ products and put them on our web site for anyone to download. And we’ve maintained them with each new app update. What we’ve found is that this serves those who want to learn every nook and cranny of the app, of course. But it also works great as a marketing tool. Potential customers can see every feature in detail before buying. They can see our commitment to the presentation of our apps and to giving users the tools they need to get the most out of their purchase.

When Apple released iBooks Author earlier this year, we immediately thought it would be a great opportunity to make our documentation even better. This is a new format, a cool way to take what was a fairly static PDF manual and turn it into a more interactive guide. It displays beautifully on an iPad. And it’s free for us as authors to use and for our users to download. Why wouldn’t we make iBooks versions of our manuals?

Apple seems to think the same thing. Which is why you can find user manuals for many Apple products on the iBookstore, too.

Starting now, you can get our manuals in iBooks format, for free, at the iBookstore. (See links below.) We’re extremely happy with how these have turned out, and we look forward to updating them as the apps keep getting more and more powerful.

So if you have a copy of Teleprompt+ for iPad or Teleprompt+ for Mac, or if you’re curious and you just want to learn everything there is to know about these apps before you buy, you can go to the iBookstore and get yourself a free copy. For those of you who don’ t yet have an iPad, you can of course still download the PDF versions from our web site support pages. Not as interactive, but all the details are still there.

We’re constantly looking for ways to improve the customer experience. If you download our manuals and have suggestions for how we can make them better, let us know. We love hearing from our customers.

Teleprompt+ for iPad User Manual (on iBookstore)

Teleprompt+ for OS X User Manual (on iBookstore)

“I want it to be spontaneous.” They say. “I just want to wing it.” Okay. That’s fair. You know who was never spontaneous? Steve Jobs. Martin Luther King. John Kennedy. Everyone you’ve ever watched give a speech and thought, “Wow, that sounds so natural and straight from the heart.” Not a word of it was improvised. Giving the impression of being natural and spontaneous and actually being spontaneous are two very different things.

There’s also a great misconception that “winging it” will save time. It won’t.

What folks tend to learn fast is that once the record button is pressed, a whole new world of nerves and confusion takes over. You babble, you say “um” more times than anyone can count, and you press all the wrong buttons. You realize half-way through a step-by-step process that you don’t have the right file to finish it. Pretty soon, you’ve done so many takes, none of which is good all the way through, and you’ve spent so much time that you realize you would have gotten it done and been to lunch by now had you just written up a script and plotted out your actions. And then your editor has to go in and spend another five hours cutting up your takes to make something coherent.

Sure, writing a script takes time. But it’s relaxed, no-one-is-recording-every-single-thing-I-say-right-now time. You can make mistakes. You can make changes. You can eat a sandwich while doing it. And you can collaborate with others, have them help you edit to find the best way to convey your message.

The goal is to minimize the part of the process (recording) that involves the most pressure. Once you have a script to rely on, the recording becomes far less daunting.

Writing a script and following it is the number one thing you can do to improve your demo videos. And practice. Always practice before hitting record.

We’ve been making some screen demos and other promotional videos ourselves lately here at Bombing Brain. And we always record from a script. Luckily, we have the best Teleprompter app in the world to help us. Set up that iPad or Mac laptop, pop your script into Teleprompt+, give it a few dry runs before hitting record, and the whole process of capturing audio becomes so much easier. And fun. Yes, it can actually be fun.

Gene at a recent audio recording session

And we’ll let you in on another little secret. We record our audio separately from the video. Often, it’s not even the same person clicking the mouse and talking. Both people are following the same script though. (Yet another reason to have one.) This allows us to record our audio in the best possible environment, even if that doesn’t happen to be where our demo computer is. And it allows us to concentrate on one thing at a time, rather than trying to get both the audio and visuals right at once.

Meanwhile, our coders didn’t sit around waiting for the graphics. We managed to bake a few new surprises into this update: a couple of smaller features people have been asking us to add for a while.

So this update is more than just a pretty face.

Gestures

While prompting in Teleprompt+, you can, of course, always tap on the center of the screen to bring up the bottom console, where you’ll find all sorts of controls for your session. But many users were asking for some shortcut gestures that could make altering settings on the fly even easier. None of these gestures is required to use Teleprompt+, but once you learn them, you’ll find they can make you more productive.

• Single finger double tap anywhere on the screen – this will toggle between pause and play. In previous versions, a two-finger double tap would accomplish this. Two fingers will still work, but now you only need one.

• Single finger swipe left or right – this will cause the script to jump to the previous or the next cue point, respectively.

• 2-finger swipe up or down – this will speed up or slow down the speed of your prompting. This one is also timing sensitive, so the faster you swipe, the more drastic the change in speed.

• 2-finger swipe left or right – Jumps to the previous or the next script in your current group.

• Pinch in and out – this will adjust your font size. Pinch out to increase the size; pinch in to decrease the size.

• One-finger swipe in a circular motion – draw a circle, counter-clockwise with one finger, and the script will restart from the beginning.

By the way, these new gestures are available on the remote control as well, with the exception of font resizing. For that one, you’ll need to use the remote buttons.

Wired Remote Control

In addition to new gestures, we’ve also added support for a wired remote to control your prompting. If you have Apple’s white earbuds (or some other compatible set of headphones with the same type of control buttons for iTunes playback) you can control your prompting session in the following ways:

• Volume Up button – speed up the prompting speed
• Volume Down button – slow down the prompting speed
• Middle button – Play/Pause the prompter
• Double click the middle button – Jump to the next Cue Point

And, as a final extra added special bonus, these volume button controls also work with the hardware buttons on your device. So pressing the volume up button on the side of your iPad or iPhone, for instance, will increase the speed of your prompting. The Volume Down button will decrease the speed. You can even double click the Home button, swipe to the right on the recent apps drawer that pops up, and use the play and skip forward and backward buttons to control the prompter if you like.

We hope you enjoy the luscious new hi-resolution graphics for Teleprompt+ version 2.4.1. And we hope you enjoy the new gesture and remote functions.

