iPhone Developer of Zenbe List Speaks Out; Exclusive Interview
by Jason Hall on 13/08/09 at 10:00 pm
Jason Hall is the head of Global Marketing for H3 Solutions. He is a Professional writer and Editor for iPhoneCTO.
How many times have you sent an email to yourself as a reminder to do something later? If you’re anything like me, the countless emails will pile up and seem to multiply in your inbox. Let’s face it, lists are a part of our everyday lives and we are often left with the daunting task of trying to organize them. That’s when I stumbled up Zenbe Lists and I have to say that it’s refreshingly simple and easy to use.
What captured my attention however, was the ability to sync and share my lists online. After setting up a free account at the Zenbe Website, you simply enter your username
and password in the iPhone app and you’re ready to go. A simple tap on the the “Sync” button on the iPhone app and your lists will be synced with the Zenbe account on the web.
You can share your lists with selected people who can view, edit, reorder items in a list and even set or change due dates (currently there are no audible or visual alarms). from any Web browser. Whenever anyone adds an item to a list, that list is instantly updated online so that everyone can see the update. That will effectively eliminate any confusion related to who has the most recent list.
Zenbe Lists helps you with a simple and visual representation of the many tasks at hand. It's an application that allows you to quickly check the list and cross off items that are accomplished. It’s a great approach which is why I was happy to catch up with Zenbe CTO Tom Alison to learn more about how Zenbe Lists came
about.
How did the idea for Zenbe Lists originate?
We felt a simple todo list app was badly needed on the iPhone. We knew that there would be competitors working on todo list apps so we wanted to make ours distinctive by keeping it simple and leveraging our web application development experience to allow users to sync items to the web and collaborate with others.
Any plans for mobile platforms other than the iPhone?
As mobile-browser capabilities mature, we're looking closer at rich web-based applications for mobile devices (similar to what Google provides via mobile Gmail in the Safari on the iPhone). Writing mobile applications designed for the browser is easier and more cost-effective for us as a small team than investing in learning the native SDK for several different mobile devices.
How did you settle on your price point for the app?
Originally we distributed our app for free because we wanted to use it as a promotional vehicle for our other web-based products. Zenbe Lists became so popular that we needed to monetize it in order to cover our server expenses for the web syncing feature.
What advice can you offer our readers who might be considering getting into iPhone application development?
In our situation, we were fortunate to be one of the early apps accepted into the iTunes Store. When we launched there was only 1 other todo list app, but today the market is much more crowded. New users still discover our app even though there are now several todo list applications in the iTunes store.
We learned that if you build a simple, yet functional app that solves a problem, it will get covered by blogs and talked about on Twitter. And most importantly, it will get word-of-mouth exposure.
It's also very important that your app is well-designed, works well and looks good. Apple products tend to be well designed, and I think users of Apple products – like the iPhone – expect 3rd party developers to have a similar philosophy.
