News on Magnus’s Online Chess has been quiet recently (since both Magnus and I are pretty busy with our day jobs!) but here’s a preview of the features in development at the moment. These screenshots show:

• The game options which will now be accessable while playing a game
• The new “Recent” listing which shows games you’ve recently finished (and games that are adjourned and ready to resume)
• The game browser that lets you play back the moves of games that you’ve recently finished

No firm date on when to expect an update unfortunately, but it will be as soon as possible!

I’ve been developing software professionally for more than 10 years now, but it’s always been a very engineering and developer heavy environment where things like look and feel, coherence and clean interfaces have been something people had to do in their spare time.

So when I started working with Ollie, there were major differences between the way I used to work and the way this app has been developed.

Some observations:

• Comparing my own designs with a pro’s designs leads to inferiority complex
• When I think something’s done, it’s only halfway there
• The end result is amazingly coherent

It’s also a much more drawn out process as there usually is a number of iterations where an idea turns into a design that finally turns into an implementation. There are usually somewhere between 4-5 rounds of tweaks before we end up with the final implementation.

If one chooses to divide up labour the way Ollie and myself did it, there is a very clean interface between the designer (Ollie) and the implementer (me).

I get designs, screenshots and other specs, and Ollie gets 3-4 builds a week with the latest improvements in them (I usually throw some bugs in there as well to keep things interesting).

(I know Ollie is a very good developer – so going forward we will probably blur the lines a bit more).

So how does this change the dynamics in terms of what one can hope to accomplish? There will always be a trade-off between what is possible, what is desirable, what is acceptable and what the total workload is.

Unless you happen to be have an unlimited R&D budget you will most likely have to decide if you want to have a release that has a lot of features with less TLC per feature or if you want to spend a lot of time perfecting a limited set of features.

I strongly believe that in order for a small group of people (think two!) to be able to develop, maintain and support an application, the latter approach is the one to go for. It’s also a lot more rewarding in the end, one can focus on the next small batch of features and trust the fact that the app is well put together, coherent and doesn’t need a lot of support. The app will stand on it’s own.

The inherent problem with a small set of features is that you won’t have the benefit of the shot-gun feature approach. If your few features aren’t appreciated, then you’ve spent all that time in vain. Which will probably suck a great deal.

This is where working with a good designer will help a great deal. The starting point is usually about what the next useful feature should be and how the user should interface with it, not about what features are simple to implement given the existing code or how one can fit a cool piece of code into the app.

Given everything I’ve written above, how well did myself and Ollie do?

Well – you tell us

Making an iPhone app needs a bunch of different skills. If you’re lucky, you’re superman and you’re already awesome at design, code, interfaces, animation, networking code and marketing. If you’re not so lucky, you need a team! And if you’re anything like us, you’ll need to figure out how that team can work remotely.

Magnus’s Online Chess was built without the two guys working on it ever meeting. We’re also in totally different timezones (USA & Australia). Ah the magic of the internet! Here’s how it happened, and a couple of the (free!) tools we used:

1. Set up a decent blog

Magnus worked on the app solo for a while and released version 1.0 in the app store. The app had great potential from the start, and a lot of people left really some positive reviews. But the app store was growing up fast, and Magnus’s Online Chess had some room to grow too.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, I was searching for a good chess app to buy. I bought version 1.0 of Magnus’s Online Chess, mainly because it connected to FICS, which is where I was playing chess at the time. I saw it had heaps of potential, and with a bit of UI tweaking could be a really cool app. I stumbled on Magnus’s blog, and emailed him out of the blue, offering to help.

At this stage, I had absolutely no idea who this Magnus guy was, but I think you can pretty much tell whether you’re going to get on with someone after you read their blog for about 5 minutes. I could tell from the posts and comments that Magnus was a friendly, helpful and passionate guy. He also had a clear vision: make the #1 chess app for the iPhone. Being a full time interactive design geek and part time chess player, it just so happened that I had exactly the same dream!

So I think the lesson here is this: set up a blog, and post some honest stuff on it. You’ll attract like-minded people.

As far as specific tools go, we’re using wordpress, which is awesome.

2: Use email (duh!)

OK this one’s pretty obvious. I worked on various parts of the interface, emailing graphics to Magnus, who implemented them in the app. It turns out, gmail is a pretty decent way to collaborate on projects like this. The (virtually) unlimited attachment sizes & threaded conversations are really handy. And the fact that you never have to delete a message means you can look back in time easily.

3. Issue tracking when things get more complicated

The gmail thing was working pretty well, but it was easy to lose track of things. If I sent an email to Magnus with 17 different bugs or features,  it was easy for 1 or 2 of them to get lost in the shuffle. After a bit of research, we settled on Lighthouse to manage our shared to-do list. It’s a great web app I’d recommend to anyone working on something like this. You can assign issues back and forth to each other, give things priorities, share files, the works. Oh yeah and it’s also free! (with limitations).

4. Sharing larger files

We pretty quickly hit the file size limitation on the free account for Lighthouse. Being poor iPhone developers, we set up a gspace account to send files back and forth. It’s another great free way to work remotely, which basically sets up a sort of virtual drive that you can access with a firefox extension. This is how we started to send all our files back and forth. I’d upload graphics (PNGs) into a folder called “graphics”, and like magic, in a few days, Magnus would add a new version of the app in a “builds” folder. It was like the shoemaker and the elves. Except with iPhones.

So there you have it, that’s how we’ve been working on the app for the past four months!

The icon of your app is pretty important, since it’s the first thing that a lot of your users are going to be drawn to (or not) in iTunes or the app store. For Magnus’s Online Chess, the icon needed to do a couple of things:

1. Communicate that this is a chess app
2. Stand out from all the other chess apps (!)
3. Somehow communicate that our app is all about online chess (our point of difference)
4. Look super awesome and slick

Every chess app seems to use a knight in it’s icon. There’s a good reason for that, the knight is generally the best looking piece in any given set. But to avoid blending in, we deliberately decided to avoid doing the same.

We started with some paper scribbles (like we do with everything). There were a few early options:

• A pawn/wifi transmitter hybrid
• Pieces flying around the world (to show moves being sent back and forth)
• A board that was dissolving into “cyber-ey looking” pixels
• Some kind of king/M composition that (to imply the word Magnus)

We decided that communicating the online aspect was more important than any tie ins with the name, so the last one was out. The flying pieces were a bit fiddly at small size, and the dissolving board seemed a bit too nerdy, so we settled on the “pawn antenna”.

The icon was actually the start of lots of things, including the final colour scheme. We wanted something that fit well with the rest of the iPhone OS, and felt a bit dark and serious, maybe even a bit nerdy (hey, it IS a chess app, who are we kidding)

Here’s the final icon in a few different sizes, and in context on the home screen.

One potential issue – the use of wifi style radio waves might confuse people – will people understand that you can play on 3G as well? What do you think? Let us know in the comments