• Advancement of wireless internet
• Online video
• Tablet PCs like iPad

More and more schools are integrating these new technologies into their classrooms. Teachers and Professors are using them to better educate their students and students are using them to better understand, and engage with, the material being presented by their Teachers and Professors.

iPad Goes to School

Here at Bombing Brain we are a little biased when it comes to which technology is making the biggest impact in classrooms around the world… iPad takes all of the new technologies and combines them into one easy to use device. iPad allows you to access the internet in the classroom. It enables students to watch videos that correspond to a current topic they are studying. It allows Professors to come up with curriculum that encourage students to engage in the topic of study like never before.

iPad is so revolutionary within our school that an entire ‘Education App’ industry is being built around its usage. Colleges and Universities around the world, along with K-12 schools, are testing using iPad in the classroom. As more and more Teachers and Professors get comfortable with using iPad and all of the Education apps out there, we believe we are going to see a huge shift away from traditional school tools like textbooks and pencils to a more advance set of tools like iPad, online video, and social networking.

Teleprompt+ in the Classroom

As we continue to upgrade our app, Teleprompt+, we are finding more and more uses for it. Many times we don’t even realize all that it’s being used for until we hear from a customer. One thing that we do think many Teachers and Professors can now take advantage of from Teleprompt+ is its video recording capability. As many of you know, Teleprompt+ is a teleprompter app for iPad. With our latest update to Teleprompt+ users can now shoot video right within the application. This means to Teachers and Professors can use Teleprompt+ to record video messages and homework assignments for students.

Why Should Professors Record Video Homework Assignments?

When we were in school we remember teachers giving us homework assignments, usually at the end of class. We scrambled to write down the instructions without taking time to think about them. By the time we got home we had our chicken scratch notes and no memory of what needed to be done. With video home work assignments, students can replay the assignment over and over. Video captures emphasis, which will help students understand where they should focus. Video assignments can be thought out, scripts can be written and imported into Teleprompt+ and Professors can create a clearer message for students instead of just throwing out the assignment at the end of class when everyone is getting ready to leave.

If you’re interested in using Teleprompt+ in your classroom, simply download Teleprompt+ from the App Store. Also, you should know that Bombing Brain Interactive is part of the Apple Education Volume Purchase Program. This allows educational institutions to buy multiple copies of apps at a discounted price. So, if you’re interested in buying Teleprompt+ for your class, but think the entire school could benefit from it, please feel free to share this information with the school board and receive a discount on your purchase.

We would love to hear how it works for you. We think Teleprompt+ along with iPad will change the way you teach and your students learn.

Tim plays skeeball at 1up

It had been more than 11 years since I had a chance to hang out for more than a few hours with my good friends and collaborators at Bombing Brain Interactive. Living on two different coasts, we just barely get together whenever I’m visiting family back in Philly.

Sure, the WiFi and the coffee in the hotel sucked, and maybe not every session was everything I’d hoped it would be. But there were more than enough informative sessions, talented speakers, interesting parties, and surprisingly good free lunch to make up for it. If you’re just getting started out in iOS development, or even if you’ve been at it a while and just want to surround yourself with like-minded people, 360iDev is a great conference. The price is more than reasonable for what you get.

And Denver is no bad place to be in mid September, either.

El Mariachi! Mike Lee's memorable General Session

More than anything, though, it was just good to spend time with Gene and Tim. Don’t let anyone tell you different; doing business with old friends you trust is the way to go. We accomplished more over a few beers than the last thousand corporate meetings I’ve attended. (I’m sure David Whatley would agree.)

I still don't know which button is the 16th Floor

Seveal late night design/coding sessions also put us well on our way to finishing a few upcoming projects, including new features for Teleprompt+, and a big update to Spooky Playtime, just in time for the Halloween season. (Bats in tuxedos and Junk Food Zombies—need I say more?) We cant’ wait for you all to see what we’ve got in store.

I look down at my iPhone as FlightTrack Pro has informed me that Gene and Tim’s plane back to Philly has just taken off. I’m reminded that I met the guy who designed that app this week, and that I’ll be on my way back to San Francsico in a few hours myself. Time to check out a few more of Denver’s sights, have some good coffee for a change (at ink!), and be thankful for a very productive week.

We’ve strived for over a year to make Teleprompt+ the best teleprompter on the iOS platform. Thanks to you, our users, we’ve been able to add many of the features and enhancements you’ve requested to make the app a leader in its category. Yet we admit there has always been something missing – a companion desktop app. Well as of today we are happy to announce that is no longer the case – introducing Teleprompt+ for Mac 1.0!

One request we’ve heard from many of you is the desire to be able to control the iPad or iPhone version of Teleprompt+ from a desktop computer. When we started investigating this possibility, we thought we might develop a simple remote control utility for the Mac, similar to Teleprompt+ Remote on the iPhone. Investigating this possibility led us to check out some of the Mac-based teleprompter apps on the market. Much to our surprise, we weren’t very impressed with what we saw – most of what’s available on the Mac is either severely limited in capability or severely overpriced. Once Apple announced the Mac App Store, putting in place the same distribution and support channels as those available for iOS, it became a bit of a “no-brainer” to us. We should do a full version of our teleprompter for the Mac.

Teleprompt+ for Mac isn’t a straight port of the iOS app, however. The Mac version is a complete rewrite of the app for a desktop interface and is designed to take advantage of the full capabilities of Mac OS X. Teleprompt+ for Mac supports the latest and greatest features of the Mac, including Mac OS X Lion’s full-screen mode – a feature found in many of Apple’s own apps. Teleprompt+ also supports external video output – perfect for pro prompting setups where the talent reads from the secondary screen while the operator controls prompting on the Mac. Teleprompt+ for Mac also fully supports remote control over WiFi with an iPad or iPhone. Remotely control your iPad or iPhone with the Mac version, or do the opposite – use the iOS device as a remote for the Mac. You can even setup a Mac-to-Mac connection and control a second Mac while prompting. Pair an iOS remote with the Mac version with an external screen and have multi-monitor output. The possible setups are now abundant.

Despite being a fully native Mac app, users of the iOS versions will be pleased to find most of the familiar features that are available in the iOS version. We designed the Mac version with a keen eye on maintaining consistency in the layout and flow with the iOS versions, while still ensuring a smooth desktop experience. All of the core features – the script list, editor, settings, cue points, and prompting interface should be very familiar to our iOS users – in fact we believe you won’t even need to consult the manual (though we have it available just in case). If you are a new user or would like to get a preview of what the Mac version has to offer, I would suggest you take a look at our product page as well.

We’ve worked tirelessly on Teleprompt+ for Mac, and we believe it is on par with or better than most other options on the Mac platform today at a fraction of the cost.

