95: !Boring Software — Andy Allen

Andy Allen:

Oh well, maybe we'll do something else. The biggest fear was getting trapped in a business that you didn't want to run. I see that happen with so many founders. And so very much from the get go, we thought of what we wanted to build and how we wanted to build and how we wanted to work. So even the fact that we come out with a new app every year, that's just kind of an expectation now. And so in doing that, we can't go back and work on calculator V3 or something. What are we going to add? We could add a ton of new features to it, but I prefer to say this is the calculator that we made and it's complete and it does its job really well. We're not going to change it on you. It's not going to suddenly have a chatbot in the corner, right?

Charlie Chapman:

Welcome to Launched. I'm Charlie Chapman and today I'm excited to bring you the founder, designer behind Not Boring Software, Andy Allen. Andy, welcome to the show.

Andy Allen:

Hey, thanks for having me.

Charlie Chapman:

We never crossed paths, but we were both in Cupertino last week. And I know this, one, because I follow you on Twitter and I believe you were once again an Apple Design Award finalist and so you were in all sorts of things. But more importantly, I know because you made some custom merch for Not Boring Camera. This little extremely cool, would you call it a keychain, I guess? But it has all these moving parts, it looks like a little camera.

Andy Allen:

Oh, funny, you should mention that. There's one right here.

Charlie Chapman:

Ah, there you go. For the video watching audience, showing it off. You can turn the dial. And I was at every single event because RevenueCat was sponsoring every single event. And at one of the events I was at, I was talking to somebody and they were like, "There's so much cool stuff here. I got this." And he just held one up and he's like, "It's kind of cool." And he didn't know your apps or anything and he just watched my face light up like, "Where is he? Is he here?" And he's like, "What?" And then I just basically vomited all the excitement about Not Boring Software and all the things that you do. And he's just like, "Oh my gosh, I didn't realize who I was talking to." So I did not catch you or one of those. So I don't know if you're going to bring those to other events in the future or if I just completely missed out, but to be honest, I'm a little devastated.

Andy Allen:

Yeah. It's kind of one of the kind of lesser known sort of aspects of dub dub. Maybe one of my favorite aspects is just the merch game that people bring and people make all sorts of interesting things. So every year people are trying to one up each other. People are doing custom pins and special edition stickers. We came out with a camera app this year and that's what was nominated for the Apple Design Award. And we had made some full size cameras that you might see in the background here if you're in the video.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. In your different themes.

Andy Allen:

Yeah, the different camera themes. And I thought, "Hey, let's make a small one." And I have young kids and they're very into keychains at the moment. And so just made these fun little camera keychains that you can slide your own little photo in the back and has some moving parts and things like that. Yeah, I just handed them... I made a bunch of them. They're all handmade just here in my house on my 3D printer.

Charlie Chapman:

Is that with a 3D printer?

Andy Allen:

Yeah. Yeah. But you can get very high resolution nozzles for it. And so you can actually produce what look like sort of manufactured parts really.

Charlie Chapman:

I imagine just for the threading to work with any degree of feeling nice, they also need to be decently high resolution.

Andy Allen:

I made so many different colors. I made probably 12 or 14 different color combinations of them and brought a whole bunch of them with me, a big bag full and was handing them out to apparently everyone who didn't even know who I was or what we did. But yeah, it's fun. I love it. It's one of my favorite parts of WWDC is just the merch game that people bring.

Charlie Chapman:

There was the maker of solar watch had sunscreen. It wasn't necessarily custom designed, but it was very well tailored to the audience that's experiencing the California sun for the first time.

Andy Allen:

Yeah, I needed some of that. I came back with a bad sunburn.

Charlie Chapman:

Let's get into the show here. And so before we get into Not Boring Apps and everything that you all do over there, I always start the show with the same three questions, which is just to let people get to know who you are. So it's where are you from? Do you have a formal education related to what you do? And then we'll get into your career leading up to starting Not Boring Software.

Andy Allen:

Originally, I'm born and raised in a small town called Bethel in Southwest Alaska. So it's a small little fishing village.

Charlie Chapman:

How have I heard of that? Is this well known or is it just because of following you?

Andy Allen:

It's not very well known. I mean, it's a very tiny-

Charlie Chapman:

I have a mental picture of Bethel. I don't know. Maybe it's like it was a wallpaper on...

Andy Allen:

Oh, I have shared a couple photos here and there. Literally, you can see the whole town. It was taken in the late '80s. I was born in the mid '80s, I was there at the time. You can literally see the entire town from one photo and yet you could see individuals walking on the streets. So it's a very tiny town. There's no roads to it. It's very isolated. It was a very odd place to grow up in hindsight, but when you're a kid, it's just normal life.

Charlie Chapman:

That's the world.

Andy Allen:

Yeah. You're living out there on the frozen tundra of Alaska, living a very kind of subsistence based life. And somehow my parents had an early Apple Macintosh and that was kind of my introduction to computers at the time. And yeah, that's where I grew up. It was a very interesting environment and I value it a lot more now. Back then you sort of wonder why you're not living in the big city with the rest of the world, but you learn a certain resourcefulness, I would say, living in that type of environment that unbeknownst to me was very applicable to the startup life and the sort of indie app life that I live now. Yeah, I grew up there and then I did get an education related to what I do now. It was in visual communication design from the University of Washington and Seattle.

Charlie Chapman:

I've heard of that degree, but what is that usually for? Because it's not like digital media, it's specifically about communication. Yeah. What does that entail?

Andy Allen:

So the more common name might be graphic design, right? But visual communication design is the kind of broader context of it. I started studying interaction design as it was called back then. That was just in its infancy. This was in the early 2000s, right? So people were starting to design websites and things like that. And a few on device interfaces were starting to become more common. So studied a little bit of that, but mostly it was graphic design. So my teachers were sort of second generation like Bauhaus. So they learned from the masters who taught at the Bauhaus who then came over after the war or during the war and then taught here at some great universities like Yale and some in the Midwest. And those taught my teachers who then brought it over to the Pacific Northwest and had a very kind of strict international Swiss typography sort of style of-

Charlie Chapman:

Of design.

Andy Allen:

... everything's Helvetica. Everything's one of three or four or five fonts, right? Everyone's worshiping at the feet of Massimo Vignelli and folks like that. And it was a great foundation. It taught grid systems a lot of things that were very applicable to software in hindsight and again, really valued that education. But to be honest, I wanted to be a filmmaker and-

Charlie Chapman:

Oh man.

Andy Allen:

... design was meant to be something of a side excursion to becoming a filmmaker. But found in finding interaction design and digital media started to learn that, oh, you could tell stories through interactive media, through software and started to pursue that more and more.

Charlie Chapman:

Okay. So that's the degree you had and filmmaking was kind of a passion, but you realized you could do at least scratch that itch with maybe a little bit, well, maybe not at the time, but definitely now a little bit easier of a career path than filmmaking or Hollywood is. So then what'd you do out of college then? Did you get into the field and start doing this at bigger companies, smaller companies? What did that look like?

Andy Allen:

So right out of school, I joined an agency in Portland called Ziba Design and they were more of an industrial design agency, but they were starting to get into, as a lot of people at the time were starting to get into this new field of interaction design and designing on-device interfaces. So their clients were, they worked with Nike and Logitech and all the kind of big electronic brands at the time. They would design the devices and then it was kind of natural to think, well, what goes on the device? What goes on the screen? The screens were getting bigger and bigger and taking it more of the interface itself with the device. And so we formed this early team that was starting to design that. So I was designing a lot of like car key fob segmented LCD displays and very early touchscreen pre-iPhone and all this and doing-

Charlie Chapman:

Oh interesting.

