Matt and I are not strangers when it comes to working together. We built a few small projects including LDG, a “larping drinking game” website, for a friend’s bachelor party. I won’t go too much into it, but if you’re interested, just ask me about it. The result was that while there was less larping then I was hoping, suffice it to say we were successful at the drinking part. After LDG, we worked at Vecna Technologies together as well. Far less drinking though and even less larping. And despite all of this, Matt and I never felt like we got a real product out the door. Even more suprising, LDG has been omitted from my resume.

Past the pastime apps – from larping to yipper

Yipper, we decided from the beginning, was going to be the first project to meet our expectations. We were dead set on that. We had to – for our own well being. There was still something to be proven and Yipper would give us an opportunity to show what we could do.

But we asked the question like many before us, “How do you start building an app?” I know how to code and Matt knew web design, but that’s like a mechanic building his own car from scratch. Working on cars doesn’t mean you just know how to design one, build the parts, and put them together.

So, we started with what we knew. At Vecna, I had been developing an open source project called Torso (it was built on a library called Backbone) to help build web sites. “Open source” in the coding world means a project that can be freely shared with others who want to use it. Vecna has a unique community service program that lets programmers code on open source tools. When I left, I could continue to use it in my own projects. The only issue was that I had a great way of writing web sites but applications that run on your phone are different than web sites. The language and display engine are not the same. I had a great screwdriver when I needed a solid hammer.

Luckly, there was another open source project called PhoneGap that promised to let me use my screwdriver instead of needing a hammer. PhoneGap said I could build a web site and it would wrap it like an application. I could still use Torso! We set off to learn how to use this magical tool that would make Yipper possible.