Some of you with a keen eye will notice that some of the iOS features are not yet implemented in the Mac version, but fear not – version 1.1 is already in the final stages of development (adding Google Docs and Dropbox support), and the remaining advanced features of the iOS versions will be coming to the Mac this Fall.

Teleprompt+ for Mac 1.0 is available today on the Mac App Store for the introductory price of $19.99 (USD). It requires a minimum OS version of Mac OS X Snow Leopard and is fully Lion compatible. Buy Teleprompt+ for Mac now at the introductory price and you will get all of the advanced feature upgrades for free when they are released.

Teleprompt+ was launched about a year ago and one of the first feature requests we had was from musicians wanting to control the app from a foot pedal.  It took some time for the hardware to become available but that has been remedied with the use of Airturn, Inc.’s AirTurn for iPad (affiliate link).  This excellent little piece of hardware allows hands-free control of Teleprompt+ along with support from a slew of other apps that take advantage of the AirTurn.

Using the AirTurn and Teleprompt+ is simple. Once the AirTurn is paired with your iOS device just choose your configuration in the settings pane of the app:

• Single Pedal: Tap the pedal to pause, tap again to play

• Dual Pedal, Speed Control: Tap the left pedal to slow down. Tap the right pedal to speed up. Tap both pedals simultaneously to pause/play
• Dual Pedal, Cue Points: Tap the left pedal for the previous cue point. Tap the right pedal for the next cue point.  Tap both pedals simultaneously to pause/play.

After choosing your configuration just tap the start button and you can then use the foot pedals as desired. Easy right?

One other benefit of adding foot pedal support as it was trivial to add blue tooth keyboard support as well. So if you have a blue tooth keyboard handy you can use that as a remote as well.  Just pair up the keyboard with your iPad.  Start prompting and go to town using your keyboard to control Teleprompt+.  Here’s a list of the keys that you can use:

• Play/Pause: Space Bar
• Slow Down: <
• Speed Up: >
• Previous Cue Point:  [
• Next Cue Point:  ]
• Start/Stop Video/Audio Recording: R
• Exit Script: X
• Restart/Begin Script: B
• Decrease Font Size: -
• Increase Font Size: +
• Hide/Show Video Window: H
• Up Arrow – Pause/Play, Slow Down, Previous Cue Point (depends on foot pedal setting)
• Down Arrow – Pause/Play, Speed Up, Next Cue Point (depends on foot pedal setting)

Note: You might be wondering why the speed controls seems to be reversed (up arrow slows down, down arrow speeds up).  Unfortunately that is how the foot pedal transmits the signal so we were forced to make the keystrokes the same.

We at Bombing Brain Interactive think that the merging of Teleprompt+ and the AirTurn for iPad will be a great addition for many Teleprompt+ users, especially musicians and other performers who need a hands-free operation.  We highly recommend that you check out the awesomeness of AirTurn for iPad together with Teleprompt+ for iPad.

To access the help screen, simply tap on the help icon on the top toolbar of the main setup screen. This will launch the help view.

The help screen is divided into four main sections:

This section will link you to the Teleprompt+ user manual, which is a complete guide to every feature in the application. This is the ultimate reference guide to Teleprompt+.

If you’re looking for a quick video tutorial on how to use a specific feature for Teleprompt+, this section will provide you with everything you need. These videos are also available on the Bombing Brain YouTube Channel. If you haven’t subscribed to our YouTube Channel yet, we’d love to connect with you. We will be using YouTube to put out educational videos about our products, our industry, and technology in general.

The ‘Contact Us’ section within Teleprompt+ will provide you with links to email us, visit our web site, or visit the app store to rate Teleprompt+. If you love using our application, there’s no better way to show your appreciation than to write us up a nice review on the App Store. Your comments will help other iOS users make informed choices about which apps they should use, and we would greatly appreciate it!

Also, if you have questions or feature requests, contacting Bombing Brain via the email link in this section is a great way to get those answered. We take all inquiries from our users very seriously and do our best to respond promptly.

In the Latest News and Blog Articles section  you will find links to our latest blog articles, and other news related to Teleprompt+ and our other mobile applications.

Last but not least, if you’re not following Bombing Brain on Twitter and Facebook yet, you can find our profiles via the links at the bottom of the page. Our Twitter feed and the Bombing Brain Facebook page are great resources not only for information about our products, but for other articles about technology, education, and many other topics we find interesting enough to share. Become a part of the Bombing Brain community, and you can also find helpful tips from other users on how to get the most out of Teleprompt+.

Are you delivering a presentation that you wish you could preserve forever?  How about sharing it with others that couldn’t attend?  Maybe your dreaming of being the next Gary Vaynerchuk or Robert Scoble but just can’t do it off the cuff like they do.  Well, Teleprompt+ is ready to help you with that and more.

The Settings view for Video and Audio Capture

Teleprompt+ 2.2 has been upgraded to take advantage of the cameras in the new iPad 2, iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, and iPod touch (4th generation or later)!  It’s now a mini-production studio in one little tiny device.

To start your career as the next Internet superstar all you need is one these devices and copy of Teleprompt+.  It’s simple to get started. Once you have your device of choice (we recommend the iPad 2) and Teleprompt+ installed. Just follow these steps:

1. Start up Teleprompt+
2. Get Creative! The hardest piece to becoming an Internet phenom is having awesome and interesting content. So get your creative groove on and start a new script or import it from Google Docs or Dropbox.
3. Enable the camera by tapping the Capture option in the settings
4. Tap the camera icon and choose your recording quality.  The quality depends on the device you are using and which camera. For instance here are various settings for the iPad 2 for each camera.

5. Make any other setting adjustment you’d like and tap the Start button
6. The prompting will start and you’ll see your beautiful mug in a small preview window.  Just tap the record button and have fun. Your teleprompter and camera are now integrated. Doesn’t get much cooler than that, does it?
7. Take that incredible and informative video you just made and post it on YouTube. If you really want to get fancy install iMovie on your iPad and edit your video first.
8. Remember us little people when you’re a superstar and give us a plug every now and then.

There you have it. Eight simple steps to get your next presentation recorded. If you just want to share it or export it to your computer you can use iTunes file sharing when you connect your device to your computer. It’s as easy as dragging and dropping! You can then do whatever you want with that video.