Andy Allen:

... some installation work where I would build full working prototypes for Nike and things like that, for different sports sensory training and things like that. Got to work with some very talented professional athletes like Roger Federer to develop hand eye coordination tests on like giant touchscreen displays that you would play a scientific version of Whack-A-Mole on. So I was like designing these games and then testing them with professional athletes and then fine-tuning them. All this work was done with Nike. So stuff like that, a real wide range of things at this agency, but it became very clear. I remember at one moment designing the interface for a multifunction printer and then seeing that printer on the store shelf a year or so later after it'd been built, manufactured and shipped. And it was kind of like how I designed it, but a lot was different. And I was like, "We went through this whole process, everybody loved the design, what happened? What changed?" And I knew in that moment that I needed to go where software was actually made, right? There was something I wasn't seeing. There was some constraint.

Charlie Chapman:

So is that because you were at an agency, you had this like total handoff, you weren't part of the next phase of dealing with trade-offs and the realities of it becoming a physical thing and you didn't get to have your voice there. You could only really extend that through your final brief or were you even thinking about, here's the trade-offs that you might run into, like you should prioritize this over that. Or did you kind of think of your final product as being the end state and then it wasn't until you saw it on the shelf that you're like, "Oh wait, I wouldn't have made that choice that they made here or there."

Andy Allen:

Yeah. It was more a sense that we didn't know what language the thing was written in. A lot of this, like a multifunction printer, like I don't even know what that was, how would they write that.

Charlie Chapman:

Some custom.

Andy Allen:

Yeah, some very custom firmware and software package built on something like a very sort of specialized use case. We didn't know what that was. We didn't know what the limitations were. I'm doing all this prototyping in flash and director and things like that where you can do some very elaborate things and we're trying to keep it realistic, but there's all sorts of memory constraints and animation and refresh rates and things like that. You have no idea what those constraints are. You're just designing it. And so you're handing this off, you're handing over essentially a packet, a packet of recommendations that says, "This is what we think you should do and try to do." And obviously they're hitting other limitations that you just couldn't account for.

And I think a lot of people are okay with that, honestly. A lot of people, a lot of designers in the field feel like, "Well, I did my part." But for me, I'm a very hands-on person. I'm the filmmaker who wanted to get in there and do the edit and apply the special effects. And I very much prescribed to the kind of David Fincher perspective of filmmaking, which is a director should know how to do every role on the team, should know how to edit and do special effects and light and do the cinematography, everything from like the lowest job to the biggest job, right?

Charlie Chapman:

At a certain level, not necessarily at the level of the person they're hiring.

Andy Allen:

Exactly. Yeah. But like know it well enough that you can create a vision within those bounds. And so I just knew that I needed to go where software was made and where was the biggest software made? It was made at Microsoft. So I never thought I would work at Microsoft and this was like during the Ballmer era. So it was not a cool place for designers to be at all. It was very anti-design.

Charlie Chapman:

I don't know. Lots of clear aqua interfaces with longhorn, right?

Andy Allen:

In hindsight, yeah. I mean, in hindsight, there was actually a lot of great work happening under the hood with things like Zoom HD and Metro and some stuff that I think-

Charlie Chapman:

Don't get me going on my love of the Zoom and Windows stuff have really-

Andy Allen:

Oh man [inaudible 00:14:40] design language.

Charlie Chapman:

... aged very well, I would say.

Andy Allen:

Yeah. But a lot of that was kind of just bubbling under the surface. It wasn't really known yet. And so I went to Microsoft and worked on some early incubation type projects. So worked on a two screen, like the idea for this two screen tablet that was called Courier.

Charlie Chapman:

Yes. The long-rumored foldable.

Andy Allen:

Yeah, this was pre-iPad.

Charlie Chapman:

Not a single screen, but yeah, yeah.

Andy Allen:

And I mean, the great thing there is I met what would become my future co-founders on my next adventure, but we really started to develop this idea that technology should be there really to service like human creativity. And most technology, even the iPad when it came out, was very consumption-focused. It was Steve Jobs sitting back on the couch reading-

Charlie Chapman:

Pre-Pencil.

Andy Allen:

... a book or watching a movie. And that's great, but we really saw the potential for, especially for mobile tools for creativity to unlock creation. And so we really came up with an entirely new OS for the Courier, which was based around creativity. We got it pretty far, but eventually it was kind of killed in Microsoft efforts to consolidate all of their operating systems around one. That was kind of when they made everything like Windows Phone 7 and Windows 7 really made everything very similar.

Charlie Chapman:

The first attempt at going ARM.

Andy Allen:

Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Your perspective then looking back on that, do you see that as a work that you were doing there, had the world around it not changed so much within Microsoft, you were on the right trajectory? Or were there things that now you're like, "Oh, we should have thought through this in a different way or in hindsight, we could have maybe gotten it over the finish line if we had changed how we approached building that"?

Andy Allen:

No, I mean, I think we definitely could have shipped something that was very unique and a very different perspective. I mean, I've even gone back and watched, it leaked, this whole project leaked.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh yeah, I'm very aware.

Andy Allen:

That's why everybody knows about it, which is kind of a blessing, honestly. I did not leak it. I mean, say that legally for the record.

Charlie Chapman:

On the record, yeah.

Andy Allen:

But it did leak. So there's videos and I still think it presents a kind of vision for how we could use software that is still different. Some of that has been implemented by iPadOS. They have a pencil now and they have some of the ideas of multitasking and an operating system that really supports creativity, like moving things back and forth between applications and stuff like that. We tried to put those sort of creative principles at the forefront of an operating system. I'm still excited about something like that and not sure that we've fully seen it realized yet. So in some ways, maybe it was ahead of its time, maybe it was like just speaking to a certain audience that a lot of technology just wasn't interested in for the longest time. I'd like to think that if we were to like... Someone could still make that type of, not exactly like that, obviously they'd make something very different, but-

Charlie Chapman:

The brains of those ideas.

Andy Allen:

... in a way speak to that audience. Yeah. And sort of try and unlock creativity rather than pure consumption on these devices. It's sort of my complaint even with new platforms like VisionOS, which are amazing technically, but still feel very consumption-oriented from the get go. I yearn for these things to be like these great tools. I'm a creator and that's the sort of thing that speaks to me and that's what spoke to me about the early Macintosh and Apple II and early computers were these things as these amazing creative tools that could unlock so much human creativity and potential.

Charlie Chapman:

Are there ideas from that that you still haven't seen implemented on iPadOS or across Android and in particular with the rumored iPhone Fold coming out where theoretically more and more people will have a wider potentially creative canvas to play with in their pocket. Are there ideas from the things you were developing or at least thinking about in that era that you'd think would be interesting to see both at the OS level but even at the developer level?

Andy Allen:

There are a lot of people with interesting ideas. There've been a lot of different kind of conceptual takes at re-envisioning the operating system, right? Like Jason wants Mercury OS and things like that, that I think just present these very interesting alternative paths that we could have taken or could speak to us in different ways. And I think it just gets you thinking very differently about what could be. But I mean, to call one thing out is like in creativity, it's very much about moving things back and forth, right? You're often mixing and matching different things, right? Taking something, an asset over here and bringing it into an application over here to work on it and then bringing it back over here. And like modern operating systems particularly like iOS and iPadOS are just not architected that way, right? They're silos and they're good reasons to make them silos, good security and privacy reasons for that, but it does hurt this idea that of the creator who just wants to move things around very fluidly, right?

