TechnomadicsVagabonding Europe

Alet-les-Bains

This is the long awaited sequel to the tale of Audiobus’ development. I’m completing this article now, on the day we say an emotional farewell to our motorhome Nettle, who has today been sold to a new family in the UK. It seems like a fitting time to tie off some loose ends as we start the next chapter of our lives in our new home in Australia.

In Part 1 of this article, I wrote about the early stages of the technology which was to become Audiobus, our inter-app audio platform, now supported by over 500 great music apps. Part 1 ended just as Sebastian had one of his genius moments, which I obnoxiously left as a cliffhanger. So, onwards:

It was winter in the south of France, and I was buried in the best kind of work: A new project, and one that brought together a bunch of different interests into a challenging, exciting heap.

But first, it was time to move on and find a more satisfying place to spend the rest of the winter.

I’d spent a little time researching places we could stay which were open all year, and I found one that looked promising: A little caravan park, wedged between the Aude river and the ruins of a 12th century cathedral, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, which sprawl across the French/Spanish border, in an old Roman spa village called Alet-les-Bains. So we packed up and took off across the countryside, taking a couple of days about it.

When we finally arrived, following the snaking, cyan-coloured Aude up a valley in the foothills, we were thrilled: Alet-les-Bains was the kind of French village that we would fantasise about before we left Australia, all delightfully wonky half-timber buildings and narrow winding lanes, and right out our door, too.

Alet-les-Bains

Alet kitty

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It even snowed for us a couple times, which really was rather sporting. Snow in a medieval French village! Hard to beat that.

Snow in Alet

Snow in Alet

Snow in Alet

Nettle, in the snow

Anyway, it was a tremendous spot to spend a few months programming.

I’d been conversing with my friend Sebastian more and more frequently, sometimes spending hours each day talking. I was struggling with two things: Usability, and a way to turn this idea into a viable product. And then, Sebastian solved both: We make a separate app which does all of the configuration.

Sebastian’s proposal turned what would be a mainly self-funded, unsustainable project into something that we can truly throw our weight behind. That’s when we became a partnership for real, and dived into designing the workflows.

“iOS Audio Pipeline”, the in-progress name for the project, soon became “Audio Bus”, then “AudioBus”, and finally (with Sebastian’s German influence!), “Audiobus”. It felt right.

We went through a number of iterations of icon concepts, some more lewd than others:

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…until we settled on the final version:

Audiobus Icon

We spent months and months carefully going over details, talking for hours each day about how to best represent the connection screen, how to handle multi-app workflows, tearing through ideas until we found something that worked.

In the meantime, Sebastian and I met for the first time in Barcelona! He flew down to join us, while we drove over the Pyrenees down into Spain, passing through snow and down to the 35°C coastal climate.

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After nearly a year of working together, despite having never met face-to-face before it seemed quite natural to hang out in person, although our productivity admittedly dropped somewhat during the week in food, beer, and vermouth-induced merriment.

Barcelona

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We made contact with a number of developers we’re close to, and began the process of trying out Audiobus in other environments than our own apps. It was a pleasure working with the likes of Rolf Wöhrmann, Jaroslaw Jacek, Hamilton Feltman; Kalle Paulsson and the Propellerhead team, the Positive Grid team and a number of other talented folks, and together we discovered and ironed out the remaining issues.

It was a thrill seeing these great apps passing live audio between themselves, and we were excited to see public interest growing as we got closer to having a launch-ready product.

Meanwhile, we’d taken some time to head northwards through the beautiful region of Provence, France, where we spent some time hiking over glorious Mediterranean fjords and rowing and swimming in turquoise water near Cassis, cycling through fields of purple lavender, and driving through beautiful fairytale landscapes.

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We ended up back in the UK, in the beautiful, quiet village of Wootton, where we continued to refine Audiobus and get it ready for launch, amidst the rolling green fields, bluebells, cooing pigeons and bleating sheep.

We’d taken Audiobus to the point where it was ready for a test submission to Apple App Review. We were very nervous about this, as Apple don’t have a pre-approval facility. That means that there can be a staggering amount of risk involved in developing a groundbreaking new product, especially one that treads dangerously close to “system” functionality. This was the one point of failure for us, and we uploaded a build to Apple with great trepidation.

The wait was excruciating. If Apple said no at this point, we would have no recourse: the last year of work would be wasted.

Then, the news arrived: we had the green light! We breathed a massive sigh of relief and continued with our refinements, building the website, writing the developer documentation, addressing bugs.

Winter began its approach, and we moved closer to London as frosty mornings became ever more common.

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Finally, launch time arrived: we had our initial group of apps, we’d done our due diligence, everything was tested and ready to go. We uploaded the final public build to Apple, along with Audiobus-compatible builds of our other apps Loopy and SoundPrism, and sat back to wait for approval.

Then, disaster struck as we were contacted by a representative of App Review who told us they had a problem with our app and were taking some time to consider whether it would be rejected. It’s hard to express our feelings at this point, after having come all this way. We were terrified.

And then: SoundPrism was approved. Then Loopy. And then, to our enormous relief, we received notice that Audiobus had been approved. It was time for a drink.

Our work was done, and with great excitement in the frosty dawn of an early winter’s day we watched as the biggest, most complex project we’d ever worked on went out into the world.

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4 Responses to Thirteen Months of Audiobus: Part 2

  1. Mark & Lucy says:

    I am so pleased that you have made such a huge success with Audiobus but really saddened that Nettle has gone to a new home. I’ve been following you from the beginning and now I am 4 days away from being completely debt free and in a position to start our adventure in Frankie. Thank you so much for your blog and the useful information you have shared with us, I wish you lots of good luck in the future. Yours Mark

  2. Barry Gray says:

    Hi Michael and Katherine,

    It’s very exciting to hear from you again, as I also followed you since the beginning, or at least close to it. You’ve both been so generous with your writing and photos, and it’s been very inspiring. Both for your travel adventures, and also be I too have been studying app development, and hope to have my first one in the AppStore in a couple of months.

    Anyway, it’s great to hear from you. And now that you’re returning to Australia, is this the end of Technomadics? I hope not but I’ll understand. I hope you’ll keep the site up regardless, as it’s a fantastic resource.

    My best to the both of you, in life, love, travel and (of course) Audiobus!

    Best,

    Barry

    • Michael says:

      Hi Barry! Great to hear from you too! Thank you so much.

      We’re planning on another few posts over the next days, but I think after that, that might be it, at least for now! Sad indeed but as enjoyable as our new domestic adventures are, they’re probably not going to cut it for writing material here! Katherine’s continuing to write over at nelliewindmill.com, though, of course.

      All the best to you!