Instead of going through a formal process of soliciting requirements or getting multiple people to sign off on wireframes, a 21-year-old student thought about how a device like the iPad could make his life easier - as a journalist and student - and he just made it.īut it’s not as though anyone can do this. And he got a response from one man who used the app to record his doctor as he talked about treatment options for the man’s sick wife.Įstes’ development of the app is a lesson in innovation. It quickly became popular among lawyers, he said. ![]() “I guess that would be an OK measure of success - without having to have another job besides this app.”Įstes has been surprised by how some people have used the app. “I live in the West Village and I can feed myself,” Estes said. It costs $5.99 on iTunes and has already sold enough to let Estes pay off his student loans. But, he says, he mostly learned the code to build the features for this app as he went along. He had played around with programming as a hobby before this and knew a little about developing on the iOs platform. “I was working at my college newspaper at the time,” Estes said, “and I was thinking of ways we could use the iPad at the newspaper.” To find that quote, I just clicked on the keywords I had typed while recording him and then transcribed that part of the audio in full. “I thought it would be great for note-taking.” “When the Ipad came out, I was in college,” Estes said. I tried out the app by interviewing Estes at a cafe near his West Village apartment to find out what drove the app’s creation and how a college sophomore with an interest in journalism could make something so successful. But Estes says he doesn’t want to overcomplicate the features. The audio doesn’t let you measure levels, which would help with the recording quality, and although it lets you draw, it doesn’t recognize hand-writing. If you’re interviewing someone, you point the iPad in the direction of your subject and jot down a few keywords as the person answers. It matches your notes with the timeline of the audio recording, so you just click on a word in your notes to jump to the related point in the audio. SoundNote is a simple note-taking application that lets you record from the iPad’s internal microphone. The app was so successful he was able to quit college, pay off his student loans and live solo in a West Village apartment in New York City. That’s what Estes did when he created an iPad app called SoundNote last year as a college sophomore at the University of Washington. ![]() If you’re David Estes, you just throw yourself into the Apple iPad development toolkit and try to make your own life easier. How do you design a mobile app for journalists? Do you commission consultants to research a tool they think reporters will use? Do you spend weeks observing the daily habits of journalists to try to anticipate their needs?
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