Charlie Chapman:

I think that's where infinite canvas tools like Figma or Sketch have become really good at that because while there are designers out there that I'm sure keep their canvas very, very tightly constrained. In fact, at big companies, you see all these systems built around it. But I feel like the best work when I look at somebody's Figma file from somebody who's really good, it's complete chaos because you're just like option dragging and creating copy over here and then you grab a piece from over there. And the fact that copy and paste works across everything, you do end up in this sort of very dynamic fluid throwing stuff. It's like a messy table, but that's where I feel like a lot of the best creativity kind of comes out.

Andy Allen:

Yeah. Think of how much weight, there are just a few little tools that we have and how much they carry, like copy-paste, operating system level kind of copy-paste, also screenshots. Think of how much people use screenshots. They were not really intended to be used in this way, but it's the only way to capture exactly what you're seeing in one place and bringing it over to another place in a very portable way. And so we were envisioning a lot of this sort of stuff in a very fluid, creative focused way. How could you make more of these operating system level tools and actions that can really facilitate this kind of very freeform way of working rather than workflow where you're going from A to B to C, much more freeform. You can just mix and match and not have to worry about the walls of applications, right?

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, that's cool. So the Courier never did see the light of day, but a portable device from a different company did and the iPhone came out and became this massive thing. Did you jump on that right away? It sounds like before this time you hadn't been in sort of just application world, you'd been at sort of broader level. When the iPhone came out, did you immediately get excited and start building apps or what was your sort of story of getting into that?

Andy Allen:

I was very excited about the iPhone. I didn't start building applications actually until the iPad came out. The first app I built was an app called Paper, a drawing app. It was honestly built on a lot of the understanding that we sort of built up through working on Courier and a lot of those same principles around like freeform creation and creativity. Although now it had to be scaled from an operating system down to just a single app, but it was great. It really kind of shocked us when it came out because to us these were just ideas that we'd sort of been living with for years and then when it came out, it kind of blew up overnight and really had this overnight success that really kind of caught us off guard a little bit, to be honest.

Charlie Chapman:

And the original business model was, was it free or was it paid upfront? I remember thinking of it as this like tool that everybody's excited about and less of it's a business. Is that how you were thinking about it?

Andy Allen:

No, it was free. So it was actually a new model at the time, new for productivity apps, but it was more common in gaming, which was free with in-app purchases. So Apple didn't have subscriptions at the time. This was 2012 when it came out.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. Or at least when they did, it wasn't allowed for anybody except for specific types of apps.

Andy Allen:

Yeah. It was really just common in gaming at the time to have free with in-app purchases as the kind of business model. But I mean, even back then we just knew that when you looked at the numbers, you just got so many more downloads, so many more people coming in upfront if it was free. And we wanted people to come in and try it because this was something new. We knew that once they tried the ink and they felt it, that's when people became convinced. And back then, we'd get crazy high conversion numbers too because these were people on the iPad and they were looking for a reason why they bought the iPad to some extent, some way to justify it. And this was something that was unique to iPad and felt native on the iPad, I think. It was one of those early native iPad feeling apps.

Charlie Chapman:

And what was the main pitch for Paper then? It was like a drawing creative app, but how did that differ from the other ones that are out there? And this is pre-pencil too, right? Apple Pencil.

Andy Allen:

Yeah, this is pre-Apple Pencil, pre-FiftyThree Pencil too, because we ended up making our own stylus before the Apple Pencil came out.

Charlie Chapman:

Was that with the original app launch or was that later?

Andy Allen:

That was about a year later. We came out with the FiftyThree Pencil and yeah, so what was the pitch? It was really, this is your digital sketchbook, right? It's like if you have a Moleskine that you love to sketch out and capture your ideas, this is our version of it. And yeah, we weren't the first. There were other drawing tools out there, but I think we were one of the first to try and envision it, like re-envision the navigation, the tools, the ink, everything about it in the lens of someone who's creative. Like for example, most note-taking apps back then or sketching apps back then if you wanted to capture something, you had to hit start a new page, title my document and then start drawing. And we're like, at that point, whatever idea you had in the moment is gone or you've gotten distracted by something else.

So we knew that our competition was a sheet of paper or a napkin or something, right? It's something that quick. So we made it super simple. You didn't have to title your documents. There were no documents, right? It was just pages within this three-dimensional journal. So we built it all in 3D. Everything was very gestural so you could get around very quickly and very naturally. Everything was spatially-oriented because a lot of people who like to sketch are very spatially-oriented people and then we spent a lot of time on the inks. We actually made them... We only had a few inks. A lot of people had infinitely customizable pens, and inks, and brushes and things like that.

The problem is like it's very difficult to find the few values on those sliders that actually look good together. So we said, look, let's just find the sliders that work and then we'll open up a dimension of expression through acceleration and speed and eventually things like pressure and whatnot that lets you do more and be more expressive with it and get different aesthetics from it, but let's not bombard you with tons of sliders and things like that. So I think it really appealed to people who just wanted something that just worked and looked good right out of the gate and sort of worked the way that they thought.

Charlie Chapman:

And then you said a year into that is when you came out with a piece of hardware to go with it, right? And that was the FiftyThree Pen?

Andy Allen:

Right. And that was in the works even from the get go. That was part of the bigger vision. We knew that having a tool in your hand was going to be very important because just drawing with your finger is not great and there's just a certain level of precision that you can get from your hands and your fingers, right? It's great for navigating. It was the right sort of... Steve Jobs, of course, famously yucked the stylist when he launched the iPhone and it's great for getting around and consuming. But when you need to make something, you need a level of precision. There's a reason that we have tools all around us, like scissors and pencils and I'm very into woodworking, so I love tools.

And we knew that that was a very critical part to it. And so from the get go, we were designing an active stylist that would... We were some of the first to do things like pressure sensitivity, you could flip it around and erase with the backside of the pencil, things like that that were quite innovative at the time, helped set up Apple for what they ended up doing with Pencil.

Charlie Chapman:

Paper is not currently still a running concern, right? So what happened there?

Andy Allen:

Yeah, not for me. It is still in the app store.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, it is? Oh, okay.

Andy Allen:

Yeah. It still has millions of users. I mean, it's still heavily used. What happened there is we... This was 2012. We were part of the early kind of app craze, right? If you remember, everyone was building apps and we kind of rode some of that excitement. Some of it we needed. So we raised money. We went the VC route and raised a lot of money. We needed the money to do the hardware, to be honest. You can't just bootstrap.

Charlie Chapman:

Especially with hardware. Yeah.

Andy Allen:

Yeah. It's just there's a lot of very real costs there. So we went that route and the company grew for a while and then you kind of reach a point where you realize, well, this is sort of about how big the company's going to get. And it was clear that we weren't on the trajectory to become the next multi-billion dollar company, but that's what the VCs and investors are investing in. So it's no surprise to anyone who's sort of ridden this ride, which is most people who've raised money don't have that billion dollar outcome. You're sort of put in a tough position to figure out what to do and we ended up selling the company to WeTransfer. They're a European Version of Dropbox essentially, right?

Charlie Chapman:

Which was acquired by Bending Spoons, I think.

Andy Allen:

Yeah, recently they were acquired by Bending Spoons. So I worked for WeTransfer then for a little while for about two years leading some design and product teams there and then just started to get that itch again of like, well, I kind of want to do something. I feel like I have a little bit more to say in the world of apps.

Charlie Chapman:

And is that the beginning of the origin story for Not Boring Apps then?

Andy Allen:

It is. Yeah. I mean, to tell it a little bit more deeply is I didn't really know what I wanted to do next, honestly. I just left WeTransfer. And was sort of looking around and I stumbled on the artist John Baldessari.

