Pocket Gamer programmer goes (London) underground

Be careful when you work for Pocket Gamer - it might just take over your life.

Let Paul Dias be a warning. A friend of the Pocket Gamer family, Paul stepped up to write the Pocket Gamer iPhone app when very few other publications had even considered the possibility of releasing their own iPhone applications.

The Pocket Gamer iPhone app was one of the first 10,000 apps to hit the iTunes store, and has since been downloaded over 70,000 times by iPhone game greedy readers like you.

Fast-forward to today and there are over 100,000 Apps available for iPhone - a tenfold increase in choice (if you’re a customer) and competition (if you make Apps!)

But that hasn’t stopped Paul, who has spent most of the past six months working on his own iPhone app, Tube Changer.

Tube Changer is a nifty little app that appeals equally to the hyper-efficient and the hyper-lazy by telling you which carriage to board when you get on the tube so you’re right by the exit when you leave.

• If you’re a commuter in a hurry, Tube Changer will shave several minutes off your journey time.
• If you’re a lardy wastrel, it’ll save tens of valuable fat-based calories from being burned off each trip.

The Tube Changer app costs £1.19, and is also available in a trial Lite version.

Since we know Paul, we thought we’d ask him a few impertinent questions about how much work it takes to create an iPhone app these days.

Paul admits he didn’t work solidly for six months. “The workload varied, sometimes only a few hours each week, sometimes getting on for 20-30 extra hours each week - on top of my day job,” he says. “Certainly gathering the data took a lot of time, and I probably didn't go about it in the most efficient way, either!”

Paul personally visited every station on the London Underground to learn where the exits were, which doubtless played havoc with his stay-at-home bedroom coder credentials. Still more time was spent polishing the app to his own exacting standards.

“I tried to bear in mind the sorts of things Apple would have done if they were creating the app, taking some cues from the Apple-supplied apps that come with the iPhone,” Paul says. “I also read their user interface guidelines, which all apps are supposed to abide by, but many don't.”

Perfectionism has a price - reworking the interface several times also added to the lengthy development process, delaying Paul to the extent that two rival apps appeared in the App Store a couple of months into Tube Changer’s development.

“This was a shame, but it was also interesting to see how neither really seemed to have the kind of fit and finish, or attention to detail that I was aiming for. I don't think I'd have been happy paying for either one, even if I wasn't writing my own, just because of the way they worked and the way they looked.”

Having already put so much effort in, Paul decided to soldier on and he’s confident the extra time and polish has made Tube Changer the most elegant and efficient app in its class today.

In some ways, however, the difficult part has only just begun. With so much competition in the App Store, it’s getting noticed that is a real challenge these days.

Tube Changer has been in the top 100 travel apps, for instance, but Paul isn’t even sure whether iPhone users use these sub-categories.

“The basic lesson is that success of an app is still largely down to good old fashioned marketing!” he concludes.

For more information on Paul’s TubeChanger app, check out the Tube Changer website (http://www.tubechanger.com/).