So for a low budget production studio the iPad2, Teleprompt+ and iMovie make a pretty mean combination. You can make some pretty incredible stuff sure to wow your boss, grandmother, significant other or some random person on the Internet with just a these simple tools.  Isn’t technology great! Here’s a little presentation I made myself with just these 3 tools in just 31 minutes.  You’ll see that I am not destined to be an internet superstar…I’ll stick to coding.

Update, April 25th, 2012: After an overwhelming response to this article on lyric prompting on stage, we decided to create a special lyric prompting app, called Setlists, tailored to the specific needs of musicians. You can read all about Setlists here.

I have a great musical memory for chords, phrases, even melodies. But when it comes to lyrics, I have the hardest time remembering what comes next. Especially during the many years when I was playing in various cover bands, I often had to sing lead on up to thirty or so songs a night, none of which were my own. I tried writing myself “cheat sheets” with the first few words of each line scribbled down with a sharpie, but inevitably, I’d end up spilling a drink or stepping on my sheets at some point. And no one wants to watch a singer who is looking at his feet all night.

So when the iPad was released, one of the first thoughts I had was that this new device would be perfect for me as a singer. I was always a bit nervous about setting up a fragile laptop anywhere on a cramped stage in a bar, but with the iPad and a nifty accessory like the iKlip, I can fairly safely set up an iPad on my mic stand, putting it within easy range of both my eyes and my hands.

This has opened up all sorts of new possibilities for musicians, of course, as anyone with an iPad who has browsed the App Store could tell you. From great little apps like Guitar ToolKit for tuning, chord charts, etc. to sheet music apps like Tab Toolkit for reading music on stage, to full blown guitar amplifier simulators like Amplitube and Ampkit, and new and exciting synth instruments like Jordan Rudess’ MorphWiz. The iPad is a gold mine for performing musicians who want to explore new ways of making live music.

iPad is the perfect tool for guys like me who for whatever reason can’t remember lyrics to save their lives. I just fire up Teleprompt+ whenever I have to sing a song, and the lyrics magically scroll across my screen, in a very comfortable font size and style.  And because the iKlip keeps my iPad up high, I can keep my eyes on the audience as I sing. They have no idea I’m reading while I’m singing. It’s truly an amazing tool for any singer with a large repertoire of songs.

Import Your Script

First and foremost Teleprompt+ is a iPad Teleprompter application. Before you can record your podcast you have to get your script prepared. Teleprompt+ offers you numerous ways to add your script. You can use the built in text editor to write your script directly in Teleprompt+, you can import your script from Google Documents or Dropbox, and you can copy and paste your script into Teleprompt+ from any iPad application. Once your script has been added to Teleprompt+, the next step is all about customizing the controls to suit your speaking style.

Modify Your Teleprompter Controls

You’re able to customize the scrolling speed, start countdown, timer display, font type, font size, text color, and background color per script. You can also insert Cue Points within your script. Cue Points allow you to quickly jump forward or back to a designated section of your script. Cue points are easy to add, and are invisible while prompting, so they will not distract you from your reading. As you are modifying your controls, you can use that time to practice reading your script. Practice is important because after you setup your controls, you’re ready to start recording your podcast.

Begin Teleprompting & Recording Your Podcast

During a recent version update, we added a recording feature built into Teleprompt+. With so many users recording podcasts with Teleprompt+ already, we wanted to add the recording feature to make it easier for you to do everything all within one application.

Once you’re ready to start recording your podcast simply select your script by clicking ‘Scripts’ in the top left corner of Teleprompt+ and select the script that you’d like to use. Click the Start button at the bottom of the app to get started. Once the countdown is finished you can simply tap the screen to pull up the Teleprompter control bar and you’ll see a microphone in the top right corner of the Teleprompter control bar. Click the microphone to start recording your podcast. Once you’re finished recording your podcast you can export your audio file from your iPad to your computer.

Export Your Audio File

To export the audio file just connect your iPad to your computer, open iTunes, and click on your device. Under the ‘applications’ tab there is a section for file sharing at the bottom. Find Teleprompt+ and click on that row. In there you can see all your recordings and copy them to your computer for editing. Once your podcast is finalized you can upload it to your site.

Podcasting is Easier with Teleprompt+

We hope that adding the recording feature to Teleprompt+ makes it easier for podcasters to record your podcasts. If anyone has already used Teleprompt+ for recording podcasts we’d love to hear how it worked for you. We hope you’ll share your thoughts with us by leaving a comment below.

Today Apple announced the iPad 2, the first major upgrade to its revolutionary tablet device. The original iPad’s impact cannot be denied. It practically created its own electronics category, and despite much criticism as to its usefulness when it was first announced, it became one of the most successful product launches in history. Today that product has been enhanced in a solid upgrade that delivers on Apple’s continued promise to deliver devices that offer the best user experience possible.

As a productive tool, the original iPad has clearly proven its initial critics dead-wrong. Developers were the first to believe in the device’s potential, delivering over 700 new iPad-specific apps when the tablet debuted last April. Many of these iPad apps (ours included) were focused on leveraging the advantages of the iPad to get real work done. Today the iPad is breaking new ground and being taken seriously by not only the consuming public, but businesses as well. Large enterprises who are traditionally slow to adopt new technology have embraced the iPad as a cost-effective replacement for aging laptops and low-quality netbooks.

We believe the iPad 2 will continue that trend in 2011, and even offer some significant improvements that we can take advantage of in our own apps. Our flagship product Teleprompt+, a Teleprompter for iPad, will see the most significant impact.

The thinner form factor and reduced weight of the new iPad will continue to improve the appeal of the device as a portable teleprompter. Luckily the height and width have not been altered, and that means that many of the great hardware camera mounts made for the original iPad will still fit the iPad 2. in the next week, we’ll be posting links on BombingBrain.com to several of these fine hardware rigs. Keep an eye out for our “recommended hardware” page.

The speed improvements in both the cpu and graphics chips in the new iPad should offer even smoother playback while teleprompting, especially when recording audio simultaneously.

The new Apple Digital AV adapter offers a ton of new options for using and external display or TV as a prompter with Teleprompt+. Previously limited to VGA-only output, the graphics processor in the iPad 2 coupled with this adapter should allow Teleprompt+ to drive a wide array of screens, at full 720p or 1080p resolution.

Those two little cameras on both sides of the new iPad, coupled with iMovie, present a lot of opportunity for on-the-go and budget-conscious video producers. But its not just Apple’s built-in apps that will take advantage of those cameras. I’m not going to reveal what we’re up to just yet, but I promise you Teleprompt+ will be one of those apps that will be a perfect companion to the new hardware. Look for an update very soon.