Charlie Chapman:

I make that face as if I know who he is other than because of your original blog post whenever you kind of blew onto the scene and that's part of the story, right?

Andy Allen:

I never know how many folks don't, because he's one of the biggest names in the art world. It's certainly the experimental art world. But yeah, not so well known among designers and technologists. But for the first half of his life, he was very much just a kind of, he was an art student and then a very kind of mediocre landscape painter. That's what he called it himself. He called himself a mediocre landscape painter. Until he was almost 40, so like mid-career when most people think your art career is over, he took all of his paintings, his entire body of work that he'd done over decades and decades and he just burned it all, lit it all on fire. And in that moment vowed to never make any more boring art. And that he wrote that statement out over and over again thousands of times while videoing it to just, he just said, "I will not make any more boring art. I will not make any more boring art," over and over again in a very kind of performance art way.

This was the early years of experimental art and performance art and things like that. And then went on to do some of the most profound art that has really influenced a whole new generation since then. And it's funny because I was reaching kind of that same point in my life approaching 40 and that just really struck me. I felt like that's a good... Sometimes there's just good, very simple heuristics. If you can just say, "I will not make any more boring software," that might lead to some good outcomes. And that was really it. It was like, "What does Not Boring Software look like?"

Charlie Chapman:

Did you feel like what you had been doing before that was boring software though? Because at least in our discussion so far, it felt like a lot of what you've been doing has been you exploring new ideas and pushing boundaries. It didn't seem like you were on the sort of Figma, JSON viewer, basically sidebar on the left like standard kind of thing, right?

Andy Allen:

Yeah. And thankfully I'd had those experiences, but I had found myself over the last two or three years leading up to this, slipping more and more into what was fashionable at the time, which was building your B2B SaaS business. Honestly, I had taken on a little bit more of a product role rather than a designer. So I was the one living in Amplitude all the time, looking at the metrics every day.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh wow. Yeah. Okay.

Andy Allen:

Seeing where we're moving and what we can do.

Charlie Chapman:

I can see the existential crisis growing.

Andy Allen:

Yeah. I was sort of filling a gap that needed to be filled at the time and that's what you do when you're at a startup, especially one that just is struggling and needs some attention. So I was doing what needed to be done, but it wasn't really the thing that was feeding the soul. That was important for me, I think, that moment and Baldessari's words there was important to just kind of remember like, "Oh, this is why I got into design." And it led me into apps, which is strange because in 2020, building an app business was not at the top of anyone's dreams.

Charlie Chapman:

No, that was definitely a lull in the cool factors.

Andy Allen:

Exactly. It's gotten more fashionable recently, but it was very much out of fashion at the time and everyone was so obsessed.

Charlie Chapman:

Ironically, there were moments that I got into it as well.

Andy Allen:

Oh, there you go. Perfect.

Charlie Chapman:

But maybe that's a sign that it had lost its cool. This is now I'm here.

Andy Allen:

Well, it's so funny because I just found that oftentimes the things that I've done that have had the most staying power or resonated the most have often been these very uncool things. Whenever you try to do something cool or of the moment, it just doesn't really go anywhere or it flubs, but doing these very uncool things has proven to play out well for me at least. And so that was one of those moments where it was very like, no one else is starting an app business. Should we really do this? Okay.

Charlie Chapman:

You make that choice. What's the thesis then other than Not Boring because experimental art while can change the world isn't necessarily a business the same way. And your last business, you had to raise money and all that. Did you have a thesis this time for things you wanted to do different or how you were going to build this? Or was it okay if it just made it small dent in the universe in terms of the design world, but didn't give you a foundation for this can sustain me?

Andy Allen:

A lot of it came out of lessons from FiftyThree, my prior company. And in hindsight, I'd realized that we had a great small business with Paper, but we just hadn't built the business. We hadn't built the incentives right. We hadn't built the company in a way to support that. We raised money, we took certain paths that made that. And so some of it was just recognizing that, well, you can have a true sustainable small business where you can do interesting work and support that through a business if you build it correctly and you kind of incentivize yourself to do the things that you want to do. And so we were very deliberate and I say we, it's me and my partner. There are two of us. There's still two of us and we were very deliberate about it.

Charlie Chapman:

Which is probably step one, right, in making it okay to stay small is not having a large company with a lot of headcount that you have to feed.

Andy Allen:

Yeah. We both had been through the startup cycles. He's been through it twice. I've been through it once where you start a company, you scale it to dozens or a hundred plus people and then you sell it, that kind of thing. And it's funny because when we got together again, we just love working together and when we got together we were like, "Our favorite time at the company was really when it was just you and your co-founder sitting around a kitchen table making stuff." And what if you could build a company that was just that? And if you just scaled... If you just do the uncool thing and ignore what everyone is saying about you got to scale and you got to raise money and like that's how everyone gets attention now and just like stay small. You can build a company where you can do the things that you want to do and hopefully motivates you to do the types of things that you want to do.

So even the way that we chose to monetize the work that we do was very intentional in terms of trying to incentivize us to do what we want to do.

Charlie Chapman:

And was that thinking happening pre even building apps, like how you're going to monetize?

Andy Allen:

Yeah, it was part of it. I mean, yeah, you asked about the thesis and so I didn't really address that, but the idea was it was really a though experiment. Honestly, I wasn't expecting it to be a business. It was meant to be a though experiment and the experiment being, can you build truly design differentiated software? And that sounds so simple because we all think design is what differentiates good software from bad software, but the more you dig, the more you realize, well, really it's because it has this feature to unlock this thing.

Charlie Chapman:

We talk about this a lot at RevenueCat where I work it's like people pay for value at the end of the day and it's not that design can't be value, but boy, is that a significantly harder sell. And just to kind of bury or not bury the lead, whatever the phrase is to pull ahead here, the apps you've made are a calculator, a timer, a weather app. And so in each of these, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but other than maybe the camera, that one's a little different, but none of them are things that you could pitch on an elevator and somebody goes, "Oh, that's interesting."

Because I've been doing this a while and talked to a lot of developers and when somebody says, "Oh, the reason is because it's beautiful design and it feels really good," you kind of roll your eyes because you're like, "Okay, yeah." Everybody says that, right? So actually differentiating on design is, I can't even think of almost any app businesses really aside from I think maybe you, that is really, that is it. That's kind of the main pitch.

Andy Allen:

It always struck me as weird because again, I'm someone who came from the graphic design world and doing physical things and it's not weird in everything else.

Charlie Chapman:

No, like Moleskines are very popular and you can go pay-

Andy Allen:

Exactly. You can pick any notebook [inaudible 00:40:05].

Charlie Chapman:

... way less money for one that's just as valuable and has just as many good features.

Andy Allen:

Exactly. You're not picking in your notebook based on features. You're not picking your sofa based on its features, right? Aesthetics-

Charlie Chapman:

Sometimes you are, that is a thing in physical design also.

Andy Allen:

Yeah. It's not devoid of it or cars. I mean, yeah, there are some feature differences, but they're kind of minor and we have strong opinions about brand and design and the aesthetics of cars, right? Even if you don't think you're an aesthetically-oriented person, I guarantee you have opinions about how you wear, what you drive, what you choose to do with your free time, things like that. You have opinions about things like this. I think those are valuable things and increasingly as much as people want to believe that, I don't know, there's this constant belief I feel like that people have that we're going to be more off our screens in the future or something or like the new technologies means we're not going to be using technology. I don't know. It's this forever kind of lie that technology likes to sell us, right? That the new device is going to make us more present by putting yet a [inaudible 00:41:19].

