When Apple released iOS 7 it became pretty obvious that any “old style” apps were going to look out of place. While I always enjoyed powerOne’s design aesthetic, it was clear that the original style, with dimensional buttons and 3D look-and-feel, was not going to hold up for long. Furthermore, keeping the old aesthetic and supporting iOS 7 at the same time was nearly impossible.

A complete re-design was in order, and that’s exactly what we did.

powerOne is completely refreshed. We removed over 1000 images, completely redesigned the calculators, and improved everything else. Not to mention the wide array of bugs we tracked down and squashed. The update is free to anyone using our apps on iOS 7.

I’m sure a massive change like this is going to be divisive for my customers. Unlike us techno-geeks who like a steady stream of improvement and change, most people want the app to just keep working the way it always did.

Personally I like the new design. I think it is a massive improvement in multiple ways, including the fact that it simplifies the app and gives us tremendous flexibility to do some things we could have never done in the past. I hope our customers will enjoy it as well.

In the past year and a half Rick and I have developed and shipped the following:

• Two projects for Adidas
• One project for a start-up
• A project for DEWALT Tools
• powerOne for Android
• powerOne for Tizen
• Two projects for The College Board
• Updates to DEWALT, powerOne for iOS, and a pro bono product

That’s eight products plus updates and, outside of powerOne for iOS and the pro bono job [1], all of these have generated revenue for us as work-for-hire. DEWALT, powerOne for iOS and powerOne for Android also generate a little bit of on-going revenue.

And what plagues me? The project I can’t get done. I really want to spend all my time on Equals and yet, to stay in business, my time is now spent almost full-time on contract jobs.

We get December, though, and our goal this month is to get the web version of Equals done for its first release. This will be a beta release as we have more features plus iOS we feel are needed for a true 1.0. But at least come January we should start seeing whether anyone cares enough to use it.

It will be a sprint. I hope Rick and I don’t get winded.

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[1] Which was a trade for some bug fixes in the Android version of powerOne.

I always feel slightly nostalgic this time of year. Why? Because my accountant has free shredding week and I pull the old accounting records from the attic. During the process I glance through the files to make sure nothing was filed that I need to keep. In those files I see all kinds of goodies. Old employees I have such positive memories of. A sense that it really wasn’t that long ago that we all worked together. Channels we used to sell through and, because of the vendors and suppliers, a sense for people I haven’t talk to in a long time.

In some ways, those years felt more certain, our success more guaranteed. Now it feels more nebulous and harder to grasp. Reality, however, didn’t turn out that way and what we are working on now has way more potential than what we were working on then.

This year I get to review two years: 2005 and 2006. For some reason I have been keeping eight years back instead of the required seven. 2005 was a very rough year for my wife and me personally. In January of that year my wife’s father died suddenly and in February we lost our baby at 22 weeks pregnant. 2005 also was the year Infinity Softworks lost 75% of our revenue in six months, forcing me to lay off most of the staff and refocus with a tighter team. We went from 10 to 3 people during that time.

2006 was rosier. We were close to shipping our new education product, which at the time we thought was going to have great success. And my first daughter was born a year after we lost a son, one of my three happiest days on this planet. [1] Unfortunately business success was not there yet and navigating first-time fatherhood was difficult. Let’s just say I didn’t handle the mixed family and work responsibilities well. By the time the calendar hit 2007, though, it felt like we were at least on solid footing, at home and at the office [2].

These two years were especially important. They were transition years. Infinity Softworks was changing. I was changing. For the first time I was asking questions about why some businesses were successful and some weren’t. I was questioning the “this is the way it is done” party lines that had nearly driven Infinity Softworks out of business. My priorities were changing. In some ways, for the first time, my wife and I weren’t just two people living in the same house. With the birth of my daughter we were a family.

The years pass, of course. Seven since this time, to be exact. In a few weeks another year will go by the books. In a few weeks I will put 2013 in a box, where it will wait to be opened and its stories revealed, like some accounting time capsule, in 2020.

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[1] The other being when my youngest daughter was born two years later and when my wife married me 13+ years ago.

[2] At home that proved true. At the office… another mirage.

Sometimes luck is with me. A month ago we did a bunch of work on powerOne to get it ready for iOS 7. We haven’t updated the interface yet — that’s still coming — but what we did do is make sure bugs were fixed and added a couple of small features.

While I hadn’t started working on iOS 7 yet what was clear is that any work we did do on it was going to have to be for iOS 7 only. There were just too many changes to also try to support the older operating systems. Because of this we wanted to make sure any remaining, known bugs were resolved for the iOS 4.3 to 6.1 customers who can’t or don’t want to upgrade. We were all ready and we did plenty of testing on iOS 7 as well as the earlier OS versions.

iOS 7 shipped last Wednesday and all was quiet. I upgrades devices and iTunes and XCode just like always.

Thursday night, suddenly, I received three bug reports, all in an area of the app I had tested. In some cases — but not always — an error was appearing when a calculation occurred in RPN input mode. Stuff like 5 ENT 6 + would work correctly and 6 ENT 5 + would fail. I could try things one time and it would work, try other things and come back to the original later and it would fail.

At this point I started to panic. There was no way, with the current version of XCode, to target iOS 6.1 and lower devices exclusively and targeting iOS 7 meant that the entire interface of the app was a mess. Furthermore I leave on Sunday for a business trip and did not have the time to completely re-do the interface before I left, not to mention my nightmare scenario of having to figure out some critical issue while away without a laptop.

So we fixed the bugs Thursday night. I didn’t sleep much that night, rolling options around in my head. The only two I could come up with was ignore the problem and tell customers to use algebraic input mode instead (not much of an option) or hustle everything out for iOS 7 (something I didn’t think possible in less than 48 hours without my designer’s help, who was on deadline).

If I could only get the previous XCode version back!

Friday morning, after a couple of conversations with co-workers on the topic, I realized I could get the previous version of XCode back. Time Machine to the rescue!

I’ve had Time Machine backing up my Mac for years now and never once needed to use it. (I also have it backed up to the cloud with CrashPlan.) I was able to recover the previous version of XCode, open powerOne in it, do some testing and submit the fixes to the app store.

I feel lucky this time.