Rainbow: My Journey as a developer

It all started three years back when I was participating for Codeproject's Intel Ultrabook App challenge. It was for the first time a great touch laptop, loaded with tons of sensors and beast of processing power was introduced by Intel. I have never been a great fan of smart phones or tablets. One of the reasons is that, I love power and they lack it. It's great for people who has a lot of mobility, but I don't.  

So I thought here is a cool device to do some cool stuff. I had been in Education service industry for over a decade by then. I had also had some good successful products for targeted SMEs. In fact I created one of the first accounting software that ran purely from a USB pen drive. More than 10k copies of that software is sold.

But Ultrabook gave me a way to try my luck into the world of Apps. Being a fan of Image Processing, I built a good image processing software called Image Grassy. And I still continue to use it because it offers me something that other apps don't. I reached finals of that challenge but was grossly a learning experience more than anything else.
Intel had the AppUp centre which was taking Desktop apps. It was kind of Google Play for Desktops. Anybody heard of it?

I dedicated quite a bit of time to publish desktop apps. But then Intel abruptly closed  AppUp, leading to a complete waste of time and effort. But it wasn't in true sense.

I got another opportunity when Intel launched first Creative 3D camera and announced Perceptual computing challenge phase I. I went crazy about the technology. There was two things to it! One of course the fun of working with such a new path breaking technology and the other, the possibility of winning some cool prize money.

I did some 20 apps with Perceptual Computing SDK in a month. You could check my extensive work with PerC in my youtube playlist here:
Intel RealSense And Perceptual Computing Work - YouTube

But one of the first Apps that I created was Gestop. I presented the design of what could possibly be Gesture driven operating system skin look like.

Interestingly, it was much before Windows 8 was released. And guess what? Windows * had the same Tile concept. 

There were some amazing concepts that I worked into and if you watch some of the videos, they were really path breaking innovation. One app a day in a new technology wasn't bad. Was it?

This time, it wasn't as bad in terms of returns also as I managed to win three 2nd prizes in that contest.

FaceSec, Gescards and Gestroid won me three second prizes.

That gave me lot of confidence, though a first prize still eluded me.

Next year I participated PerC challenge phase 2. I created two apps.

Shadow Art Showmaker 

and Perceptual ImageGrassy

To me, Shadow Art Show maker was a lifetime experience. I bet my life, business, career, family life and every possible thing I had, in that contest. I had written a detailed Intel IDZ blog about my experience. I can't find the link now ( or, perhaps I am just too lazy to search my old blogs).
But, I was disappointed with the results. I couldn't manage to even get a second prize this time around. However, Intel awarded me with Pioneer award in Perceptual computing for both my works. That was an amazing experience.

I thought both the apps were much ahead of their time. The processing capabilities of the PCs back then were not good enough for supporting such graphics. But none the less, the failure was so demoralizing that I could not lift myself for days ( lie, in fact for months).

Just after the contest we had one more contest called Intel App Onnovation Challenge II and here too I was in the finals. Here I created Augmented world, which was a one heck of everything app, and Datafly. Both again was great learning experience with no so much in terms of results.

It was about the same time that I told myself that I am possibly not good with Apps and I promised myself to never try making another so called "app" in my life. I went back to teaching and doing projects for SMEs, students, offering simulation and prototyping services.

Then Intel came up with RealSense challenge in  2014. I told myself that I am not going to waste my time in it ever again. But my wife Moumita inspired me to give it one more go. This was about the same time I had my PhD course work papers. having not written the first attempt due to my psychological breakdown after consequent failures, I had the one last chance of making it in PhD exams. So I casually submitted some seven proposals and to my surprise six of them got selected for the finals. Shadow Artist was one of them.

This time I decided, that I would do it little differently. Rather than adding features, I spent time on reducing features and worked significantly on user experience. I submitted three apps in early demo submission and all three won early demo awards.

I am sure you will particularly like this automata driven Pixel app called Pixelife

A cool 3K USD was good motivation. I had my exams from 19th to 26th January 2015 and final submission of RealSense was just a week later. So packed off as much of development possible by jan 5th and gave myself a solid two weeks to slog with subjects. Thankfully I managed to clear all the course works in a single go. 

Back to the submission and I managed to submit four apps on the day of submission. I frankly wasn't expecting anything this time in terms of results. Because the motivation wan't simply there and expectations were none too!

To my surprise, Intel awarded me with a Trailblazer award for Shadow Artist. A cool 10k USD prize money was a bonus. A not so frustrating experience none the less.

And I knew that my stint as a product based company was almost over. There was no way to go to market and there was no continuation of the effect.I knew Intel had no plans to come up with any significant contests in any sooner.

