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Dear Internet,
Boy oh boy, this has been a busy week already!
Last night, the new version of Make Pixel Art hit the iPad app store. This morning, the Make Pixel Art for Chrome was updated as well. As part of these launches, I’ve also made some changes on the server side to make it easier and faster to find the latest pixels that have been submitted to our pixel library.
We’re also counting down the days until our iPhone app, Pixel Pix is released. If the review process takes the same time for this app as it did for the iPad app, it will be in the iTunes store on Friday afternoon. Katie is reaching out to the press and some potential partners about our launch, and I am busy finishing up the website and making galleries of example images. I also need to record proper demo videos for both apps — something I find particularly difficult because it involves talking and drawing at the same time.
I hope you are excited for the massive tsunami of Pixel Pix-created images to hit the social media wetlands. You may want to reenforce your levee system now!
In the meantime, Damien, one of our engineers here at XOXCO, has been hard at work building a prototype of what may turn into our next product. Though Damien has contributed to all of our products and projects since starting more than a year ago, this is the first product that he brought to us as a completely new idea.
This is a big milestone for me, as my initial goal for XOXCO was to create an environment in which many products could be conceived and brought to fruition — not just by me, but by everyone in the team. That Damien was comfortable enough with his place at XOXCO and the way we do things to bring his brand new (really great) idea to us is a definite sign that we’re heading in the right direction.
I read a lot of things about new “startups” or “labs” whose goal it is to iterate quickly and release a lot of products to “see what sticks.” However, I feel like I never actually see any products launching from these groups, sticky or not. Obviously these little labs can’t launch EVERY idea, but I think more of their attempts could be made public — even if the product ends up on the trash heap.
Since becoming XOXCO, we’ve launched SendTab (actually three separate clients for iPhone, Chrome and Safari AND a cloud server), PeoplePods, Make Pixel Art, and Stay Useful. Soon we’ll add Pixel Pix to that list, and then Damien’s TOP SECRET PROJECT as well.
On top of that, we’ve launched brand new products or built sites for MediaBugs, NeighborGoods, Dooce, The Zeitguide, The Rumpus, Marimekko, Fugaboo, Helsinki Design Lab, Safari Books Online, KIA, a major league football team whose name I can’t remember, The Discovery Channel, and The Grammys.
AND we’ve released half a dozen popular free jQuery plugins that have been widely adopted.
We’ve built with Javascript, PHP, and Objective C. We’ve built things using Drupal, Node, Mongo, MySQL, local storage, SQLite and Phonegap. We’ve built Chrome plugins, Safari plugins, iOS apps, HTML 5 apps, become experts in canvas drawing, and responsive design.
We’ve done all these things without external funding, and we’ve done it with a team of just 3 people.
While not everything we’ve built has been perfect, and some of the things we’ve built are more prototype than finished product, I am very proud of all the things we’ve done, and I think they demonstrate our dedication and determination to LAUNCH PRODUCTS, not just talk about ideas.
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Fact: every day at 7PM I have a robot email me and ask about my day. I hit reply and let it know. Later I’ll be able to reference such things.
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I did a pixel art version though just to be safe.
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Perfect from all angles.
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