MooPlan Blog

Yesterday evening has been  quite a night. I was watching a movie with a friend of mine when my cell phone rang, with a US number on screen.

Hi, I’m calling from Apple. I’m finishing the review of your MooPlan app. But I just miss a few things before it can go on sale.

I sent the application for review about a week ago, and 24 hours after that, I received feedback from Apple requesting me to modify 2 icons that infringed Apple’s trademark. No big deal, the app was resubmitted with the hour. And then I didn’t have any news for a whole week, and I was not worried because I had read so many people complain about the slow review process and the impossibility to get in touch with anyone inside Apple.

And then BOOM! A guy from Apple calls me twice the same evening, just to get my application in store as fast as possible. And a few minutes after the second call, TADAAAA! MooPlan 1.0 is ready for sale. Isn’t it great?

So ladies and gentlemen, it’s my pleasure to announce that my first iPhone application is on sale, and you can get it here for $0.99 or €0.79. If you want to know more about what it does, head to the official website.

Just a few thanks:

• Special thanks to Groovy and Grails communities for producing such a great productive Java platform that allowed me to focus on the iPhone side of things. Grails was really ideal for me: RESTful services are so easy to build, and scaffolding is just great to quickly produce an administration interface. And it was so fast to learn! I didn’t know anything about Groovy and Grails 6 months ago. And thanks also to Guillaume Laforge and his buddies for the tweets.
• Thanks to all my friends and colleagues who tested the app: Frédéric Navarro, Mounira Hamzaoui, Clément Mary, Geoffrey Bogaert, Thomas Le Goff, Quentin De Mot, Louis Jacomet, Jérôme Vanden Eynde.
• Thanks to my employer, Axen, for supporting me in this self-training effort.
• Special thanks to my Geekette friend, who beared with the movie interruption and supported me for the final steps. Hopefully in a few years, we’ll laugh about this screenshot.

So that’s it. I have the feeling that this release could be the beginning of something big. I feel it in my guts. Now it’s up to you guys. And as I read it in a German restaurant last week-end.

If you like it, tell others. If you don’t like it, please tell me.

This is the first post in what I hope to be a very long series.

I’ve been working on MooPlan for a few months now, and it’s approaching the finish line pretty fast now. Private testing is going to start with friends, and when it’s done, I will send it to Apple for approval.

You don’t know what MooPlan is? Well, it’s pretty simple. The goal is to make it simpler for people to get together. Let’s say you want to organize a meeting or a gathering of some sort. You want to invite a few people but they all have pretty full schedules and you know it’s going to be a pain to figure out when everyone is available. With MooPlan installed on your iPhone, the pain is over. All you have to do is create a meeting, choose people to invite from your address book, propose a few time slots, and send invitations. Invitees just have to click links in the invitation email they receive in order to reply. And when everyone has replied, you know what is the best time for everyone, and you can send the final details. Ain’t that great? Do you want to see how it works?

One last thing: I’m still looking for translators. So if you would like to have MooPlan available in your language on first release, and you can translate from either French or English to your language, please contact me. There will be free lifelong updates for every translator.