Maker.

I spent seven years building AskNicely. Seven years of hiring engineers, arguing about architecture, shipping features, fixing bugs at 2am, and slowly assembling the kind of product that takes real time to build. We raised over $15 million. We grew the team past 100 people. We built something genuinely useful.

Last month I watched someone rebuild the core of it in three weeks using Claude and Cursor.

I'm not exaggerating. The fundamental functionality — collecting NPS scores, routing feedback, generating reports — is not magic anymore. The AI didn't just write the code. It understood the problem domain. It made reasonable architectural decisions. It even wrote decent tests.

This is the new reality. Software is heading to zero.

I thought I would be the last one replaced in the ai revolution. everyone needs coders?

this is important code

The moat that wasn't

For twenty years, the SaaS playbook has been: pick a problem, spend two years building a solution, raise money, hire salespeople, build more features, raise more money, and eventually the sheer weight of your codebase becomes your competitive advantage. Nobody can catch up because you've got three years of code and institutional knowledge baked in.

That moat just evaporated.

When any competent developer with an AI pair programmer can rebuild your core product in weeks instead of years, "we built it first" stops being an advantage. It becomes a liability. You've got legacy code, technical debt, and a burn rate. Your competitor has a fresh codebase and no overhead.

I've seen this coming since I started building GoodSign. The eSigning space has massive incumbents — DocuSign, Adobe Sign, HelloSign. They've spent hundreds of millions on their platforms. GoodSign is me, working from a shed in Auckland, and I can offer a competitive product at pay-per-use pricing because the cost of building software has collapsed.

What actually matters now

If the software itself isn't the moat, what is? I've been thinking about this a lot, and I keep coming back to the same list:

Distribution. Who can get their product in front of the right people? This has always mattered, but now it's the whole game. Building the thing is the easy part. Getting anyone to care is the hard part.

Trust. In a world where anyone can spin up a SaaS product overnight, customers need to trust that you'll be around next year. That your data handling is solid. That you actually care about the problem. Trust takes time to build and can't be cloned with AI.

Taste. This is the subtle one. AI can build functional software. It can even build attractive software. But it can't make the thousand tiny decisions that add up to a product people love. The opinionated choices about what to leave out. The specific way an interaction feels. Taste is human, and it compounds.

Relationships. Your customers know you. They've talked to you. They trust you specifically. No AI-generated clone can replicate the fact that you've been solving their problems for years and they have your phone number.

The opportunity

Here's the thing that gets lost in all the doom and gloom: this is the best time in history to be a builder.

The cost of building software has never been lower. The tools have never been better. A solo founder in 2026 can ship what would have taken a funded team in 2020. I'm living proof of this — I'm building HeyGopher (invoicing, projects, time tracking) essentially solo, and it would have been impossible five years ago.

The democratisation of software creation means more competition, yes. But it also means you can try more ideas, faster, cheaper. You can build something, put it in front of people, and find out if it matters — all in the time it used to take to write a product spec.

What I'd tell founders

Stop trying to build moats out of code. Your code is the least defensible thing you own.

Instead: ship fast, talk to customers obsessively, build in public, be transparent, and develop taste. Be the person your customers trust, not just the product they use.

The founders who understand this are going to do extraordinarily well. The ones who think their proprietary codebase will protect them are going to get a brutal education.

Software is heading to zero. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you can start building the things that actually matter.

I have a shed in Auckland. Not a fancy "studio" or a "creative space" — a shed. It's where I build things now.

Before the shed, I was CTO of AskNicely. We raised over $15 million from investors like Blackbird and Nexus Venture Partners. We grew past 100 people. We had offices, stand-ups, quarterly planning, board meetings, and all the infrastructure that comes with a venture-backed company.

Now I work from a shed, and I've never been more productive in my life.

The choice

Going from a company of 100+ to a company of one sounds like a step backward. People assume something went wrong. That I burned out, failed, or retreated.

The truth is simpler: I chose this.

I chose it because the economics of building have fundamentally changed. What required a team of twenty in 2019 now requires one person and the right tools. AI hasn't just made coding faster — it's collapsed entire job functions. I can design, build, deploy, support, and market a product without a single hire. Not theoretically. I'm actually doing it.

GoodSign is live, processing real payments, planting real trees. HeyGopher is in beta with real users. Both built from the shed.

What I don't miss

I don't miss board meetings. Hours spent preparing decks to justify decisions to people who aren't in the codebase.