On the entertainment side of the house, the new gyroscope should offer increased accuracy in some of the games and educational apps we are working on. Increased graphics and chip performance should greatly improve the loading times and responsiveness of our games, so your children will spend less time waiting and more time engaged, having fun, and learning.

Of course there are things we would like to have seen in the new iPad (higher-resolution “retina” graphics, perhaps more memory), but overall the iPad 2 looks to be everything its predecessor was, plus many excellent improvements. We look forward to picking up our new iPads on the 11th. See you in line!

In my home music studio I use a variety of tools, including Apple’s Logic Pro, virtual instruments like Guitar Rig for guitar sounds, and Toontrack’s Superior 2.0 for drums. I also use a variety of hardware, I/O boxes, electronic drum kits, keyboard controllers, etc. Recently, I’ve begun integrating the iPad into the studio work flow as well.

One way I use the iPad is as a wireless control unit for Logic. No longer do I have to hit “record” and then run across the room to begin a drum track. Instead, I use AC-7 Core to mimic a traditional control console. I can start and stop the recording, change the tempo, and most importantly “undo” my mistakes, all without leaving the drum stool. So I can concentrate on my performance, rather than the engineering process.

Another way the iPad comes in handy during recording is for vocals. Before, my singer would come into the studio with sheets of handwritten notes for lyrical ideas that he had jotted down during the course of the week. Or maybe he’d have some basic lines typed out on his phone. These were fresh ideas, often in rough form, long before he had them memorized. He’d squint at his notes holding the paper or phone in his hands as he tried to work out the melodies he wanted to sing.

Now, with the help of Teleprompt+, he can import those thoughts (either via cut and paste, via his Google Docs account, or even our shared Dropbox folder), set the iPad onto his microphone stand with an accessory such as the iKlip, and comfortably read his lyrics with hands free in large type, advancing the lines at a comfortable pace. He can even make quick edits using Teleprompt+’s script editing tools as new ideas come to him.

Thanks to the recording feature built into Teleprompt+, he can also record preliminary melodies on his own while reading his lyrics. This is extremely helpful for those times when you have a great idea on the road but don’t have a quick way to record it. Just hit the record button on the Teleprompt+ console, and you have it captured for playback. Refine the idea and record it for real in the studio later.

If you have a home studio, or you are a singer who needs to read new lyrical ideas while hammering out your melodies in the studio, you’ll be surprised at how much easier it is to create great melodies when you don’t have to strain your eyes just to see what you’ve written.

I was on that path. Before Bombing Brain, I had a fairly good career. After college, I took a good starting job in information technology (IT) at a pretty good company, and started on the typical corporate IT career path. It goes something like this:

1. Graduate college, work a few years and climb your way up a few of the dozens of pre-defined career levels.
2. At some point, go back to school for the now almost obligatory graduate degree.
3. Get your graduate degree, then either move up the ladder into middle management, or switch to another company for a moderate pay raise and a job in middle management.
4. Spend the remainder of your career in middle management, and just as you are about to break into the executive level, receive your “early retirement” notice.

Sounds cynical, and I know this is not how all technology careers go, but I’ve seen quite a lot of it. I remember clearly when I started my career that a lot of the people above me, former managers and mentors alike, seemed really successful. They had nice homes and nice cars, and at the surface level were living the American dream. This is where the “rules” started to appear. Here’s just some of them:

1. Work hard and people will notice you
2. Work long hours and your job is secure
3. Work your way up the ladder, and one day you might even be CTO
4. Going into business for yourself is a huge risk
5. If you do go into business, never go into business with friends

Great advice, except that its wrong

All of the above rules seemed to make sense to me originally, but then something interesting happened as I got older. I witnessed some of the brightest, most intelligent people I’ve ever known get passed over for people who lacked any substance at all (rule #1 false). I worked 15 hour days and received nothing to show for it except a pink slip (#2 false). I saw excellent, experienced managers get passed over for the vice-president’s golfing buddies (#3 false).

It didn’t take too long for me to notice all of these people I originally wanted to be like were not what they seemed. Looking closer you could see they were tired, frustrated, and had sacrificed a lot of their personal lives in pursuit of their careers, with not that much to show for it – a moderately successful life at best (more like “mediocre” if you ask me).

Then there were the nay-sayers, some people who tried their own businesses and failed, but by far mostly people who just never tried. “Its too big a risk” was advice I believed for a long time. The reality is its no more risky than working for a company that ultimately cares more about the bottom line than your job security (#4 false).

“Never go into to business with friends” – that’s a good one. Makes a lot of sense on the surface. In fact I avoided it for over 15 years on account of that rule. But then it hit me, nearly all the people who had ever given me that advice were bitter, selfish people who had major trust issues. So of course that’s good advice – for them, but not me.

The bottom line is, you need to do what is right for you based on your level of trust with the other individuals. For me, I would rather go into to business with people that I trust like brothers and take the chance it may sour. The opportunity for success outweighs the risk (#5 false).

So, I took that risk, and formed Bombing Brain with some of my closest friends. I couldn’t have even started any of this without them. So far its been worth it.

Trust your gut, break the rules, and follow your own path.

As 2010 turned to 2011 the next piece of budget talk focused on the need to yet again raise the debt ceiling. Now, days after President Barack Obama released his budget proposal for fiscal year 2012, media is once again talking non-stop about America’s budget deficit. You may be wondering why exactly we have decided to write about this topic. No, neither Gene or Tim are considering running for President in 2012. Instead, we stumbled across a very interesting piece of news reported by Fox news back on February 16, 2011. Apparently, even the President isn’t immune to the high costs of teleprompters!

Here’s a recent media report from February 16, 2011:

It appears that Representative Womack has since pulled the amendment, stating, “I think we made our point,” Womack said. “We’re asking people to do more with less. And I think the president ought to lead by example. He is already a very gifted speaker. And I think that’s one platform he could do without.”

We agree that the President is a very gifted speaker. With that said, even the best speakers can benefit from the use of a teleprompter. Although eliminating the President’s teleprompter isn’t going to happen, we are prepared to do our part to contribute to reducing America’s budget. President Obama should use an iPad teleprompter, like Teleprompt+, instead of the traditional teleprompter that’s been used to date at the White House. In fact, if the President is interested, we will give him a FREE copy of Teleprompt+! If Rep. Womack’s people are reading this OR if President Obama’s aides come across this article, simply email Bombing Brain Interactive and we’ll send you a promo code for what AppAdvice is calling the best iPad teleprompter on the market, Teleprompt+.

