ObjectiveSee | Padraig Kennedy

Who are you and what do you do?

I'm Pádraig Kennedy. I live in Vancouver and I've developed a handful of Mac and iOS apps. On Twitter and ADN, I'm @padraig.

My pal Oisin Prendiville (@prendio2 based in Dublin, Ireland) and I just launched a Mac app called Tokens, which is our take on how app store promo codes should work. That's what I spend my time on at the moment.

How did you get started in developing for Apple devices?

I got my first Mac in 2003 while working as a web developer. Over the next few years I became interested in building Mac apps.

I found Cocoa hard to learn at first. One of it's strengths is that it leverages real computer science concepts like design patterns. That stuff is hard to learn by trial and error, which is, if I'm honest, how I had learned programming until then. You really need to read a book to get that stuff. Well I needed to anyway. Once I discovered Aaron Hillegass, I was set.

My first app was a free Mac tool to extract files from iPhone backups. It's pretty rudimentary, but I've kept it working since it came out 5 years ago. At the time, Craig Hockenberry and John Gruber both linked it up, so that got the word out as well as being an enormous confidence boost.

What does your computer and workspace setup look like while developing?

I use a 2011 Mac Book Air, pretty much always connected to an external display. When I moved to Vancouver I decided it would be better to get out of the house to work. I worked for six months at a co-working space called Hive Vancouver, then started renting a desk at Hop Studios. I still work from home once in a while, but would never go back to that full time.

Do you enjoy developing based off of wireframes, finished designs, or just ideas that you have in your mind?

It's really motivating to know what the interface is going to look like. If you're excited about the design, you kind of feel like you have to live up to it, and that helps get you through the boring bits.

By the time we started coding the interface for Tokens, we had a pretty much pixel-perfect screenshot of what it would look like. It's hard to really capture the feel of an app in Photoshop, so you need to figure out how it will move, resize, and scroll too. In Tokens, if you scroll the collection view down, it pulls the app bar background down to maintain the impression that it's stretching. That took me a crazy amount of time to implement, but I'm proud of it.

Your app Tokens takes a really simple, and seemingly apparent concept and executes really well on it. What made you want to create an app like that?

Thanks! Oisín and I have been friends for a few years and we wanted to see what it would be like to collaborate on a Mac project.

We started off with the observation that iTunes Connect is really not a great experience. It was originally made for record companies to upload albums for sale in iTunes and then retrofitted for apps. It never really got the kind of attention that Apple gives it's consumer products.

We thought this was something that a native app could really do well. At first we had this really broad idea that we would wrap a lot of iTunes Connect functionality in an app and market it as saving developers from dealing with it at all. But we honed in on promo codes (the ITC process really is pretty goofy) and settled on an app that would try to do a great job of generating, tracking and sharing them. Apple's documentation talks about having an "App Definition Statement". This is really good advice, and for this app we followed it. Having that plan locked down early worked really well to settle discussions about whether to include particular features or not, for example.

Finally, what is your favorite app?