I don't miss fundraising. Months of your life spent pitching instead of building, optimising for metrics that impress investors instead of metrics that help customers.

I don't miss the coordination tax. When you have 100 people, an astonishing amount of energy goes into making sure everyone is aligned, informed, and unblocked. That energy isn't building anything. It's overhead.

I don't miss enterprise sales cycles. Six months to close a deal. Legal review. Security questionnaires. Procurement committees. I'd rather build something useful and charge a fair price for it.

What the shed gives me

Speed. I can go from idea to deployed feature in hours, not sprints. There's no ticket to file, no PR review to wait for, no deployment window. I think it, I build it, I ship it.

Honesty. When it's just you, there's nowhere to hide. The product is either good or it isn't. The revenue is either growing or it isn't. No vanity metrics, no OKR theatre.

Freedom. I work on what matters. Not what a roadmap committee decided three months ago. Not what the biggest customer is screaming about. What I believe is the right thing to build next.

Focus. No Slack channels with hundreds of unread messages. No "quick sync" meetings. No context switching between management and making. Just making.

The AI factor

I want to be clear: the shed only works because of the current moment in AI tools. Five years ago, a solo founder couldn't realistically build, maintain, and scale multiple products. The coding would have consumed all your time, leaving nothing for design, marketing, support, or thinking.

Now I pair program with AI all day. I describe what I want, we build it together, and I ship it. The AI handles the boilerplate, the research, the edge cases I'd forget. I handle the taste, the decisions, the customer empathy, the vision.

It's the most powerful combination I've experienced in twenty years of building software. One person with strong opinions and good AI tools can outship a team that's still doing sprint planning.

The shed as a statement

Working from a shed isn't about austerity. It's a statement about what matters.

What matters is the work. The thing you ship. The customer you help. The problem you solve. Not the office, not the headcount, not the logo on a glass door.

The shed says: I don't need permission. I don't need funding. I don't need a team of fifty. I just need a good internet connection, the right tools, and the stubbornness to keep shipping.

If you're a builder and you're thinking about going small — do it. Right now. The tools have never been better. The overhead has never been lower. And the shed has never been more powerful.

Open your bank statement. Count the subscriptions. Go on, I'll wait.

How many did you find? Ten? Twenty? That gym you haven't been to since March? The project management tool your team tried for a week? The premium tier of something you only use the free features of?

This is the world SaaS built. And people are done with it.

The subscription trap

The subscription model was never designed for customers. It was designed for investors. Recurring revenue is the holy grail of SaaS metrics — predictable, compounding, and it makes your ARR chart go up and to the right. VCs love it. CFOs love it. Growth teams love it.

You know who doesn't love it? The person paying $30/month for software they used twice this quarter.

I lived inside this model at AskNicely. I understand why it exists. I understand the unit economics, the LTV calculations, the churn analysis. I'm not naive about why subscriptions became the default.

But just because something is good for the business doesn't mean it's right. And I think the subscription model has crossed from "reasonable business model" to "extractive by default."

Why GoodSign is pay-per-use

When I built GoodSign, I made a deliberate choice: no subscriptions. You pay per document you send for signing. Use it once a month, pay for one document. Use it a thousand times, pay for a thousand. Don't use it at all? Pay nothing.

The reactions I got were telling.

Investors and SaaS people: "But what about your MRR? How do you forecast? How do you show growth?"

Actual customers: "Wait, really? I just pay for what I use? That's it?"

Yes. That's it.

Pay-per-use does something subscriptions never can: it perfectly aligns your incentives with your customer's. You only make money when they get value. If your product is so bad they stop using it, you stop getting paid. There's no "well, they're still subscribed so technically they're a customer" fiction.

Subscription fatigue is real

This isn't just me being contrarian. The market is telling us something.

People are cancelling streaming services they barely watch. They're auditing their app subscriptions quarterly. "Subscription fatigue" isn't a buzzword — it's a lived experience for anyone with a credit card.

Every subscription is a tiny recurring bet that you'll use this thing enough to justify the cost. Most of the time, you lose that bet. The company knows it. That's why they make cancellation flows six steps long.

The SaaS industry has spent two decades training customers to accept this, and customers are finally pushing back. When I tell people GoodSign charges per use with no subscription, the relief on their faces is genuine. They're not just buying a product — they're escaping a model they've grown to resent.

The objections

"But recurring revenue is more predictable." Sure. But predictable for whom? Your revenue is predictable because your customer is locked in whether they're getting value or not. That's not a feature. That's a bug.

