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I had almost lost the code for abettercal, an app that I wrote back in 2009 (for iOS2.1 no less). Found it on my old macbook pro, and put it up on bitbucket. I have to say, I am pretty impressed by what all I got done in a month of coding.

The app is an exact copy of the standard iPhone calendar. But it does a little more than the standard calendar. It syncs up your google calendar account and allows you to read write to google calendar. Also, it can take voice memos, uploads it on amazon EC2 and takes the url and syncs it into google calendar. You can replay the voice memos from within the app and they should up as embedded clips on a browser on google calendar.

It was quite an impressive hack, and I am very proud of it. I will re-release it sometimes soon, I think and make it free.

It has been a surprising 48 hours since Fotobook was released. I am humbled by the kind reception it has got. The app has gotten more than 2K downloads in the first 48 hours! If anything, this is a testament to the need for better Photo viewers on the world’s favorite Social network platform.

Apple has featured Fotobook in ‘New and Noteworthy’. Here we come ‘What’s Hot’.

On a side note, I was impressed with Facebook’s dev support team. Fotobook has a minor outage caused by an automation tool, which they fixed in an hour. Thanks!

I had been thinking about a more photo friendly Facebook app for a few months now. Writing apps between a full time job at Yahoo! (awesomest place to work), an MBA at Santa Clara University, and being the ‘Best daddy in the whole wide world’, is challenging.
Finally, I got about 3 weeks of ‘free’ time between winter and spring sessions at SCU and did Fotobook. Here is it at all it’s glory, I hope you like it. Drop me a line if you want features.

We are happy to announce chatroulette for Android at PaypalX event. The app used Twilio and Paypal. The app is currently in beta. Drop us a line if you want to learn more.

It has been 2 weeks since Chatroulette was submitted in the Appstore. Apple has started testing the app, because I got a call from one of their reviewers. It was followed by a terse ‘we need more time to test the app’ mail. Hopefully it will see the light of day soon.

Nothing kills attention like a Powerpoint presentation. Instead, I am going to use Prezi. Here is something that I put together in 5 minutes.

Ok, after 4 hours of hard work cannibalizing bottlr, I submitted my new app Chatroulette for iPhone  today.

It is a simple 1 minute random phone call app. You get 5 free minutes to start with. As always, both callerID’s are hidden. Many thanks to Twilio for their excellent API.

Now it’s your turn Apple….

I have submitted a new update to the appstore. In spite of promises of Foursquare like checkins in Leash, I had to rush this release without checkins. After a few weeks, I have discovered that the code is attempting to updating the UI when in background, causing more battery drain for older phones.

From Apple’s IOS Application Programming Guide :

“Avoid updating your windows and views. While in the background, your application’s windows and views are not visible, so you should not try to update them. Although creating and manipulating window and view objects in the background will not cause your application to be terminated, this work should be postponed until your application moves to the foreground.”

After 2 years Tapulous has been acquired by Disney. It seems yesterday that iPhone had just come out (Summer 2007) in the market. A bunch of talented hackers went to town on the device. One of the first thing that I was stuck was ‘Wow, this is a phone running a *nix OS’.

The first big break was ‘Jailbreak’, which would allow  people had managed to ssh to the device and peer into the binaries/applications that had shipped with the phone. Luckily the computer language in which the programs were written, Obj-C was designed to be a very readable language. A wide spread tool called ‘class-dump’ exchanged hands over IRC’s. Although the tool would give show the overall class structure of the apps, it was not enough. Soon, hackers constructed a toolchain, which would allow us actually write programs which would compile link to apple’s libraries.

Programming without any documentation from Apple was a challenge to say in the least. I would spend countless long nights poring through arm disassembly code, and trying to figure out how many parameters would a particular function take? I remember the excitement when I could launch the camera and make it take a picture. The memory of the camera iris, opening and closing for the first time is still vividly clear to me.

At that time the iPhone hacker community was buzzing with anticipation. Everyone was still wondering what would the killer apps be? Some were obvious, like photo sharing, twitter like apps (remember Jaiku?) while others like TTR where not so obvious.

I started off the route of making a Flickr uploader for iPhone. I called it iFlickr (I took the name while it was still up for grabs). I decided to open source it as a honor to the hacker community who made it possible for programmer like myself to write apps on the iPhone. It is still available on Google Code.

In a few months, the app took off. At the height of it’s popularity, the app was used by over 80,000 people. I showed off iflickr in one of Yahoo! Hack Day event, and was covered on YDN.

By December of 2007, well known entrepreneur Bart DeCrem had approached me. In those days, we would spend a lot of time brainstorming on what would make sense for the next big app, as it was fairly obvious that Apple would open up the iPhone to 3rd party developers in a matter or months. Long story short, I started helping Bart and his team on building some very interesting apps. Bart has written a short history of Tapulous here.

Shortly after my employer Yahoo! started looking into forming an iPhone apps team, I was approached by Sandeep Gupta to help build the official Flickr App for Yahoo! That is when I decided to part ways with Tapulous. I went on the build some awesome apps for Yahoo! for both iPhone and iPad.

In the next 2 years, Tapulous went on to become The Most successful iPhone app company ion the iTunes store. Eventually in July 2010, it was acquired by Disney.