Behind the App – Mike Rundle

Full name: Mike Rundle
Website: flyosity.com
Where you live: Raleigh, NC
Where you work: UI Engineer at Bronto Software
What type of design do you do: Design and development on the web, Mac & iPhone

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What current projects do you have in the pipeline?

Beak, my Mac Twitter app, has been taking up the majority of my spare time for the past few months as I work to get to the 1.0 release but I’ve also got two other applications in the early stages of development: another Mac app and an iPhone app. The Mac app is a twist on traditional productivity apps which will have some really nice syncing capabilities and the iPhone app is still in the early stages so there’s not much to give away at the moment.

How many different phases or changes has this projects gone through to reach its end result?

Beak has gone through a ton of changes since I first thought it up around November 2008. It was originally meant to be an extremely free-form conversation manager where all tweets were visualized as “cards” and you could drag and rearrange all the cards to form your own “stacks” where they’d stay and pile up. It was more of an exercise in creating a non-traditional user experience for Twitter but I ended up coming back to reality and creating a more traditional-styled Twitter app but with some interesting features brought over from the first vision. The interface design has changed most significantly over the course of development but I’m happy where it is now.

How did you get started in your field? Did you study something in particular or are you self-taught?

Depends on which field you’re talking about :) I’ve been designing and developing websites since 1996 and graduated from college in 2005 with a degree in Information Technology with a concentration in usability and web programming. Since then I’ve focused mainly on visual interface design for the web but I’m just as comfortable writing my own code as I am in Photoshop. After the iPhone SDK came out I spent some time pouring over the APIs and learning Cocoa but didn’t start Mac application development in earnest until summer of last year. I never took design classes in college so I’m not classically trained but I did study programming for many years however all my Cocoa and Mac/iPhone development knowledge I learned on my own.

Please tell us more about your app development background and what made you choose this path for your career?

Well my career is focused around creating interfaces for web-based applications which I love and do on a daily basis. Even though my current interests are geared more towards Mac development I’ll never stop designing and developing for the web. In my mind if I’m working on a Mac application or a web application I’m still creating a software experience for a user so it’s still part of my overall passion.

What do you feel are the most important skills for someone in your field to have?

I couldn’t even tell you what field I’m actually in since I’ve been spanning disciplines for such a long time but the most important skill for anyone to have in the software industry is a love for learning and a never-ending desire to become better at what they do. Designers who don’t know how to program should grab some books and learn and developers who don’t know anything about usability or interface design should start talking to users and understand human-computer interaction. Stepping outside your comfort zone and learning something new is a great way to make yourself more marketable, too, and that’s pretty useful in the current economy.

What do you do to get fresh ideas?

Recently they’ve all been attached to my own frustrations so I like creating software that fills my own needs first. I wanted a Twitter client for the Mac that looked nice so I could leave it open all day long. The other two applications I’m currently working on both have similar backgrounds — I was missing something so I decided to build it.

How do you typically start a new project?

It starts with a whole lot of thinking spread out across a few weeks. Not in straight doses, either, but sporadically and usually while I’m thinking about something else I’ll have an idea or think up the solution to a particular problem. These solutions and ideas make their way down to paper and pretty soon I’ve got the software’s problem set defined in front of me. It’s around this time I start to think about the key interaction points of the app and how they should be designed so I start drawing out some concepts with pen & pencil. Once I’ve got a rough outline of how the interface will look I fire up Xcode and Photoshop and start putting the pieces together.

Do you have any favorite websites for interacting with others in the app/development community? (flickr, twitter etc)

Twitter’s been my favorite outlet, it’s extremely easy to find smart developers and connect with them.

What does your typical day look like?

I’ve got a full-time job as a User Interface Engineer for a marketing software company so that takes up the bulk of it. I don’t start to work on any other projects until late at night. I like to restrict the amount of time I spend per week on Beak or my other projects so it makes me respect it more and forces me to be more productive.

What are your 5 favorite sites online?

Reddit, TechMeme, Daring Fireball, Mac Rumors and The Superficial.

Who, in the online world, would you say has had the biggest influence on you? (designer, blogger, entrepreneur, etc…)

When I started designing for the web my big influencers were Doug Bowman, Dan Cederholm and Dave Shea. They were doing clean and brilliant visual design in the early 2000s before anyone else and I think I gawked over their portfolios enough to have some of their design intuition leak into my subconscious. Nowadays I’m observing application design more than web design so I love the work that guys like Wolfgang Bartelme & Laurent Baumann are putting together. They’re some of the top interface designers in the world and I’m extremely fortunate to be friends with both of them.

What are the tools you couldn’t live without? (software, invoicing tools, time/task-management apps, pen/paper, online etc…)

TextMate is my swiss army knife for everything but Mac development which is Xcode’s domain. Safari is my browser of choice, Photoshop is for pushing pixels, and I’ve recently begun to love Mailplane as it’s now replaced Apple Mail as my default email client. I’ve got all my email addresses hooked up through Gmail and I leave Mailplane open all day long.