Charlie Chapman:

If you strap a computer to your wrist, you'll use your computer in your pocket less.

Andy Allen:

Exactly, right. Oh, what we really need to do is put the computer on the eyes, right?

Charlie Chapman:

Right.

Andy Allen:

Now you'll be present.

Charlie Chapman:

Now you'll be free.

Andy Allen:

Exactly. And so maybe it's fatalist of me, but I kind of just embrace that. I think we're going to be spending a lot more time in software in whatever form that takes. And I don't see that as a bad thing. I think software is great and beautiful and it can be what we want it to be. It's one of the most flexible, most prolific, widest reaching mediums that we've ever probably have ever created. So I love software and I think we're going to live in increasingly more and more of it. So why not be shaping it the way that we want to shape it? It should reflect us our individuality, our aesthetics, our taste and that kind of thing.

And then when you look at the world of software and what people run on their devices, it's largely the same. Almost everyone is running the same weather app, the same calculator. It's weird. It's like imagine stepping outside and 90% of people are wearing the same exact outfit that you are, right? That would be a cult. I wanted to see that type of world, right?

Charlie Chapman:

I'm curious how much of the reason people make purchasing decisions based on design really has to do with the experience of using it versus the signaling it does externally. Because I do think there is a significant amount of money being made purely based on design, which is like skins in video games, but that is users making purchasing decisions that let them signal to the outside world something about themselves, express themselves in some way. Whereas for the most part, I think it's true that especially on your phone, the software you use is extremely intimate. Very few people are seeing what you're using almost ever. And do you think that that's a part of that?

Andy Allen:

Yeah. Certainly a part of design is brand and what it signals outward, but also what often gets missed when you talk about brand and outward signaling is also how it sort of reflects back on you. We often choose things because they help us kind of communicate who we think we are, you know what I mean?

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. Or what we value.

Andy Allen:

Yeah, and it's not just-

Charlie Chapman:

I think the value might be premium feel and all this stuff, but it's externally validated or like you can see it, right?

Andy Allen:

Exactly. Right. What groceries you buy and all these things as much as their signals outward, there are also ways for you to maybe try and understand who you are, if that makes sense, and what values you want to embody and live by and that kind of thing. So I think it definitely goes both ways and yeah, software for sure has often been a very private thing and so it often doesn't have that outward signaling, but I think it's still prevalent to an extent and I think there's still a space for this for design oriented software to, again, like help you figure out what values you want to embody. And maybe there is some outward signaling too in some way with software or maybe that's yet to be cracked beyond avatars and skins and things like that. So that might be part of it as well.

But I'm excited about that type of future where we can have a lot of different voices creating a lot of different types of ideas that are expressed through software. I love the idea of the Italian artist, Bruno Munari, who was a sculptor but writes a lot about design and he writes about how we're sort of constantly trying to find this balance in life between this sort of like outward material world and the inward moral world and design often helps become this sort of bridge between that. And the hope is that art can be brought into the everyday. And so that art is not just something that is in the galleries or is in these very like controlled moments in our life, but it's something that we can live with. And so the artist's perspective helps us reflect on our own perspective and the material can sort of coexist with the moral and we can live every day among art.

And so I love that idea of bringing art into the every day where we can experience that. You can pop open your weather app and you can experience hopefully a little moment of artistic expression that maybe in some way helps shape your view for the day. That's a dream at least.

Charlie Chapman:

So let's actually get into the apps then. You've made this choice you wanted to, and I don't think we said, but the monetization method for these is a subscription that unlocks things within each app. And then there's also, I think even from the very beginning you had a group subscription that kind of captures all of the Not Boring Apps. When you launched, this is my memory and correct me if I'm wrong, but my memory is you started, I think you didn't even release the apps immediately. You wrote your, I promise I won't make boring software anymore blog posts, which we'll link in the description. It's excellent, like very worth reading definitely. But then following up on that, you released, I think, a set of apps. It wasn't just one app right at the beginning. Well, I'll let you say which ones it was, but it was more of these simple utility tools that everybody uses apps, right?

Andy Allen:

Yep. So we released weather, calculator, and timer and yeah, we released three of those. You could get them individually or you could get the full collection of apps.

Charlie Chapman:

It's a subscription and with weather it's a little easier. You can say like you can get premium data sources along with it. But for the other apps, pretty much what you were unlocking was making it look different, right? There's kind of different styles, different app icons, that kind of thing?

Andy Allen:

Yeah. For the most part, you were unlocking skins in those early apps and we were regularly, every few months we would push out a new skin, sometimes collaborations with artists that we like. So that was kind of the idea. But the way that we looked at it and the way that we tried to position and still do to an extent the subscription is it's a little bit almost like a patron model where it's really fueling the work that we do and we try and come out with a new app every year. So we've come out, it's been five years now we have six apps out and every year we come out with a new one and if you're part of that, if you're one of the patrons, you just get the new app, right? You get it for free. We're not charging you another X dollars on top of it.

And the other thing that we decided early on is like we're going to lock your price in. The people who paid like early on in that first batch, they're still getting a great price now. So if they're still around, we've locked in that price for them and so they just every year get a new app that they get to add on top. So that's kind of how we justify the ongoing... Of course, there are like ongoing expenses with things like weather data, which is a lot more expensive than a lot of people realize and there's like maintenance costs and stuff like that that helps it, but we kind of see it in that way. We try not to justify it in terms of like X many features and things like that. It's more, what you pay for is this ongoing effort to try and build interesting apps. And if you're interested in following along in the work that we do, it's the best way to support us just by buying our subscription, our membership plan.

Charlie Chapman:

And normally advice would be don't make that the value proposition. Because if people are coming to your app for a specific value and the thing you lock away is the thing that is nice, but people don't care that much about like alternative app icons or skins, you're not going to get many people to do it. But like you said, your whole thesis here is that really it is differentiating on design. And that last bit, it was interesting to hear you say that because I feel like for me and for a lot of people in my area, that's more of the thing is almost supporting the work, the artistic work and coming up with ideas and inspiring people or whatever and that it is like a patronage versus I'm getting this out of it. Obviously you are getting something out of it, but the free versions of a lot of these are pretty good. So did that work?

Andy Allen:

Yeah. Well, even the first, so the first plans that we launched, there's one tier which was essentially you unlock all the apps. It was like, you get everything, right? We offered another tier above that that we literally called the patron plan that was more expensive. I mean, it was five times as expensive and you didn't really get anything new. We sent people a gift, like a physical gift, but it was really just about supporting us and it was shocking how many people went for that plan. And that was kind of the moment that we realized, "Oh yeah, this is a little bit of a different business model, right? We're not selling a different proposition. We're not selling features here. People want to see this work and see us maybe as the knights fighting this battle against boring software and they want to fund this effort."

And so ever since then we've been leaning into that because honestly, I think that's what we are and it also allows us to do the type of work that we want to do so we're not trying to chase features that are going to unlock some new audience for us or that we think are going to suddenly bump up our conversion rates because we've added these new features and it's more on par with the other apps, that kind of thing.

Charlie Chapman:

Well, and even if you were thinking that cynically because of what the value proposition is, the incentives that you've built are to actually do things that are inspiring and feeding the narrative at least that you're doing new, interesting, creative things that can help inspire other people versus an innovative feature because that can be just as innovative, but it's a very different thing. And at least it appears that it sends you down a route where you're not chasing really deep crazy new feature work and it's more like how can we take a different design approach to a very well-troddened problem space that again, you couldn't really pitch in an elevator because it's like, what does this calculator do that other calculators don't? And it's like, there isn't really an answer at all for that, right?