"But pay-per-use makes revenue lumpy." Yes. And that lumpiness is information. It tells you exactly how much value you're delivering, in real time. If revenue drops, it's because customers are getting less value. That's a signal you want, not one you want to smooth over with subscriptions.

"But the economics don't work." They work fine. They just require you to build something people actually want to use, regularly, because it's good. I know — terrifying.

The future is usage-based

Look at the direction infrastructure is moving. AWS charges per compute second. Stripe charges per transaction. Twilio charges per message. The infrastructure layer figured this out years ago.

It's time the application layer caught up.

I think we'll look back on the era of "pay us $49/month whether you use it or not" the same way we look back on phone contracts with 500-minute limits. An artifact of a time when the industry could get away with misaligned incentives.

Build something good enough that people want to use it. Charge them when they do. Give them the dignity of not paying when they don't.

It's not complicated. We just made it complicated because the alternative was more profitable. For us.

Last Tuesday I 3D printed a custom mount for a sensor, soldered it into a circuit board I'd designed, wrote the firmware to read the data, and built a web dashboard to display it. All before lunch.

That's not a flex. It's a workflow. And it's the most satisfying way I know to work.

The divide that shouldn't exist

Somewhere along the way, tech people decided that the physical world was beneath them. Real builders work in code. Hardware is messy, slow, expensive. Atoms are for people who couldn't learn to program.

This has always been wrong, but it's especially wrong now.

The most interesting things being built today live at the intersection of physical and digital. IoT, robotics, smart infrastructure, wearables, manufacturing automation — all of it requires people who are comfortable in both worlds. And there aren't enough of those people because the industry spent twenty years telling smart builders to stay in their browser.

What atoms teach you

Working with physical materials changes how you think. Here's what I mean.

Constraints are real. In software, you can abstract away almost anything. Don't like the architecture? Refactor. Wrong database? Migrate. In the physical world, steel has a tensile strength. Plastic has a melting point. Circuit traces have resistance. You can't refactor physics. Learning to work within immovable constraints makes you a better designer in every medium.

Feedback is immediate. When I 3D print a part and it doesn't fit, I know in minutes. Not after a sprint review. Not after user testing. Right now. The bracket either clips in or it doesn't. That tight feedback loop recalibrates your intuition in ways that purely digital work can't.

Waste is visible. A bad software decision hides in technical debt that nobody sees for months. A bad physical design is a pile of failed prints on your desk. You learn to think before you build because material and time are tangible costs. That discipline carries back into how you write code.

Satisfaction is visceral. There's a specific feeling when a 3D-printed enclosure clicks together perfectly, or when an LED lights up on a board you designed and soldered yourself. It's different from deploying code. More grounded. More real. And after twenty years of building things that only exist on screens, I need that feeling to stay sane.

The cross-pollination

Here's what I've found: skills from physical making improve my software, and skills from software improve my physical making.

Designing PCBs taught me about systems thinking in a way that enterprise architecture diagrams never could. Every trace on a board is a real tradeoff between space, power, heat, and interference. That thinking maps directly onto software system design.

Software taught me about iteration speed. My 3D printing workflow is heavily influenced by agile thinking — print fast, test fast, learn fast. I've seen hardware people spend months perfecting a design before making a single prototype. That's waterfall, and it's just as broken in atoms as it is in bits.

Firmware sits right in the middle. It's code, but it runs on physical hardware with real timing constraints and limited resources. Writing firmware makes you a better programmer because you can't be lazy. There's no garbage collector. There's no "just spin up another instance." You learn to be precise.

The maker advantage

I run the Auckland Web Meetup. I talk to a lot of developers. The ones who have maker hobbies — woodworking, electronics, 3D printing, machining — are almost always the best software engineers too. It's not a coincidence.

Making things with your hands develops a kind of intuition that's hard to acquire any other way. An understanding of materials, tolerances, assembly, and the gap between a design and reality. You can't get that from a tutorial.

The maker movement gets dismissed as a hobby. People building things on their workbenches on weekends, playing with expensive toys. I think that's completely backward. In an era where AI can write most of the code, the people who can also design a physical product, prototype it, test it, and iterate on it have a massive advantage.

Software is getting commoditised. The ability to bridge atoms and bits is not.

Get your hands dirty

If you're a software person who has never soldered a wire, printed a part, or wired a circuit — start. Not because it's fun (though it is). Because it will make you better at everything you already do.

