Today in 2007 (Jan 9th) Jobs announced iPhone, How did iPhone influence you, your product or career

Everyone should be influenced by iPhone, more or less. For me, iPhone changed my life. This is the story: I was an audio DSP (Digital Signal Processor) engineer. I got my first iPhone in 2008. It totally changed my life. I had an iPod before, so kind of excited to experience first iPhone. Actually the first impression was sad. It was not as "revolutionary" as I expected. It could be I cannot use the telephone, message and google earth features. Or it could be I was working on LG Viewty at that time, which is more favorable since I joined the product development with my team, felt more heart touch to me. Any way, first touch of iPhone, just so so. Later on, there were some prison-break tools to make it work. It start to work better than my Viewty and Palm Treo. I start to love iPhone. Pretty soon in middle of 2008, iOS SDK was Announced and App Store is available. That really had blown me. I remember a fancy beer drinking app, reached millions of download in a couple days. As a curious software engineer, I have to try it. But It is not easy, since iOS SDK requires Xcode, Xcode requires Mac. Mac was pretty expensive and beyond my budget. I researched a lot online, found a cheap solution: there's MacOS Unix (Darwin) build for Intel PCs, not very stable but should work for me. So I spent several nights on it, I got a working Mac environment with Xcode and iOS SDK 1.0. Back to 2008, I was an engineer with about 10 years software development experiences. I thought I was a good engineer, document well, also knew what's good document, since I worked a lot with some excellent Israel engineers (to name a few of them, they were great talents and educated me well: Uri Nix, David Klajn, Polina Tartakovsky, Miki Koffman, Hadar Gat, Stanislav Alkhazov, Micha Galor). So I knew what's good design, good software and good document. But when I read the iOS SDK documentation. It was amazing. It felt like a young boy just saw his beautiful princess. Every night I stayed with my "black-mac" and learn how to code with Xcode and iOS SDK. That was fun time. There were no big companies on App Store then, mostly indie developers like me. Lot's of creativity and innovations. Like I mentioned, the Beer Drinking app. My first app, card manager, was ugly, I just use an iOS standard list form to display user's credit cards and other membership cards. Cards can be edited as well. It worked for me. After a couple years, the to-do app "Clear" came alive, it's beautiful and fun user interaction blown me again. After several month playing with coding and the store, I had some basic sense in my mind: first, I have to do sth. unique, which is I'm good at. Second, I have to make it pretty. That's how app wins. I've been an audio DSP (digital signal processing) engineer since 2000 when I entered graduate school. I'm good at audio signal processing. So I start to figure out what can I do for apps. Lots of ideas came to me: mp3 play with equalizers, karaoke application, etc. But no one really hit me until one day I had a call with my mother. I knew she had trouble sleeping for years. we all get used to it. that day she explained her latest trouble, it hit me. I start to think if I could do sth. for her, and for those trouble sleepers. This idea made me busy. I started to build a mission around it. Also research on algorithms, play with audio APIs and most importantly, what name should I give to it? I didn't remember how, finally a name came to me: SleepMaster. This is how I define this app: by turn it on with your iPhone (at those days, your app cannot work in the background, you have to keep it on. Until later new SDK update we could define an app as VoIP so audio can always work at background), put it around your face during sleep, it records all your sound, the next morning when you stop, it analyze for you, tells you how many minutes you snored, how many minutes you talked. What's fun is it automatically cut your dream talk, you can send it to your email box. interesting, huh? while I spent most of my night developing algorithm and app, I didn't stop exploring good designs. CocoaChina.com was the most popular forum for iOS developers in China. I met some friends there. Finally one group of talent designers had some similar sense as me, we liked to work with each other. Deal, they will do the UI design for SleepMaster. Their name was: Clova studio. They themselves made several cool games, really beautiful, fun to play with. And they are a group of designers who really care about design, care about details, care about user interaction. Till today, we are still friends. Development was smooth, after several iterations, I really love their design, dark theme, good details (but not many, just enough), beautiful curves, simple but intuitive flow. The better UI design, the more development work, even more challenging to implement. But I'm not afraid of that. It was still the algorithm that was most difficult. Back to 2009, the software world is not like today, everything AI. I code and learn at the same time, using traditional digital signal processing methods to identify snore sound and dream talks. After a couple months, I could achieve recognition rate about 75%. It was hard to reach over 80% then. Clova also tested for me. We decided to launch first. And together improve both design and software after launch. It didn't grow rocket high, but we have our customers, mostly from Japan, some from UK. Iterations were going on. Until 2011, I started a job at Microsoft in 2010. I kept feel painful that Microsoft pays me in the day job, I also gains some $ from Apple at night. So I stopped developing for iOS and transferred everything to Clova. Later on I started my company to build hardware apps, that's the 2nd half of my story, if you're interested, let me know, I'll keep writing.