Bombing Brain Interactive is sponsoring this program, providing free copies of its Teleprompt+ app to students for their use during class presentations.

We’re proud to be a part of this new initiative, as we feel that the iPad will have an incredible impact on the world of education. We hope that this is but the first of many such programs in universities and other learning institutions across the globe. We feel strongly that Teleprompt+ is the perfect tool for students preparing and delivering live presentations or recording scripted videos. The students and faculty at Patterson will surely demonstrate this for us.

We’ll be watching the progress of this program with great interest, and we’re sure others will be, too.

You can follow the program at its official blog here. Or follow the program on Twitter. We’ll be posting updates as they pertain to the students’ use of Teleprompt+ as well.

You can also read more about this great program in The Kentucky Kernel.

Meyers explains that our easy-to-use and learn interface was the primary reason for choosing Teleprompt+ over the competition. “Chief among its virtues: the two minutes or less you’ll need to get up to speed—especially important for Nervous Nellies or technophobes who want to focus on their talk and not on gadget wrangling.” He also liked our text import feature, which allows users to import text from Google Docs or a Dropbox account.

Peter Meyers was a former editor at O’Reilly Media. He co-founded Digital Learning Interactive, and he’s written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Wired as well. His new book Best iPad Apps: The Guide for Discriminating Downloaders can be purchased at Safari Books Online, Amazon.com (paperback or Kindle version), or on Apple’s iBooks.

You can check out more information about iKlip, including how to purchase, here.

It was great to get some valuable feedback about our game and to preview a little of what we’re working on for our next title.

This meetup is always well-attended, and the room is filled with valuable talent.

There were a number of other great presentations this week, from Lorraine Akemann of Moms with Apps, Jacob Klein, one of the creators of Motion Math, Veda Guess, author of the Android app Multiple Madness, Lenny Greenberg, showing off his very impressive TapToTalk software, and more.

If you happen to live in the Bay Area, and you are interested in applications written for children, I highly recommend this group. It’s a great way to network with others who are trying to break into the apps business. Engineers, creative designers, musicians, marketers, app reviewers—even just people with great ideas looking for people who can implement them—the group has a mix of all of the above. It’s good fun, and it’s good business.

You can find out more about the group here.

And if you aren’t in the Bay Area, you may want to find out if there are similar meetup groups where you live. It’s a great way to network and share ideas.

He was trusting me to make something his own children would love. So I knew I couldn’t take it lightly.

We talked about several characters and some of the activities he wanted. (This was still very early in the process, so we hadn’t mapped out everything the app would include just yet.) I walked away from that conversation with some great ideas about how the app should look.

I mainly do UI and corporate graphic design in my day job, so doing character design was somewhat new to me. “Just make sure the characters are smiling,” Gene had said to me. “We want to be spooky, but not scary. This is for kids.”

That concept “Smiling Zombies,” as I later dubbed it, would drive the visual aesthetic of the entire app.

Where to begin? I decided to start simple with a study of eye shapes. I knew that the key to any animated character was the eyes. Get the eyes right, and everything else will follow.

Everyone has that classic Halloween image in their heads of eyes blinking in the darkness; simple enough, right? Just some white shapes on a black background. Nothing I couldn’t pull off with the pen tool. So I fired up Illustrator, and I started playing with bezier curves.

Some early eye drawings for Spooky Playtime

As you can see from this picture, my first inclinations were far too scary for toddlers. Those thin, sinister eyes would have to be softened, and after several more variations, I arrived at the final set at the bottom, which became the eyes of our lovable black kitty in the pumpkin patch.

The final Kitty in a Pumpkin Patch Character

The basic eye shapes for several of the other characters were taken right out of that initial study, too. I had drawn about a dozen or so sets of eye shapes, and in the end used four or five of them.

The marathon coding weekend
Between our other commitments, both home and work, we realized if we wanted to get this done in time we would have to truly dedicate some time to this project.  So some serious discussions began at home with the wives to try and sneak away for a long weekend to code.  What originally was planned as a 5 to 7 day coding get away ended up being shrunk down to about a 2 and a half day coding weekend over the labor day holiday.

Late Friday evening Gene and I headed to a family owned house in the Pocono mountains for some serious and concentrated coding.  Arriving around 10PM we unpacked our equipment, cranked up iTunes and got to coding until about 2:30 AM.  Went to bed. Got up around 9 and coded again until 2 to 3 AM with occasional breaks for food and drink. This process repeated until we left on Monday afternoon.  It was a lot of work but a lot a fun with requests to Joe for any additional graphics we needed as we went along.

(A few shots of the marathon weekend – lots of work but location of Bombing Brain hideout is beatutiful)

By the end of weekend we had the menu and all 5 games coded and working. We also had a list of about 95 to do items. We were feeling good as the majority of the coding was done. The “house” was framed and drywalled. Now we needed to furnish and decorate!

The crash report
Upon getting home from the trip, the kids were excited to see us.  I decided to let my kids give the game a dry run and see how they liked it.  They LOVED it except for one problem – it crashed after almost every game.  To the point where my 3 year old would say as the game ended – “crash!”. Oh boy…

The next 3 to 4 days I dug deep into our code. Using all kinds of tools to find out what was causing the crashes. Turned out to be some bad memory management on our part.  This tends to happen when you code something rather complex and have a minimal understanding of the framework you are using. So after doing a ton of research on cocos2d, learning a bunch and reworking some of code I got the app stabilized and running much more efficiently.

Family time
In order for this game to come alive we needed sound effects – lots of sound effects. Some we got from Garage band, others we made ourselves. The squeaky door sound is the door to my basement (still have to find time to oil that hinge). The bone rattle sound is Gene’s kids toy blocks!  These sounds effects were easy but we also needed kid sounds. Luckily we have 5 kids between our families ranging in age of 2 – 7.

So on one Sunday afternoon we gathered them together and Gene dusted off his old equipment from the band days and recorded all the voices you hear in the game. The kids had a great time cheering, counting and making silly sounds.

That same evening Gene’s wife, Karen, recorded all the instructional text using a Teleprompter iPad app we just happened to have: Teleprompt+.  Nice to have an opportunity to use your own app!

So now the sounds were recorded and we just needed on last piece: Music!

It’s Spooky, spooky playtime
While I was trudging through memory dumps and crash reports Gene started working on the music. All three of us have musical backgrounds, Gene and I were in a rock band together in high school and college. Joe and Gene were in a competition Jazz band in high school and had done numerous duo projects together in college and beyond.  Of the three of us, I am the least musical but the most techie. Therefore Gene and Joe took on the music of game. I knew it was gonna be great!

Gene has had the theme music in his head since July so he laid down the initial guitar, drums, vocals and sound effect tracks.  He dropped an mp3 of the theme for us to hear. I was blown away it was nearly perfect. He actually had a few versions. One with his normal voice on the the vocals and another with an effect on the vocals that made it sound a bit more spooky. Eventually we decided it was difficult to understand with the effects and later removed them.

Once Gene was done his part he shifted the audio off to Joe to work his mixing and percussion magic on the soundtrack. Joe added real drums, bass and some low vocals. This collaboration went back and forth between them until you get what you hear today.

In the next few days this same process happened on the other 2 songs: Spooky Scat and Spooky Grove.

The final push
All the pieces were now in place and we worked every night until 2 or 3 in morning editing and importing the audio, adding animations to bring the characters to life and just adding more polish to the app and making some minor tweeks for the iPhone version.

As we came toward the end we all took on our roles: Joe created all the screenshots and started on the website (www.spookyplaytime.com), Gene wrote up the descriptions and cleaned up any audio, and I worked on the splash screen and last minute coding changes and tweaks.

On September 24th 2010 at about 2:30 AM the app was submitted to Apple. Total days from the time the app project was first created: 40 days.

Time to rest…not really
Spooky Playtime was amazing collaborative effort. It showed us what we can do if we really put our mind to it.  So now you know the story of Spooky Playtime. So what does it take to write a kick-butt iOS game in a month (and not have your wife and kids walk you on you)?

It takes a lot but here are some of the major factors:

1. Family first – yes we were under a tight deadline but we still had those family obligations.  Putting your family first will keep the family happy and understanding when you have go into hiding to get the game complete. I think also getting the whole family involved made everyone feel a part of it.
2. Understanding significant others – This game would not have gotten done if our wives hadn’t of let us get away for a few days.  This is priceless and extremely important.
3. Varying but overlapping skill sets – The 3 of us all excel in different areas and all of our skills overlap. So if someone is tied up with something then the other can fill in and move things along. Very important when on a tight deadline.
4. Ability to function with little sleep – There were a lot of nights where we would only get 3 – 4 hours sleep a night. This can’t go on for too many days in a row but this is vital when trying to write an app in a month.
5. Passion, Heart and Fun – If you don’t have these 3 factors you’ll never get an app complete.  Contrary to what you may hear in media writing an iOS app is not something you can do overnight. It’s not as simple as building a web page. It takes concentrated effort that takes a lot time.  Without passion you’ll drop the app the for something else. Without heart it won’t have that special charm that makes it stand out from the thousands of other apps. Without fun it’s just not worth doing.

We had a wonderful time developing this app and are currently working on more apps to add to the “Playtime” series. So no rest for us! Please keep a lookout on this blog, Twitter and Facebook for more fun and unconventional uses for Apple’s revolutionary mobile products.

Most seasoned iPhone developers would probably turn and run in fear when then heard that.

Not at Bombing Brain.

“Sure!” I said. Ever the optimist and lunatic.

At the time we were knee deep in working on a major update for our flagship app, Teleprompt+, with hopes to release by mid-August. I had just started as the first full time “Bombing Brainer” and stay at home dad. My partner, Gene, was still working his full time job. Both of us also have family and young kids so our free time is at a minimum. We also were committed to have 2 new iPad apps for one of our clients delivered in July and August respectively.  You could say we we’re busy. Oh yeah, we also had a joint family vacation planned for the end July so we would lose that week also.  Looking back on it now…I really think we were nuts.

The first steps
While we were finishing up the Teleprompt+ changes we reached out to our good friend and designer, Joe, to see if he could do the graphics for us.  Next thing you know he gives us what you see in the image below – Perfect!  Exactly what we were thinking: “not so scary” monsters.

Of course these images got us jazzed but we had to resist the urge to start since we were about a week away from submitting the update to Teleprompt+ and also working on contract work at the same time.

But I just couldn’t resist. I just wanted to prototype something before we got to far into it. So I started researching tools for the animation. I find an open source project – cocos2d. These libraries have been used for various iPhone games and it seemed a good fit.  I gave it a try and got a basic animation going. In the meantime, Joe sent us 3 frames of an animated bat. The timing was perfect – I dropped these images in and had a bat flying around with 30 minutes of downloading the cocos2d software development kit. We now had something to prove we could do this.

Here’s my actual email to the guys (on August 7th 2010 @ 10:03 PM):

“I couldn’t resist anymore…Check out the Halloween/Samples folder on dropbox. I’ve added a little video of Batty animated!  Did it using cocos2d and it was extremely easy. Took about 20 minutes to learn the basic api and write the code based on a sample. Can’t wait to really get started on this…back to Teleprompt+…”

Let the coding begin…
In the wee hours of the morning on August 18th we finally got Teleprompt+ submitted to Apple, all 3 versions: iPad, iPhone and the remote.  We agreed to take a couple days off to recoup. But later that day, after the kids were in bed, I had to scratch that coding itch that had been bugging me for weeks.  I created the project that would eventually become Spooky Playtime. At the time I just called it Halloween.

//  HalloweenAppDelegate.m
//  Halloween
//
//  Created by Tim on 8/18/10.
//  Copyright Bombing Brain Interactive 2010. All rights reserved.

By the weekend, Joe had provided some graphics for us to work with and I presented the guys with a video of the first version of the haunted house matching game. It had some basic animations and rough sound effects but was already looking and feeling like a real game.

Gene had been busy with his day job and on the front line for our client apps but by the weekend I had given him my code and a 10 minute crash course in my limited knowledge of cocos2d.  We were now starting our insane mission trying to complete this game in a month.

Working from coast to coast
Joe is on the west coast and Gene and I are on the east coast. Therefore we do most of our collaboration using a mixture of email, Dropbox and iChat in the evening and early mornings.  We all had ideas for types of games we could do and came to the consensus on 5 different games plus the menu screen which could act as a mini-game.

