Wow it’s been quite a trip these past few months. First of all, many thanks to our fans and beta testers that challenged us to make due on our promise: easily access your Mac from anywhere.
Second of all I want to extend a thanks to Sebastiaan de With who designed our icon. It’s memorable, catchy and divisive; just like our name! It’s a perfect match, and his penchant for abstract thinking really benefited a concept like ours. Both we and Seb weren’t happy with just merely showing a computer in a cloud (though his sketch for that was pretty nice looking :D).
App Submission
We submitted our application to the app store Tuesday of last week, and it was approved just yesterday, seven days after submission. We were getting fairly nervous because our app is pretty unconventional for four reasons:
- It requires an OS X companion app
- It streams video and music from your machine on the fly
- We pull down Apple copyrighted images from your computer to display on the desk and the file listing.
- We’re directly competing with MobileMe and BackToMyMac
While each of these is completely okay with app store policy, Apple doesn’t necessarily need a good reason to reject (or not-reject) your application. In addition, we lucked out that Rogue Amoeba was the initial martyr for the API we use to get your icon preview. The computer sitting on the desktop was an interface element we were pretty excited about, and we would have been devastated if we were told to yank it from the app.
But all’s well that ends well. We’re through the dreaded App Store Approval Process™ and we’re live on the store!
So what are people saying?
Reviews are positive so far! It’s really exciting to be able to provide a polished experience and solve a problem that hasn’t been solved well before.
Some of our favorite reviews:
- TUAW Review and Giveaway: Here, File File! - TUAW
- Access Your Mac From Your iPhone with Here, File File! - Smoking Apples
- Here, File File! Puts Your Mac on Your iPhone. And It’s Stunning. - MacStories
- Here, File! File! - AppSafari
- Here, FileFile! Pieejams uz iPhone - ipods.lv
Check the twitter buzz on Topsy to see what real folks like you are saying.
The great thing about these is that many of these reviewers helped us beta test the app, which is exceedingly important for an app of our nature. The environment variables are too many to name, and we want to extend a special thanks to our beta testers and journalists who helped us make Here, File File a fantastic product!
How’s it going so far?
Things are going fantastic so far! We’ve done our best to market the app the best way we know how: contacting journalists and bloggers, buying some ad space with Fusion Ads, and doing our darndest with word-of-mouth marketing.
As of right now we’re tracking #78 on top grossing for the app store, and #26 in the utilities section. This is just phenomenal.
What’s in store for the future?
Right off the bat, feature requests came pouring in. As a software developer, this is how you know people love your product and want to use it. Here’s what we’re seeing:
- Make it faster. We’ve done quite a bit to make sure everything comes in as quickly as possible, but we understand that things can always be faster. We promise to make it faster.
- Allow for dynamic DNS domains. This is one of those features that we knew we needed to build out, but made the tough decision to launch without it.
- Enough with the crashes. Argh, crashes are so annoying. We hate them as much as you do and thinking that HFF might be making someone really mad right this second is pretty depressing.
- Pages `09 support. Not sure how we didn’t catch this in beta. We promise to make it better.
We’re dedicated to this app, and we are working hard to make a great app even better!
In closing
Let me tell you something, personally… (If I were talking to you in person, this is where I’d lean over) we love this. We love taking a problem that people are craving to be solved, and then solving it in the most elegant way we can muster.
Even if we didn’t sell a single copy we’d consider HFF a success because we love the way it turned out. But the fact that we’re getting this positive praise– not just from journalists and bloggers, but also from our customers– is immensely rewarding.
This is what making consumer products is all about; we get to engage with you and make your life a little bit better through our product. My only regret is I don’t get to see the smile on your face when you use the app, but until then an emoticon on Twitter will have to do.