Andy Allen:

There aren't many folks in the software space that do this. And so maybe it's just, I don't know, maybe it's just a kind of unnatural, too much confidence or something. But my thinking was always like, if we just do what we want to do, there's got to be somebody out there who's going to resonate with it and be interested in it. And I don't know how big that business is going to be, but guess what? There's just two of us. It doesn't have to be that big.

Charlie Chapman:

Exactly.

Andy Allen:

And that's the other key piece is like we kept everything very small. Thankfully, we've been in tech long enough and had some success along the way that we can afford ourselves that opportunity to watch it grow because it's not a big business right out of the gate. But I think there was just some of that confidence that if we just do what we want to do, we will attract the right people and we'll see what business is there. And if there is no business there, oh well, maybe we'll do something else.

The biggest fear was like getting trapped in a business that you didn't want to run. And I see that happen with so many founders. And so very much from the get go, we thought of what we wanted to build and how we wanted to build and how we wanted to work. So even the fact that we come out with a new app every year, that's just kind of an expectation now. And so in doing that, we can't go back and work on calculator V3 or something, right? I mean, what are we going to add? We could add a ton of new features to it, but I prefer to say like, this is the calculator that we made.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, it's a complete product.

Andy Allen:

Yeah. And it's complete and it does its job really well. We're not going to change it on you. It's not going to suddenly have a chatbot in the corner, right? It's like it's just what it is and we'll keep updating it and making sure that it works on all the OS versions. Maybe we'll add tiny hooks here and there for whatever new things come out like widgets or dynamic islands, stuff like that, but we're not going to dramatically change it. And that pushes us on this path to making new apps. And then that happens to align with the sort of thing that we're excited about, which is making and re-envisioning old software new ways and putting our own spin on it. So things like the camera app was a great example of that sort of playing out where we had a chance to really re-envision what we thought a camera should be.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. And I want to get into the camera app here in a second, but going back or everything leading up to the camera app, it feels like your kind of design language is pretty consistent between all of them, which is kind of like we've said, very simplified, not overdone on features or anything like that. But then in particular, it's not about it being a iOS-y app or a whatever. It's its own language, which is very focused on a lot of 3D gestural animations. They feel like games.

One of the really big ones is the sound design and your choice to, which I think a lot of apps could not never get away with, but you play the sound even if the mute switches on. Which is something that makes total sense when the whole point of it is to experience something that you're not experiencing elsewhere. But if anybody else did that, they would get destroyed in reviews and everything because people get really upset at that. But whenever you go into your calculator app or weather app, that's almost why you're there is to experience this thing. Is that how you were thinking about it? Or do you disagree and you're like, "No, everybody should be pushing more and more sound design that your phone is always making sounds"?

Andy Allen:

I think sound design is just not done very well. I think it's part of it.

Charlie Chapman:

It's not prioritized almost by anybody. Right?

Andy Allen:

It's almost nobody does it. Everyone's kind of written it off and said, everybody mutes their phones anyways and nobody wants to... That's for the kids' websites or apps or something, right? Yeah. Sound is a huge part of video games and you alluded to it, but video games were a huge inspiration for me throughout my career and long wanted to inject more of video game design into the software I made. And so Not Boring has really been a vehicle for that. So everything that we do is in a 3D space, a 3D engine and we 3D model everything and we just think it brings a certain tactility and dimensionality and sort of sense of physical space that just really speaks to the way that I like to use software and hearkens back to, I think for a lot of us, what is probably our most connected that we ever felt to software was often video games, honestly.

We grew up on video games and some of the deepest experiences that we've had have been with video games now. So sound is a huge part of that and I think a lot of people just don't do it well, honestly. I wrote a whole article on this trying to give away our secrets so that other people could do it well. And I am starting to see more people doing it, which is great. We even literally gave away sound kits of buttons and things like that. But just for example, one small thing is normally what everybody does when they have, let's say they put a click or something on a button tap. They have one click file, one sound file and it just plays the same one over and over and over. And guess what? No button ever sounds exactly the same.

Why does it sound so great to listen to someone typing on an old clickety clackety keyboard, right? That can sound wonderful but not when you move it digital. It's because of all the variation, right? When you hit a physical button, it hits differently every time, right? And this is a thing that is used in gaming because gaming has the same problem. You might need to punch over and over repeatedly in a row and you don't want to-

Charlie Chapman:

Or footsteps, that's a common one.

Andy Allen:

Footsteps, yeah. Or like background music is a thing, like how do you keep that interesting and changing over time? And so there are all these techniques and so one of them in video games and one of them is just don't have one sound file, have a dozen sound files for that same button click that are all slightly different. And suddenly, it doesn't sound as grating anymore to us. And so there's a dozen or so tricks like that that we just gave away for others to use because I would love to hear more sounds. I'm someone who likes to hear sounds and software. And I think it just really amps up the experience that you have and then the flip sort of corollary to sound is haptics. And again, a lot of people I think don't use haptics nearly enough. You can make your own custom haptics in iOS, literally your own custom haptic patterns.

Charlie Chapman:

Right. So everything feels a little different.

Andy Allen:

Yeah. And you can use the defaults. There's some good defaults, but literally you can make your own haptics that feel weighty or feel like an explosion or things like that. And again, it doesn't take much, honestly, it just takes working with a sound designer. And I highly recommend that for anyone who's building apps, consider sound. It's a great way to amplify your experience that really doesn't add much overhead or complexity to the app itself. It's just it's built in or it doesn't add it to the experience. It's sort of layered on on top.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. I think the trick in that particular case, but maybe in a lot of things that you do is you're working in a game engine and your users are expecting a different kind of experience explicitly. Whereas most people making productivity software especially, there is an expectation of things fitting within the stand... Because you're not building an operating system, you're building something that lives inside of an operating system. And there is an expectation for most users that things feel and look similar in certain ways. So you are completely ignoring the whole liquid glass thing because that defeats the purpose of the app. The whole point is that it's this unique, interesting experience. And so not only are you able to do sound effects that play even when the mute switch is on, but you can have the visuals when you tap something in your app have a wait to... It's like a punch in a video game.

It's like things crash, or move, or skip frames, I'm guessing anyway, to have this feeling of like, this was an expensive action, this is a light thin action. And so the sound, the haptics, the visuals, you can do all this stuff in your app that I at least don't feel the permission to do, not just from the company I'm working for, but from users. Does that make sense?

Andy Allen:

No, it does. But yeah, I mean-

Charlie Chapman:

It's a weird balancing thing that I feel like you've almost built a business where you are allowed or almost have to now ignore in a way that it does. It feels like everybody else lives on a different platform that they kind of have to live within or different constraints maybe.

Andy Allen:

Yeah, maybe I'm being too optimistic, but I think there's room for it. We do have some liquid glass, the way that we see it is like we exist within... We're not blind that we exist within an operating system. And so we don't reinvent everything. We don't reinvent the menus and share sheets.

Charlie Chapman:

I guess that's true.

Andy Allen:

And so we see it as a bit of a kind of like they're providing a foundation and we're building something on top of that. And so we can build our own perspective, but it has to kind of work with the Apple language as well. And so we see that really as more of a collaboration really rather than us just doing our own. Because some video games do it where they really just like, "Hey, it's full screen, it's built in Unity."

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. Video games are great. The menus can be extremely obtuse.

Andy Allen:

Exactly.

Charlie Chapman:

But it works, because-

Andy Allen:

They can do their own thing. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

... you're in it and then you learn that design language, but you couldn't do that in a calculator app because people don't live in their calculator app. They're bouncing there from somewhere else and they need this sort of familiarity.