At the same time,  Intel was promoting IoT and I really got hooked up with IoT. Did attend it's IoT Pune roadshow, and started working with Intel Edison. I made a cool project for my son, to control RC cars with the mobile. This project did not have any commercial aspects and was a hobby stuff. But one thing I saw was that my son was loving it and was playing with it. So, it was great satisfaction for me.

In the month of July ( 2015) one day I got contacted by an Intel developer manager by name Mr. Praveen Ramamurthy . He asked me "Intel would like to have Shadow Artist demo in it's RealSense showcase site. would you be interested?"
Hell, yes. Why shouldn't I be? I had worked on this project for last two years. So I started making the process much smoother. I had a real tester at my home. My four year old Son Rupansh, who would make some movies with it. But he would repeatedly tell me "baba, why this doesn't have colors?"

Here, I must share few things about Rupansh. He is kind of "maker". He loves making A, B.. With spoons and wooden pieces than reading them in book. He tries to improvise toys and make home, building, cars and all sorts of things.  As I manage to spend a lot of time with him, I slowly realize that traditional teaching will be a burden for him, and he would never be able to love studies, if he is not given things to make. Here is a photo of some of his creation! 

Shadow Artist taught me a lot. It taught me what an App should be like, the nitty gritty of UI design and user experience. But I would be dishonest if I do not mention the name of Adam Hill, a great game developer from UK who helped me to understand 'Design".

Back to Rupansh. His lack of interest in conventional studies gave me something to think about. I wanted to "do" something for him. I wanted to create a product for the first time for my son.He would ask many questions. Once you say, Apple starts with A. He would keep asking "why it starts with A, why it is red? why we don't play with it? Why we eat it". I would then not manage to go to B. 

I realized that when you create a product, that must solve a problem. And my biggest problem was my son's approach of learning. 

One of the other things he  loves is animation. So I thought, it may be a good thing, if I could teach him something with animation that also allowed him to build stuff.

First I  created a nice animation tool called Rainbow. It's primary objective was to help him build things with animation.

Why Rainbow? Because it had what Rupansh always wanted in ShadowArtist! Color.
Once he started playing with Rainbow, I realized kids love animation. They simply do. And when you give them some power of making, they love it even more.

I asked myself, can I give him something that could help him with his queries? Can I built an education app? But then there were plenty of education apps around. So first I started giving him some of the popular education apps like the ones from xlkids and ABCYA. He played for couple of days and then he would never turn to them. Within a week I realized that he wasn't interested in Rainbow too. His behaviour had a significant impact on my thought process. I realized, even learning is like toys for them. They really want new stuff. So rainbow had to be in a way to organize the knowledge and be more like toys.

I coded extensively for about two weeks and changed the whole App. I organized the animations as Chapters. So that he can learn one thing at a time.
As I saw him enjoying rainbow and learning with it, I got more motivated to build it as a better product. I wanted to take opinions from teachers. So I went to schools. I asked their approach of teaching and showed them the demo. They liked it. It gave me more purpose. I wanted it to be with kids and helping more and more kids and their parents.

One of the issues that I observed with Rainbow was that my son would complain that I can not win anything here. I observed the reason kids love games is that they can actually win something. So I created a quiz engine, game engine and whole lot of new thing. My idea was to create something that gives users an easy access to creating their own content for teaching their kids. Keeping the interface same for every type of learning was essential. 

I created :
1) Match the pair
2) Rough Quiz
3) Odd thing out
4) Sorting
5) Smart Chart
and many such activities.
I also realized that my son learns faster and better when I explain the meaning of something in Bengali ( our mother tongue). So I incorporated Localization support. Without changing UI, you can teach the kid in as many languages as you wish.

One of the great thing about this product is that entire logic is encoded into image file names. Just with different file name patterns one can create a learning chapter for kids. Today if a good teacher wants to share his knowledge with the world, he has to write an App. A primary teacher may not be good at creating an app as apps demands a different user UI and experience. But images? Anyone can create image and change file names. So I worked towards creating this engine that can handle images, decode the coded information into file names and do amazing stuff.

I kept pivoting Rainbow and wanted to release it in Dipawali ( 2015) which was few days back at the time of writing the blog.

I realized that everyone will not have a multi touch laptop and a Windows 10. There are many Windows 7 happy users. So I worked towards making the app reverse compatible with windows 7 and be as good a user experience as with touch. Finally after about 20 days of sleepless nights, no participation in regular business activities and a cut off family life,

I now had to create a product video which went with the theme of the product. All my earlier product videos were how to use them. But with Rainbow I tried to explain why and what and not how.
Here is a fun video of Rainbow.

With Rainbow, I am on a mission to make my own kid more smarter. I am a mission to solve my own pain and solution. But I want everyone to enjoy teaching their kid. So I have uploaded it for free. And, it will always remain free.

I wrote this blog to share my experience, but more so my journey to Rainbow. At the end of the day the image below is most satisfactory to any father and a developer.