Tapku

After months of frustration built up from the approval wait, I’m happy to announce the approval of Album Shuffle. The application is a free, little interactive application that allows you to experience your music albums in the iPhone’s multi-touch environment. Go ahead and download it. Enjoy!
I wrote previously on the doubts that surmounted from the extended approval time. So much so, that I doubted that Album Shuffle would ever be approved into the App Store. I still stand by my intuition that any application that takes advantage of the Music API in iPhone OS 3 will be ushered into an extend approval time queue though. All that aside, I’ve written a few articles discussing the various issues that Album Shuffle presented when developing an application that deals with multi-touch and layer transparencies with the iPhone. Stay tuned for those articles!

People ask me all the time what “Tapku” means. In short:

Tap + Haiku = Tapku

I’ll start with the meaning of tap behind first. Back when I was thinking of a name and logo, tap seemed like a popular keyword for many iPhone companies (too many now to name). Call me a victim of conformity or just a copy-cat, but tap signifies a user gesture on the iPhone screen. Other options were been touch or pinch, maybe even shake, but ultimately tap was the way to go.

That leaves us with haiku. While I don’t pretend to be some expert on this style of Japanese poetry, I do think the ideals of something that is simply structured and conducted with a rhythm is a very good description of everything a great iPhone app needs to be. As Apple themselves hark, a great iPhone app needs to be devoid of many of the bells and whistle you expect to find in a desktop application. The goals of an app must be clearly define and executed in the most elegant way possible. This need for a user experience that is simple and intuitive makes Haiku a great word to describe the goals of the company’s applications. And thus, we have the name Tapku.

Hey World, I’ve been meaning to start a blog for Tapku, but I just haven’t gotten around to it…. until now. While I don’t have real design for the blog yet, I have a lot of ideas of what to write about. These ideas will come out soon enough! In the mean time though, there’s To-Do Lists and my Twitter. I’ve just put up a sneak peak of an upcoming iPhone project. If you have a moment, tweet @ me! I’d appreciate it.