At this time of year, I reflect on the past 11+ months, all the things we’ve accomplished at rrripple, all of our small victories and small losses we’ve endured.  It is always with a sense of gratitude and blessing that I enjoy stepping back and seeing our global team orchestrate around a common vision of private, controlled sharing of media.  But today, I wanted to also talk about the enjoyment I selfishly enjoy working with my team of Engineers and Product Designers (including my research guru Thierry and our leader of visual design Lev) here at rrripple.

To most, the idea of enjoying a mixture of designers (often individuals who are more individual artists that collaborative universal team players) and engineers (often erroneously considered design-illiterate) may seem odd.  I, however, love this mixture, and find nothing odd about it at all — instead, I find that both designers and engineers love the interplay with one another, feeding off each other at critical junctures of software development.  However, this feeding frenzy has to be well spiced and prepared.

The combining of designers and software developers necessitates clear artistic communication and defined, firm delivery of technical specs.  For the artist (and I mean Product Managers, R&D teams drafting ideas, Interaction Designers and Visual Designers), there must be 100% buy-in on the art being constructed.  In the beginning, there can be various prototypes and neat variations of the artistic goal, but at the time of engineering engagement, there must be a clear message and understanding that all artistic team members buy into, or at the very least accept.  While small changes can happen (through iterative testing, they must happen) the next phase of engineering specifications rely on an almost unmoving artistic vision — stable enough to reproduce (sort of like an artist painting a subject — the stiller they are, the better).

Thank you to my team, to my design advisors and to the many friends, as we wrap up 2010.  Here’s to painting in stillness.

As chance would have it, our first-ever submission to Apple was rejected earlier last week, and we are now wrapping up the fixes (and taking the opportunity to throw in some new details) before re-submission.  All in all, a valuable, efficient application to share your life with the groups in your life.  One of my favorite features: being able to select ‘Family’, take a photo of a family member or event, and the rest (uploading to the family group and emailing everyone in that group) happens automatically for me.  This feature alone is fantastic!  Here’s a snapshot:

rrripple iphone application screenshot

Version 1594 improves on several bugs sent in from our great early user base — thank you everyone! Next up: performance enhancements on our submission of our iPhone app!  You guys are going to love the app.

For those who want to try our group-sharing application (in Beta), please go to: rrripple.com and use the following invite code: tc50party

One remaining Mac ‘post/upload’ bug to take care of, and then we’re off to the races! We’ve been working round the clock (literally) over the past week, hammering out the remaining critical (blocker) bugs that we need to disarm before proceeding to letting our first users in. We’re now hours away. I hope you enjoy our creation: a new way to share with groups, privately.