In the last two weeks we got really great Feedback of some of our private beta testers. As we won´t hide Thoughts from you, i decided to give you all a deeper look into the development of Thoughts.
Today i want to write about how it all began.
Usually other companies had the first steps of their Company in the middle of their old garage where they made the first prototypes of what later turns out to be their first product.
In our case this is different. When i was 16 i attended a graphic design school where i began to get interested in the early web technologies and web design. I think this was when i got my first mac. It was a G4, 400 MHz which my father bought me.
Some years later i got a real big fan of Apple. I met Andreas the first time at a Mac meeting in Austria Vienna in 2002. His obsession was to code for Apple Macs with the all new Mac OS X. He worked for a company called “Freshly Squeezed Software” where he coded for the Apple design awarded RSS reader Pulp Fiction.
Some time later Apple release iWork and i was not really excited about how iWork´s Pages workflow was. It was the same complicated interface like MS office which i really hated.
I told Andreas that Apple could have done this much better. He just laughed at me and told me i should tell Steve Jobs.
That was exactly what i did. I wrote a mail to Steve in which i described what i first told Andreas. Surprisingly Steve Jobs replied to me asking me how i would improve iWork. After that i start to work on a resume/work samples for Apple Computer Inc.
Later i decided if Apple can´t do it better, I will. Andreas and me started to discuss how our first Application could look like and what it should make better than Pages.
My first idea was to concentrate on the task of writing. I want to have an Application which let´s me write without distracting me of hundrets of pallets and features i hardly use.
I began to think back on the resume i did for Apple Computer Inc. It was a Website which looked like a Journal where all my work was sticked into it and notes where written into it. On bottom of that where navigation buttons to navigate forward and backward.
I showed it to Andreas and he really liked how it looked and behaved. That was what a writing Application should probably look like.
In the next few months i worked on mockups of how that Application could look like and behave. I came up with these simple mockups.
Since i had much to do with User Interface Design for "Squirrel" (Finance Application) and Andreas worked on the Jabber engine for "Adium" (Chat client), those mockups where waiting in a drawer and got dusty through the months…
Check back for Part 2…
cheers dietmar