Amazingly, the games we decided on that night are the ones that ended up in the final game with almost no variation to the original idea.  I think that just shows you how in tune we are with each other. I guess that shouldn’t be much of a surprise as we’ve all been friends since high school (grade school for Gene and I) and share a music background.  We know each others strengths and weaknesses so we make a very strong team.

Many projects would probably suffer from working these strange hours at long distances but it seems at Bombing Brain that distance nor time present much of a challenge.

(See how we rallied to finish this app in time for an October release in Part 2! Coming in a couple days)

The old version of Teleprompt+ (2.0.1 and earlier) recorded the audio in an Apple Lossless format which should play fine in iTunes but for some reason they didn’t. This was why we didn’t enable the export of audio before.  In this new version any new audio you record is saved in an m4a format which plays just fine in iTunes but old recordings are still in the Apple lossless format. So the question remains – how do I get my old recordings to play on my PC?

It’s a not a great process but it should get your audio extracted and in a format that you can play easily.  These directions are for OS X. For windows users I would use a application such as Advanced MP3 Converter which should be able to convert your files to many formats.

How to export and convert old (verisons 2.0.1 and earlier) Teleprompt+ audio recordings

1. Plug your iPad/iPhone into your computer (if it’s not already)

2. Open iTunes and select your iPad/iPhone from the menu on the left

3. Tap on the Apps option in the menu bar across the top (see screenshot above)

4. Then scroll to the bottom of the large content area until you see the “File Sharing” section

5. Click on the Teleprompt+ app and you will see a list of all your scripts and audio files on your device

6. The files with the .alac extension are the older audio recordings.  So find the one you want to export. Click on it and select the “Save to…” button

7. iTunes will then present you with a dialog of where to save it. Save the file anywhere on your computer but remember where you put it. For this example we’ll use the Desktop.

8. Open the Terminal app. This can be found under Applications, then the Utilities folder and double click “Terminal”. This will open a small window with some text and a blinking cursor.

9. Type the following into the window to make sure you are working in the correct folder:
cd ~/<Whatever folder path you saved the file to> (for this example: cd ~/Desktop)

10. Type the following into the window (replace <> and text in between with the name of your file without the extension. And note the backslash (\) in the screenshot above if your file name has spaces in it):
afconvert -f mp4f -d aac -b 128000 <NAME OF YOUR FILE>.alac <NAME OF YOUR FILE>.m4a

11. The file should now be in the same folder as the original file with the extension .m4a and this you double click and it should play in iTunes or your default audio player

I understand this a cumbersome process and if you have any problems or questions please email us and we’ll help you out.  The good thing is that this is only for older recordings. Any recordings you make with the new version (2.0.2 and higher) are already in a compatible format and no conversion is necessary.

Lane also shares our love for coasters, clearly, as he posts videos on Fridays of his favorites. We’re glad to see our app in the hands of a true enthusiast.

Maybe he’ll be reviewing Teleprompt+ or Spooky Playtime soon? Let’s hope so.

My name is Gene Whitaker, and I am the co-founder and CEO of Bombing Brain Interactive. We’re currently a three-man operation, so I don’t take that “CEO” title that seriously. Lets just say it stands for “chief explosives officer” (pun intended) and be done with the formalities. We are three guys who love Apple, love technology, and most importantly want give something good to the world (and maybe at least make a half-decent living doing it).

The purpose of this blog is to to connect with our customers on a more personal level – to talk about our apps and share some of our trials and tribulations in making them. We hope to inspire a dialogue with you in these articles, with the intention of improving our existing products and coming up with new app ideas that will bring even more value to this exciting new platform.

Over the next few weeks, our partners and I will be posting some articles that will help you get to know us better. Please register on our blog and respond to our articles, we love the feedback and love to hear from you. You can always hit us via email (support@bombingbrain.com), or on our Facebook (facebook.com/BombingBrain) and Twitter (@BombingBrain) accounts as well.

Might as well get it started…

Why Apple, why now?

A little over two years ago, Apple launched the iPhone 3G and the iTunes App Store, and changed the world as a result. Fast-forward to today and look where we are – the iPhone is the most sophisticated and popular mobile phone in the world, and their revolutionary iPad is one of the most rapidly adopted electronic devices in history, and is going to take a bite out of traditional PC sales. For a lot of people, the iPad will replace their computers (I already know a few people who rarely use their computer for much of anything since they bought their iPad).

There are so many reasons why one could explain Apple’s recent success – too many in fact to count or even discuss here. There is one thing that attracts us personally to their platform. Its that through years of careful experimentation, failures, and refinements, Apple has seemed to find that balance between state of the art science and engineering and still somehow produce products that are so naturally human and intuitive. I challenge anyone to find a platform that offers such a natural human interface. I watched tonight as my two year old daughter asked for my iPad. She sat it in her lap and promptly pressed the home button, swiped the lock on screen, pressed the home button again to exit the app that I was last running, and then she swiped through the icons until her games appeared. She chose a game and was playing in just a few seconds.

If my two-year old can operate the device with such ease, I have to think that perhaps that we do not just have a gimmicky new trend on our hands as so many people have accused. Perhaps we are actually witnessing the beginning of a new era in computing. One centered on the user, not the technology, centered on the task to accomplish, not the mechanics of the tools.

All of this is a natural fit for Bombing Brain, and I’ll tell you why in part 2 of this post. I’ll tell you more about us and how we ended up developing some of the apps we’ve published. After that, Tim has a great article on the marathon effort we put in to make our latest labor of love – Spooky Playtime!

Bombing Brain Interactive is pleased to announce the release of Go StarGaze, an iPhone/ iPod Touch application developed for the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. Go StarGaze taps into the NASA’s Night Sky Network database to enable users to find events and clubs for amateur astronomers throughout the United States.

Go StarGaze can easily find upcoming events or clubs based on your current location and provide you with information about how to get there. You can also perform advanced searches to find events happening in other locations you are planning to visit up to six months into the future.

Bombing Brain was excited to work with the Astronomical Society of the Pacific to make this great resource available to everyone on the App Store. And best of all, it’s a free download. So if you’ve ever been interested in the night sky, wanted to find out more about star gazing, or just want to have some free, educational fun, check out Go StarGaze on the App Store today. And visit the NASA Night Sky Network and the Astronomical Society of the Pacific to learn more.