Happy Decade Ditty Labs

A decade. That's a long time. Ten years ago Adam Harris and I were chatting over AIM, burnt out at our current jobs and yearning for something new. "We should start a company", Adam said. Both of us being musicians, we quickly settled on making a music collaboration website. It would be a place where people could write songs together no matter where they were in the world. The name "Ditty Labs" was born. It didn't take long for us discover that there were already several music collaboration sites out there. As I sat there, with discouragement setting in, AOL Instant Messenger chimed: "How about we make iPhone apps"? The iPhone was still pretty new. Again we searched and found a handful of companies making iPhone apps but this time we weren't going to be discouraged. We were motivated. An app is a small application, just like a ditty is a short, small song. The name, "Ditty Labs" still works! We registered the domain name and began the colorful journey into our new endeavor. A year prior, I made a web page in PHP that helped with selecting resistor values in a voltage divider circuit. I thought this would be a good first app to teach myself the basics of iPhone programming. A month later, our first app: Voltage Divider was born. It featured 3D rendered resistors and a cool easter egg. We landed a small project from a friend but no other client work was coming in. I decided to port my Macintosh game, MacBrickout to the iPhone as this would further hone my skills on the platform. MacBrickout and Voltage Divider were both released in 2010 and remain on the App Store to this day! In Late 2010, we were contacted by Frank Jensen of Binary Labs. He had a bunch of web based learning tools that he wanted to bring to this brand new device called an iPad. That was the start of a long run of projects for Ditty labs. We made apps that help young learners, hone fine motor skills and even coach people struggling with letter reversals -- all with a game-like flare. Another company needed help porting their chiropractic practice management software to the iPad from Windows. Years went by and the projects varied. We made games, educational apps, a shopping rewards app, an app that helps you find the best price on airplane parts, apps that help people with language disorders and even some cool hardware and firmware projects that used Bluetooth to communicate with the iPhone. Ten years has passed and the experience has been amazing! I have had the opportunity to meet many great people (many of you reading this in fact!). I have no regrets taking that leap of faith back in 2010. I'm looking forward to following this path further and seeing where it leads. Here are some highlights from the 2010's: