Venice Tides: how it all started (part I)

It was a tipical evening, drinking Spritz with friends after work, when, at some point, someone said something like “hey, we should make an ‘acqua alta’ app! Just imagine it: your usual iPhone home screen with water in the background which goes up according to the current tide level!! Wouldn’t that be totally awesome?”. It happened like… more than two years ago.
Creating Venice Tides hasn’t exactly been a short process. No, it didn’t take two years - we started working at it way long after that evening, with many breaks in between – but still, it took us more than we imagined in the beginning.
We had zero experience with the iPhone when we started. Ok, we are a programmer and an interaction designer, but this was our first iPhone app, which mean learning objective C, dealing with animated sprites, fighting with Apple’s licences. Still, we’re proud of the results.

We started brainstorming during coffee breaks at work. We made some wireframes and started some research about how to implement it.
Looking at the wireframes now… the general interface is still the same but some features got lost, others were born during the process. For example, we thought, at first, that would be absolutely cool to have the water tilting according to iPhone rotation. Something like in iBeer, so that the iPhone could become your little personal acquario.

(continue...)

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