Since October 2010, I’ve been busy working on a new iPad application for my company, TIBCO Software Inc. called TIBCO Spotfire® for the iPad.  This application represents a first for the company and for me – the first iPad application TIBCO has ever done, the first major mobile application that I ever designed and engineered, and the first Monotouch C# iOS application I ever submitted to the Apple iTunes app store.

The story started back in October 2010, when I was asked to come up with a design for a new iPad application that would manage multiple connections to TIBCO Spotfire® Web Player servers and present Spotfire® Web Player analysis pages to the user.  The app also had to provide the ability for the user to annotate (or draw and write comments) directly on the analysis page and then be able to e-mail the annotated analysis screen to colleagues via the built-in iPad email app.

So, on my birthday in October 2010, I spent the whole Sunday putting together a PowerPoint presentation of a design that represented how I thought this application should work.  I worked hard on it because I wanted to be able to present my design proposal on Monday to the decision makers.  Another company outside TIBCO originally came up with a design, however it was very modal and focused mostly on establishing connections to servers.  Their design forced the user to go through a specific path of modal dialogs prompting to login and manage server connections.  I wanted my design to be modeless and allow the user to load analyses and manage servers through any path in the app that seemed natural to the specific user.  I wanted my design to focus on working with the analysis and on annotation, instead of focusing on managing connections to servers.

The next day, I presented my design to product management.  My design was almost immediately approved and I began development. We decided that the app should be implemented in C# and Monotouch.  It would be the first iOS application we would do in Monotouch.  TIBCO previously produced an iPhone app called tibbr, which has since become very popular.  That app was not done in Monotouch, however.  So I would be treading on unbroken ground.   I would be the only engineer to work on this ambitious project.  My original estimate for engineering to feature-complete status was 22 days.

After 20 days, I was finished!  We had a completely working and relatively bug-free version that accurately matched my original design proposal.  Then it went to our QA department.  In the following weeks, I conquered many difficult issues that came up during testing, while preserving all the feature set that was part of the original design.  I also found ways to implement new features that were requested as we tested.  For instance, one of these new features was support for attaching the iPad to an external VGA monitor and being able to reflect the analysis screen so that as you drew annotations on the screen, they would be reflected to the external VGA display.  This feature would be invaluable for big-screen presentations driven from the iPad.

Finally, after all the testing was done, we were ready to submit the app to the iTunes store.  I had never submitted an app to Apple before, so I was bit scared.  I started the process and crossed my fingers.  After entering all the screenshots, the information, and the keywords, and uploading the app, we all sat back and waited in anticipation of when Apple would start reviewing the app.  Soon our baby, that was born from a single design proposal I made back in October, nurtured along through many stages of development and bug-fixing and Apple UI guidelines compliance testing, etc. would be put before the masters who held the progress of this young app in their hands.  I submitted the app on a Friday.

The weekend went by.  Then suddenly on Thursday at 8:56 AM PST, the status on iTunes changed to “In Review”.  At 4:02 PM PST on the same Thursday, the app status changed again – it changed to what we all hoped for:  ”Approved”.  So in less than one day our new revolutionary iPad application was approved for distribution on iTunes!  What an exciting accomplishment for all of us involved in this project.

You can see our app on iTunes now.  Download it and experience the power of Spotfire for interactive data analysis on your iPad.

Here is a quick demo of some the features of the app:

“Spotfire”, “tibbr”, and the Spotfire logo, TIBCO are trademarks of TIBCO Software Inc. ©Copyright 2000-2011 TIBCO Software Inc.