Behind the App: Garrett Murray

Recently FYA had the pleasure of  being able to pick one of the best in the businesses brain, Garrett Murray. He is responsible for Ego App and one of the creative minds behind Pinch/Zoom. Garrett let us in on what he does and a few things he has in the pipeline.

1. What does your typical day look like?

In general, I tend to spend mornings catching up on email and scheduling out various meetings or calls for the week. I spend time going through all the active projects in Basecamp and checking on progress and milestones, posting updates, etc. I’m not a good morning person, so I rarely ever do anything related to design or development before noon. I tend to spend three or four hours developing/designing/etc during the afternoon, depending on how many calls or meetings I have.

Around 4 or 5PM, I try to get out for a run and a little exercise. Then I tend to go back to work from 6PM to 8PM or so. This aligns pretty well with EOD in the Pacific timezone, where my business partner is, so we can touch base if necessary. Any time after 8PM is time I spend on side projects, going out, etc. I try not to work on anything business-related on weekends wherever possible and use that time for my own stuff.

This all is also completely flexible–one of the benefits of running your own business and working out of your home office is that you can do whatever, whenever. Another benefit is that we tend to have a lot of our internal meetings while playing Zombie mode in Call of Duty: World at War.

2. What are some of the recent projects that you have been working on?

A majority of the stuff we’re working on at pinch/zoom right now I can’t talk about publicly (yet), but I will say a lot of it is related to the iPhone. Recently, we did some work for Lonely Planet, Telstra, Big Think and others.

Personally, I’m still working on various updates to Ego, and some of my other side projects including Prettify. I’m also in the beginning stages of creating a new iPhone application which I’ll be talking about more in the coming months.

3. Ego has an amazing UI which translates into an amazing UX. I bought the app based on looks alone and then fell in love with how stupid easy it works. Was the UI or the UX the driving factor when you made this app or did they fall under the same category?

First, thanks. And yeah, they sort of fall under the same category when it comes to an application like this. Ego is what I’d call a clear case of a utility application. It doesn’t do much (functionally) except display data, which means it needs to get right to the point in a clear and usable fashion. I wanted the widgets to look like they belonged on the iPhone but also felt somewhat unique. Sort of native/non-native if that makes any sense. I took a great deal of inspiration from the OS X dashboard and existing widgets for various tracking services, most notably Mint.

Luckily for me, the process for setting up a widget wasn’t terribly difficult so I was able to attempt to streamline that as much as possible. Little touches like the “Next” button on the keyboard going to the next field in the setup form and then finishing when on the last were simple to implement but made a difference when it came to entering data. I try to keep my eye out for those kinds of little enhancements when developing/designing applications.

And, most of all, *I* use things I write. Hell, I primarily write them for me, so I spend a good deal of time testing/using the application before I ever share it with others. I think that tends to add a bit more polish.

4. From start to finish in the production of Ego what do you think was the hardest part?

Hands down the Google Analytics support. Which is a bit ironic, of course, because it wasn’t even part of version 1.0. Back when I implemented GA support, Google didn’t have a public API. There were plenty of ways to get various bits of data out of GA through scraping and such, and the clamor for Analytics features from users was so strong that I went ahead and implemented a version of it. Luckily, it worked, but only for a time. When you have thousands of people all hitting the site from a specific application Google takes notice and they blocked Ego from scraping the data.

Over the next few weeks I rewrote the feature several times and even got friends to help me rewrite it in various ways. But it all felt like a dead-end. Then, finally, I was able to get into the secret Google Analytics API program and write an officially-supported version of the feature for the application. Two days after that version was released, Google publicly released the API. Figures.

The whole experience was pretty awful, though. There were a few weeks there were the app was getting blasted in reviews, negative publicity, etc. Not fun to deal with. Luckily the feature is solid now and I don’t have to think about it any more. But everything else pales in comparison to that whole ordeal.

5. How many different icon designs did you go through for Ego’s iPhone icon? How crucial of a role does this icon play in the branding of ones app?

I’m really lucky that I had an idea for the application icon right off the bat and didn’t have to do much back and forth on it. The original name of the application was actually Stacks, but a few days into development I was talking to my friend Shawn Morrison about it and he said it sounded like an application for someone with a really inflated ego. He told me I might as well call it what it is, and I agreed and changed the name to Ego. A few hours later while I was sketching out various bits of the UI, I had a sudden idea for the icon which was basically a golden statue of me on the same background the app uses. I sketched it out and made a SUPER rough version of the icon for an example.

Luckily, I had been in contact with Adam Betts years ago related to him doing some icons for an OS X app I wrote (xPad) but never ended up redoing that stuff, but I still followed his work very closely because he’s one of the best icon designers out there. I sent him an email with my sketch and rough mockup, as well as a screenshot of the in-progress app and he loved the concept and UI design and agreed to do the icon. And he did a fantastic job.

6. Its clear by your Flickr feed that you have a clear Mac obsession. What is your overall opinion of the Mac platform for your development? (both web and iPhone)

Yeah, I have a bit of a problem. That aside, I would say that I couldn’t imagine using any other platform for pretty much anything I do, whether we’re talking about web, mobile or app development, making podcasts, editing films, etc. The Mac experience is superior to any other computing platform on earth, hands down. Most of my friends are Mac people, and many of them have to use Windows at work and I can’t imagine the hell they suffer through on a daily basis.

7. How easy (or hard) has the iPhone SDK been to work with?

The iPhone SDK is wonderful. It really is. It’s as if someone went through AppKit (one of the core frameworks used for developing OS X applications) and threw out most of the garbage and cleaned up the remaining stuff. I was beyond pleasantly surprised when I sat down to write Ego, and since then when writing various applications for clients. It feels new but has the stability of the OS X legacy behind it.

A few months ago I wrote an OS X desktop application for a client (for the first time in about 6 years) and, after using the iPhone SDK, it was really rough. I just kept wishing I was building an iPhone app instead.

8. When did you start pinch/zoom?

We officially launched pinch/zoom in May of this year. We (Brian Fling, the other founder, and I) had been working together on various projects over the previous year and had been talking about creating a company together and things finally lined up for that in the beginning of 2009.

9. I noticed that the pinch/zoom site redesign has launched and shows an awesome apple feel (as well as iPhone). Were these conscience design decisions made to represent the fact that you live in the app world?

The design credit for pinch/zoom’s website goes completely to Brian. The design direction was definitely taken from our motivations and goal to design and develop lovely applications for the web and mobile devices. We’re both big fans of the iPhone and Apple in general, and we get a lot of our inspiration from their design work. We wanted our website to convey to potential clients the kind of design we enjoy and specialize in.

10. What is some insight that you would like to pass down to some up and coming app developers?

The best insight I can give: Become a workaholic. That sounds terrible, but it’s true. You have to keep doing it, all the time. Play with different technologies, build things, take existing applications apart, learn. I’ve been doing this for nearly 10 years and I still end up playing with side projects nearly every day.

Connect With Garrett?

Personal Site | Pinch/Zoom | Twitter | Blog/Stream