Episode 10: avTag With Simon Wolf

Simon Wolf joins me to talk about creating his media tagging and annotation app, avTag. We discuss major redesigns for iOS 7 and dip into marketing woes, and even do a little brainstorming regarding Simon's future plans for the app, and spinning it off to it's own company. Simon actually went indie by choosing to leave a job, rather than return to developing Windows software. Simon has been a software developer since 1994, but until 2008 he was developing Windows software. Around 2005, he got his first Mac, and in 2008 his employer needed to develop a simple Mac application. As the only Mac user in the office, he volunteered. A couple more projects followed that but in April 2010 he actually left the company when he was told he'd have to switch back to developing Windows software. Since then he's been a self-employed contractor who has worked on a range of OS X and iOS projects and he also managed to develop and release avTag. Play an audio or video file on your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad and, during playback, create tags for those moments that you want to easily find again. You know you've seen or heard it somewhere. In one of the video in your media library maybe. But which one? If only you could quickly find specific moments. Now you can! Want to bookmark scenes in movies by location? By actor? By subject? Shoot video and need a way to index it all? Use avTag to create tags, and store the time-stamps of specific locations in your media. You can edit the titles and even add notes. The tags are fully indexed, so you can browse through them or search and see the results in an instant. The idea for avTag came from a frustration at finding important pieces of information in conference videos. By 2010 Apple's annual developer conference videos were being released for free, but the problem was that there were usually over 100 of them. A few months after watching them you'd have only a vague idea of what bit of information you vaguely remembered was in which video, let alone at what point in the video. It was because of this that Simon had the idea of being able to tag moments in the videos and create a searchable database of those tags. On 8 May 2014, around three and a half years after having that initial idea, avTag was finally released. avTag had a long and difficult development process and now, six months on, Simon feels he's only just starting. Contact Links: avTag Website avTag on Twitter Simon on Twitter Vic on Twitter App Story on Twitter Support Simon & the show by using this link to get the avTag on the App Store: avTag on the iOS App Store Additional links: Otter Software (Simon's Company Website) Simon's presentation from NSConference If you're an indie developer and you'd like to tell your app's story on the show, click here. If you are enjoying App Story, please consider reviewing/rating it in iTunes. I'd also love to hear your feedback and to know how you found the show. Please feel free to use the twitter links and let me know! Thanks so much for your support!