iSitter - Origin Story

All of my applications come about because I need them, so if i can't find an App then i often end up writing it myself.​

​iSitter wasn't quite that, but it was pretty close.

May 2011, our family of 5 takes a trip to Legoland in Windsor. The trip is at a weekend and we arrange to stay in a hotel on the Saturday night. As is fairly typical for us (2 adults, 3 kids) we can't fit in one room, so we have booked 2 adjoining rooms in the Hotel.

​After an exhausting day we arrive at the hotel to find that although we do have 2 rooms next to each other, there isn't actually a door in between them, this is going to be fine for sleeping - we will have a boys room and a girls room - but for the evening this is going to be quite a problem.

Faced with loosing a night with my wife in front of the TV (we have a bottle of wine ready), i start thinking about a technical solution - what if there was a way of monitoring whats going on in the kids room from our room.?

​Now as my wife will tell you i go pretty much everywhere loaded with technology, I certainly had multiple iOS devices on me (never know when a app bug is going to need to be fixed). A search through the App Store finds a couple of apps which promise to act as a baby monitor, I organise tethering on my iPhone to get 2 devices onto the same wifi network and download a promising looking app.

​I think we got through the evening, but it was a frustrating time with crashes, disconnections and i think eventually the iPhone on the baby end had a flat battery.

So, i mail the author of the app, explaining that it nearly works, if he's not interested in fixing it does he want to give or sell it to me so i can fix it?​

​Well, there was no reply all weekend, so the next week i investigate what would be required to write my own baby monitor. By the end of the week i've got something kind of working, A colleague at work has a wife who can do some design / graphics for me. And at the end of the 2nd week, i submit my baby monitor to the store.

What do you know, 2 days later the guy with the original app replies, he will sell the app but only for a lot of money. Well by now i've figured out his original app is basically just Apple sample code strung together and I let him know i've just submitted my own app so i'm fine, thank you very much.​

iSitter has evolved a lot since then, but its still using the same underlying technology. I wouldn't recommend the baby monitor app space, too many devices in need of a reboot, crazy wifi networks and other things to go wrong - its definitely not a wall to wall 5* review situation.

​I will rewrite iSItter totally in the next year, building on what i've learned so watch out for that.

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Who am i?

Hello.

​My name is Daniel Broad, I’m an independent developer of iOS apps and also a full time technical lead to a team of iOS developers.

I have been a software developer for nearly 20 years.​

I first got into iOS development around June of 2010, I suspect like many people I wasn’t satisfied with the Apps I was using and thought ‘How hard can this be - I can do better than this!’. The tipping point for me was an app called ‘Podcaster’ - it’s still pretty popular so you may have heard of it. It was my most frequently used app and frustrated me with crashing and things changing on one screen and not on the others.

Suspecting that there might be some reasons for this I took a somewhat different approach to learning iOS than my normal ‘start hacking away and see how we go’, I bought the book ‘Programming in Objective-C 2.0’ and went meticulously through every chapter, doing and redoing every exercise until I had it perfect. This book is a great introduction to ObjC and the foundation frameworks and I still find I picked up things from this that my colleagues aren’t aware of.

So, schooled in my craft I started to write RSSRadio - I already had the Windows version available with its podcast directory back end, so I knew a lot about the quirks of RSS podcast feeds. The first version of RSSRadio hit the app store in August 2010, and correct me if I’m wrong but I think it was the second podcatcher on the App Store.

RSSRadio has changed a lot since its beginnings but I still have a lot of things i want to do with it.

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