Andy Allen:

Yeah. And they don't want to wait 10 seconds for Unity to boot up either.

Charlie Chapman:

That's the other thing I'm curious about is because you lean so hard into video game engines, is that a power concern? I mean, most of your apps you're not sitting in for a really long time, so maybe not, but is that something that you're always thinking about? Or again, is it you're allowed to make different trade-offs than a typical productivity app and so it-

Andy Allen:

Yeah. So part of it is, we make utility apps that you're often in and out of. You're not scrolling in endless feed in our apps. You're intended to kind of go into the calculator and pop out. But then also we take it very seriously, perf and battery usage and things like that and startup time. So we use Apple's 3D game engine called SceneKit and it can be quite performant and so it just depends on how you use it and what things you use. We also don't push it. You can try and push it to get very photorealistic things. We actually embrace a little bit more of like a PS1 era.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. It's very polygon, low polygon kind of graphics.

Andy Allen:

Exactly. Very low poly. I've gotten very good now at rendering or modeling very low poly models. We very much think about all those things, how we can make it very performant. And actually our camera app, I've tested it against other camera apps and we launch faster than all the other camera apps minus Apple's like default camera app, which granted they probably have some special sauce. They can start booting up the camera before the app is fully zoomed open, but we can boot up faster than any other camera app. And so it's not the 3D. The 3D stuff, you can actually optimize that quite a bit. And given that we're doing PS1 level graphics, the GPUs on these modern devices and modern phones is way past what PS1 could ever do. So they're very performant actually. Now yeah, if you leave it open for a long time like a camera app, I mean any camera app, you leave it open for a long time, it's going to start eating up the battery.

So there's some element of that, but we're very conscious of it and we're very performance-oriented when we think about how we build our apps because we know that people need to use them regularly and yeah, they don't want to have to make that sacrifice. So we try and do everything that we can so they don't have to so they can get something beautiful. There's so many like poorly built apps out there that they just eat a battery and you're like, "What are you even doing with all this juice?" It's not rendering anything interesting or there's some background processes, whatever it's doing. So we try and be very conscious of that. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

So you mentioned the camera app and we have to talk about that because quite frankly for me, I've always liked all of your apps as like toys or experiments to play with, but I'm usually looking for more features or whatever. And the camera app in particular is one that I've found extremely interesting and I think you're pushing further than you've pushed any of your other ones. Maybe you would disagree, but it feels like there's more interesting under the hood things happening there and certainly more value in the what do you get whenever you subscribe than normal. So I'm curious, what led you to making a camera app in the first place and what was the, again, thesis behind how it's different than everything else other than just 3D graphics?

Andy Allen:

Yeah. We started on the camera app about three years prior to releasing it. So it was in the works for a while and it was really just, again, coming from a filmmaking background and my partner being very interested in photography as well and he's one of the best graphics engineers out there. So it was always just an interest for us. We're just kind of exploring different things, what could you do with the camera? We sort of went on a very circuitous route trying to figure out what this camera app could be. So we'd pick it up for a month or two and try some things with a new idea and then abandon it and then we did that off and on.

Charlie Chapman:

Was the starting point just not camera? What is that?

Andy Allen:

Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Is that? So the idea was, what does a camera app from us look like?

Andy Allen:

Exactly. And we go through these journeys. It's not very linear, right? And I think that's just how the creative process is. You're trying to figure out what is at the core of this thing and what makes it interesting. We were exploring all sorts of different things. Okay, could we do 3D photography? And then you can look at your photos in 3D almost like, and then Apple came out with their sort of spatial photos and things like that. So we were looking at all these different interesting ways that we could make it better and then eventually we realized like, you know what we make? Basic apps, we just improve the experience of basic apps, right? We make a great weather app feel great, something that you want to open. So let's not try and like reinvent too much what a camera app can be and do, but let's just reinvent what the experience of using a camera app can be.

So we started there and we started thinking, well, what if we use 3D in all of our apps, but for the most part, the controls are actually on a Swift UI or UI kit layer that sits above the 3D. You can spin the 3D or do a few basic things with it, but once you need to get into 3D-

Charlie Chapman:

It's much more static. You're not throwing things around or-

Andy Allen:

Exactly.

Charlie Chapman:

... spinning things. Yeah.

Andy Allen:

But this was like, well, what if we actually built all the controls in 3D? And then it led us down this path of making a very tactile camera where the sliders, and the dials, and the buttons, and everything are actually in 3D. When you press on them, they tilt based on where you press, right? You can feel the haptics and hear the sounds. And we just thought like, let's just take that as far as we can and just make that experience of holding the app in your hands as good as possible. And we just found ourselves loving how the thing felt and then it was like, well, how do these photos need to look? And this is a couple years ago now and it's only gotten worse since I would say where photography on the phones has become very processed, right?

And I would say very over processed in that a lot of the photos that you take now we're having these debates like, is it even a real photo if you're doing these like multi-frame exposure compensation and composites, where you're pulling together the sky from one photo, which is under exposed and the foreground, which is overexposed and then melding them together. And then sometimes you get weirdness when you try and do that, especially when things are moving.

Charlie Chapman:

I think the camera app's clear goal is capturing a memory the way that you see it and remember seeing it more than anything else, right?

Andy Allen:

Well, the way I like to say it is the default camera apps, it's not just Apple, it's Google, it's everyone, right? Their goal is to make sure that you never take a bad photo, but I think the result is that you never can really take a great one.

Charlie Chapman:

I hear that a lot. It's not about never taking a bad photo. It's about never missing the moment you're trying to capture. If you're taking a picture of people at night, it's better to be overexposed with all the weird night things and just be noisy or over sharpened as hell, but memory preserved, that's the point. And same if you take a picture of a car going by because it looks funny or whatever, like you're trying to capture this memory, you're not trying to capture a photograph with a capital P or whatever. There are different goals, which is why contrast doesn't matter because if your goal was to just make it look like always be an okay photograph, there's different decisions you could make in terms of contrast and stuff to make it look more photography.

But I think it's really way more about people taking pictures of menus and memories of all these people together and everybody's exposed exactly the same than it is about taking a picture that you put on your wall the same way. Maybe I'm wrong.

Andy Allen:

You're right in the sense that I think there's a very scientific... There's a version of photography that's very scientific that's like, let's make sure that your exposure histogram is perfect, right? There's nothing clipped on the edges, everything's kind of in the middle. And I think it's true if you show two photos of like, "Hey, this one has a blown out sky behind it and this one has the sky that looks correctly exposed," or maybe the way that you remember seeing it, people are going to choose that one, right? Just like if you show an HDR photo versus an SDR, people are like, "Well, that HDR one looks a little like shinier," right? But I actually think to me, it's funny that you mentioned memories, to me it feels like it doesn't capture the feeling of when I was there all that well. You know what I mean?

I feel like it doesn't capture the moment that I remember feeling in a lot of these photos. It's like it's technically very accurate, everything's sharp and exposed correctly. So what we ended up doing is we just strip all that out. The beautiful thing about Apple is they expose their raw data. And so you can actually take the raw data from a photo and build your own pipeline. So we built our own pipeline. We call it super raw because Apple is pro raw, but it's still processed quite a bit actually. So we're like, "Well, what's more raw? Let's call it super raw." And also I love Super Nintendo and the whole Nintendo idea of super, right? So we said, "Hey, let's call it super raw." So we just take all that out and there are a couple other apps that have done this too and you can actually get a very beautiful photo because the cameras on these devices have gotten so much better.

