We know what it's like to look for off-the-shelf software which SURELY must exist for the challenge at hand - how could we be the first people to need such obvious features? But amazingly, what you want often simply isn't available. So, the obvious answer for a group of enthusiastic developers brimming with ideas for world-class solutions is to roll our sleeves up and fill the gap ourselves. And the brilliant thing about being users of our own creations is that we are constantly thinking about how we can make the user experience better and can incorporate improvements born from our own use.
Products
The Reactor plugin, for creating Calendars, Gantt Charts, Taggers and more, was a solution stemming from our own needs. We didn't want our FileMaker databases constrained - we wanted more of the richness and magic of modern-day web interfaces - and if it was going to take writing it ourselves, then by golly, we'd do it. We can now get intuitive, rich, modern calendar and chart interfaces in a fraction of the time it used to take, and they're pretty darn good. It's not just us saying that either - we got recognised for the plugin with an award at DevCon, the annual FileMaker Developers' conference in USA, and we've got a large international following of Reactor users.
Nutshell is our Customer Relations Management tool. It's both a solution in its own right and a base for most of what we create these days. We've rolled all the most popular features into this pre-built platform, so when we start a new project, we're already ahead of the game. And we use it ourselves, which means it's been tested in a real environment by the harshest of critics, and decisions on what should and should not happen have been argued ad nauseam. It has the distilled wisdom of many people over a long period of time, fed by our own experience and needs, so using it as a base is a confidence-booster for us and our clients.
Tabzon is a free online in-out board which grew out of our need to keep track of our staff and update our own status from on the road, at home, at the office, or wherever we were. We'd been using and perfecting a version of it for years, and it just needed converting to a web app. It's become such a valuable tool for us that we thought we'd see what the public thought, so in 2011 we launched it for free to the world. With thousands now using it every day, we're pretty stoked with its success.
Available on the App Store
Canterbury Quakes is a way for shaken and stirred Cantabrians to get up-to-the-minute data on the latest earthquakes via their iPhone or iPad. When there's a biggie, we all have a crack at estimating the strength: 4.5? 4.6? 5 even? Cantabrians have got pretty good at it and it's become a universal topic of discussion after a quake. So we've helped settle the arguments. Seems like there must have been quite a few of them too (arguments and quakes) because we've had over 10,000 downloads.
Gamezon, an office pool organiser, was a bit of fun born out of our fairly frequent office pool competitions. Spurred on by the imminent Rugby World Cup in 2011, we wrote an app to take the donkey-work out of organising a competition, and ironed out the bugs by test-driving it ourselves in a few earlier comps. Plenty of cheeky banter and the odd sensible suggestion later, we had an app which we again threw open to the world for free.