Tapmates Inc. is a privately held company based in Central Europe, and made of of 10 employees from Europe, Australia, Asia, and the United States. They entered the App Store with Cookmate followed by many client apps. Their latest product is Dribbblr.
MO: What is Dribbblr and when was it released?
Robin Raszka: Dribbblr is a simple to use and beautifully designed Dribbble client for your iPad. So far it’s been an overwhelming success and the feedback has been incredible!
MO: Who is the target market for this app and what problem does it solve?
RR: Basically, the target market is the community around Dribbble (circa 5,000 registered users) plus everyone else who is looking for inspiration, design trends and has passion for *stalking* what the best designers in the world are working on right now.
The problem that Dribbblr solve’s is quite obvious, a better way to enjoy browsing Dribbble from your iPad. There are no subpages, no small thumbnails, just a stream with full size shots (images). The large iPad display provides a superb viewing experience.
MO: How long did Dribbblr take from the idea to the App store?
RR: We started working on Dribbblr right after Dribbble released their API. It was one month of hard and creative work. You can read more about the story behind Dribbblr on our blog.
MO:> Tell us a bit more about development. How man lines of code is there? What language is it written in?
Petr Reichl: Dribbblr is developed in Objective-C, as most of the iOS apps in the App Store. It has around 8k lines of code which surprised me a little bit as it is about the same amount of code as our first App Store product, Cookmate, which was a much bigger project from the functional point of view.
MO: What challenges did you face during development?
PR: The biggest challenge of development was probably performance. We work with plenty of images and a fast UI was required so we really had to work hard here. We have rewritten UISCrollView similar to UITableView so that we are recycling pages similar to the way Apple does it in the case of cells.
MO: How is developing an iPad app different from an iPhone app?
PR: Dribbblr is not yet available for iPhone but we were thinking about it at the beginning. The question was whether to use the Three20 framework as on our other projects or not. Unfortunately Three20 for iPad is still not in such a state that it would allow serious implementation so we had to go without it. I have to say that it complicated the situation a little bit and the development was more demanding than we expected at the beginning.
MO: Did it take long for your app to get approved, what was the approval process like for you?
PR: It took the app 13 days to get approved. I have to say we all were a bit nervous whether Apple would let the app through due to the in app purchase, which has caused problems on some of the projects we worked on in the past. Luckily in this case it is made in a very transparent way so it got approved without any problems. For sure apple could approve the app faster thanks to the fact that the app is free and pretty simple from the functionality point of view.
MO: How are you and how do you plan to market Dribbblr?
RR: The marketing plan for Dribbblr is very simple, personally I think the best PR is the app itself. If the community like’s the app, it will find it’s way to the target market automatically. I’m talking about users who became self-assigned ambassadors of the app and spreading the word on social networks on their own.
Another very powerful tool to market the app is reviews in media and on community websites focused on design and inspiration. There’s no plan for paid advertisement. These are the market strategies that we have found work the best, except for being promoted directly by Apple.
MO: Any new projects in the works for your company, Tapmates?
RR: You bet! We’re working on a new version of Cookmate for iPhone and iPad that will bring a totally new way for social cooking. Can’t say too much about it yet but it’s gonna be huge, I promise.
We’re also developing few tiny side projects for the App Store, for example the forthcoming nifty app focused on writing markdown on the iPad
MO: Finally, what is your favorite iPhone/iPad app?
RR: Basically, I don’t like many apps because of their look and feel. I’m using mostly native apps made by Apple like Notes, Calendar and Mail. There’s also a few “must have” apps and magazines on my iPad: Instapaper, Flipboard, Dropbox, Reeder and Twitter. I really like the Popular Science magazine app! I’m don’t play many games on iPad.
PR: Definately this would be Things and Instapaper. Just a pity that there are still some features missing in Things, but I did not find a better alternative yet that would cover iPad, iPhone and Mac OS X.
MO: Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions. Best of luck to you with Dribbblr and your future projects.
The folks at Tapmates are currently looking to revolutionize cooking apps with a new version of Cookmate. You can keep up with what is going on with Tapmates by visiting their website or following Robin (@robinraszka) and Petr (@meap) on Twitter.