This made a lot of sense back when cameras were not as good, but as the cameras and the sensors have gotten better, it produces decent results. And because it's raw, you get such a wide range of values already. And the other thing that we do is we let you actually edit the raw data in the app so you can shift the exposure or pull back the highlights or push it up or change the temperature after the fact change the LUT. So we apply LUTs as well in real time so you could see them. So that's another cinematography back to my filmmaking era of like applying LUTs to photos, which is becoming more common now too. It's not the same as a filter because it's applied to the raw data and so you can get much more crazy effects from it and that's how filmmakers get like these wild effects.

So we try and model some of them after filmmakers we like, like Wes Anderson and things like that. So yeah, you can get just a much more expressive range of photos and it means you can get blur and noise. The odd thing is people, like Apple takes out the noise in their photos and then people add it back in because they want that grain effect and we just say, "Well, just don't take it out and just shoot it with the noise or the grain and embrace it." And so you can get blurry photos or things like that. And so yeah, it's kind of embracing that idea of photography as a little bit more of an expressive medium, I would say, rather than a documentation medium, right?

Charlie Chapman:

I've gone down this route many times where I want to take my nice camera that I have right here that's very small for a full frame camera, but unless it's out and I have it on my strap, it's like I'm not going to take most pictures with it. So I've gone through many, many photography apps. And since the kind of big Fujifilm resurgence three or four years ago, the film simulation app game is pretty big. And this is why I say the camera app is somewhat unique to me compared to your other apps because the utility of using it is actually... I could pitch this to somebody on an elevator and really pitch it to them, which is like there are quite a few apps now that do the sort of film simulation thing in app and a lot of them are really good and a lot of them focus more on film simulations.

I think one interesting thing about your simulations is, and now I understand why hearing you say it, is that it does seem more movie film inspired and the fact that you can bring LUTs in is kind of in that same vein, right? But the thing that I think Not Boring Camera does extraordinarily well is like Fujifilm, one of the big reasons people talk about it so much is the feel of turning dials and like making it the way you want kind of in camera, that I've not found another app that matches. The ability to kind of like there's a dial specifically for switching between film simulations and there's a dial for changing your exposure level. Something about those things, maybe I wouldn't be able to describe this because if I'm hearing myself say it out loud and now I'm like, I would roll my eyes at somebody saying this, but it genuinely does capture that feeling.

Also the fact that the preview is not full screen. It's like in set, you're not making the preview as big as you possibly can and something about that does make it feel very different capturing with it compared to the camera app or these other very, very nice professional camera apps that I also use.

Andy Allen:

It's interesting to hear that because the camera app was... I mean, we've made weather and calculator and those, they're a little bit more utility. Camera app was my first creative app or that's how I saw it since Paper. And so I got really excited about it and I just found like it was unlocking all sorts of like fun sides of my personality and the way that I want to see tools that we hadn't really unlocked with some of the other apps. And something that I learned early on with paper was like that moment of creation is very powerful. We tend to downplay that and think, especially in this kind of AI-driven era where you can just kind of fix it later like, oh, you can edit it later, you can do something later.

I learned very early on that, no, if you can bring some of that power to that moment of creation, so like as you're using the pencil, it's responding to you in a way. You start to use it differently, right? It's this conversation between you and the tool and people will draw something very, if you ask them to draw a flower or something, they will draw it very differently if you give them a pencil versus an inkbrush, right?

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah.

Andy Allen:

And that's the tool and it's not just an effect you can apply, you just discover something different. And so a lot of camera was trying to put those tools back into your hands at that moment of creation so you can see it in real time, what are you doing? What does this focus poll do to the composition? And so it was as simple as that. It was like, well, stop trying to think of all this stuff as something later that you can do in post and try and do it as you do it in the camera because now you start framing the photo a little bit differently or you start backing up or focusing.

Charlie Chapman:

That's the biggest one for me is when you have high contrast in your preview, like I can kind of see it in person and I can kind of see it through a glass viewfinder. But when you see it in the preview and you can see, especially because the preview's a little smaller, it forces your brain to do that kind of, you know the trick of unfocusing your eyes to see the shape of a composition. It kind of does that a little for you. And yeah, just like you're saying, you discover happy little accidents and reframe your shop based on that as it's happening.

Andy Allen:

Yeah. Some of the best feedback we get from the camera is from people who are like, "Oh yeah, I downloaded your camera app and then I just went out and started taking a bunch of random photos of things." You know what I mean? Remember when you do that, when you buy a physical camera, you get excited about it and you just start taking photos of plants and ants on the ground and like abstract [inaudible 01:20:04].

Charlie Chapman:

So many of the photos in my album are just, there's a sudden big chunk of my backyard because I got a new lens that weekend.

Andy Allen:

Yeah, exactly. Some of my favorite photos from our app are accidents. It's like, I accidentally hit the shutter button as I was putting it away so it's like this really cool blur or something. And so I miss some of that and I think we're trying to bring some of that back to that moment of capturing, can you bring some of that magic and creativity back to that moment and not just think of it all as like, oh, you'll do something interesting later.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. Oh, that's so cool. I could wax poetically about this for way too long, but I've already taken a little too much of your time. So I'll go ahead and kind of wrap us up here, but not before I ask you the question I ask everybody to end the show, which is who's a person or people out there who've inspired you in your work that you'd recommend others check out?

Andy Allen:

Well, I would definitely recommend checking out John Baldessari because he is the sort of patron saint of Not Boring Software. There's a great short film, this is actually how I discovered him, a great short film called A Brief History of John Baldessari that is fascinating to watch narrated by Tom Waits. I would also, I know a lot of people have, but if you haven't dug more into Brian Eno. He's just a fascinating person who speaks very well I think on creativity. A lot of people, if we're talking music producers, I think a lot of people are aware of Rick Rubin. In my opinion, like Brian Eno, I think is a better model for software designers and just has a little bit better perspective I think on creativity and how to apply creativity. So Brian Eno, there's a great documentary on him by Gary Hustwit called Eno that you can watch. It's like an interactive documentary so it plays differently every time you watch it.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, that's interesting.

Andy Allen:

And then he also has a book called What Art Does, which is just like a tiny little book where he talks about the value of art. But honestly, I think it applies to a lot of creative endeavors, including design.

Charlie Chapman:

And then where can people find you and your Not Boring work?

Andy Allen:

Go to notbor.ing to find all of our apps or search Not Boring on the app store to find us. And then yeah, I'm on the usual social channels, Twitter and the others if you're just interested in hearing me rant about the state of creativity and the app world.

Charlie Chapman:

Or seeing your latest swag game.

Andy Allen:

That's right. Or I also like to share my private woodworking excursions and things like that. So I try and talk about apps some of the time, but honestly, I talk about a lot of these other random things quite a bit.

Charlie Chapman:

Ah, perfect. All right. Well, thank you so, so much for coming on. This is you-

Andy Allen:

Thanks for having me.

Charlie Chapman:

Like I said, you came on the scene in 2020, which was right after I started doing iOS development at all. So it's very cool to kind of get to talk to you about this and go very deep on all the backstory and then spend a little time on the actual thing we're theoretically here to talk about. But man, this was a joy. So I really appreciate it.

Andy Allen:

No, it's great. Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

Charlie Chapman:

So thank you all for listening. Launched is part of the RevenueCat family of podcasts. If you want to learn more about the growth side of the mobile app business, check out Sub Club, which is hosted by my good friend and colleague, David Barnard. And of course, check out revenuecat.com to learn about the easiest way to grow and monetize your mobile app business. And you can find everything else Launched at launchedfm.com. And I'll see you all in two weeks, hopefully with my voice fully recovered from WWDC. Bye.