Buy a cheap 3D printer. Get an Arduino starter kit. Design something, print it, break it, fix it. Feel the difference between a design that works on screen and one that works in your hand.

The future belongs to builders who are fluent in both worlds. The tools have never been cheaper, the materials never more accessible, and the intersection of atoms and bits has never been more valuable.

Get your hands dirty. Your code will thank you.

GoodSign's revenue, customer count, costs, and trees planted are public. Anyone can see them. Competitors, customers, random people on the internet. All of it, right there.

People think I'm crazy. I think it's the sanest decision I've made.

The transparency test

Here's the mental model: before I make any business decision, I ask myself one question. "Would I be comfortable if everyone could see this?"

Pricing change? If I'd be embarrassed for customers to see the margin, the margin is wrong. Business expense? If I wouldn't want it on a public dashboard, I probably shouldn't be spending it. Product decision? If I can't explain it transparently, it's probably not the right call.

This single filter has saved me from more bad decisions than any framework, advisor, or board meeting ever did.

Why companies hide

Most companies hide their numbers because they're afraid. Afraid competitors will undercut them. Afraid customers will demand lower prices. Afraid employees at other companies will see their salaries. Afraid of being judged.

These fears aren't irrational. But they're overblown. And the cost of hiding is higher than the cost of showing.

When you hide your numbers, you lose the accountability that comes with exposure. You can tell yourself stories about why things are fine. Revenue is down but it's seasonal. Costs are high but it's an investment. Churn is up but it's a temporary blip.

When your numbers are public, you can't hide from reality. And reality is the only thing that helps you get better.

What transparency actually does

It builds trust you can't fake. Anyone can say "we're an honest company." Very few companies will prove it by publishing their financials. When a potential GoodSign customer sees our actual numbers, they know exactly what kind of business they're dealing with. That trust converts better than any sales deck.

It attracts the right customers. People who value transparency tend to be good customers. They're straightforward about what they need. They give honest feedback. They pay their bills. The transparency acts as a filter — it attracts people who share your values and naturally repels those who don't.

It forces good decisions. I've caught myself about to make a decision and stopping because I imagined it on the public dashboard. That sounds small. It's not. Those moments add up to a fundamentally different kind of company. One that optimises for being right, not for looking right.

It creates content for free. Our transparency page is one of our most-visited pages. People share it. They write about it. "Look at this company that shares everything" is inherently interesting and shareable. I didn't build it as a marketing strategy, but it works as one.

The fears that didn't materialise

When I launched with public numbers, I braced for the worst. Here's what actually happened.

Competitors seeing our revenue? Nobody undercut us. Turns out, seeing that a small eSigning company in New Zealand makes a modest but growing amount of money isn't particularly useful intelligence. Our competitors have their own problems.

Customers demanding lower prices? The opposite. When people see your real costs and your commitment to donating 20% to trees, they respect the pricing. Transparency creates understanding, not leverage.

Being judged for small numbers? Early on, our revenue was genuinely tiny. I was tempted to hide it until it looked more impressive. I'm glad I didn't. People root for transparent companies. They watched our numbers grow and felt invested in the journey. Starting small and public is better than starting hidden and big.

How to do it

If you're thinking about radical transparency for your business, here's what I'd say: just start.

You don't need a perfect dashboard. You don't need to share everything on day one. Pick the numbers that matter — revenue, customers, costs — and make them public. See how it feels. See how people respond.

The first time you publish a real number, you'll feel exposed. By the third month, you'll feel liberated. By the sixth month, you won't understand why anyone operates any other way.

Transparency isn't a marketing tactic. It's an operating system. And once you install it, everything else gets a little bit easier, a little bit more honest, and a lot more trustworthy.

Default to open. You'll be surprised how few people exploit it and how many people respect it.

On July 10, 2008, the Apple App Store launched with roughly 500 apps. Mine was one of them.

It was a mortgage calculator. Nothing groundbreaking. But I'd been ready. I'd been waiting for this moment since I first got my hands on an iPhone in 2007 — before Apple even sold them in New Zealand. I was one of the first people in the country to jailbreak one, poking around the OS, figuring out how it worked, writing code for a device that wasn't supposed to run third-party software.

When Apple announced the SDK and the App Store, I knew exactly what to do. I'd been building for the web since the early days. This was the same feeling — a new platform, wide open, and nobody had figured out the rules yet.

The 500-app moment

There's a specific window in every platform's life that I think of as the 500-app moment. It's the period where the platform exists, it works, there are real users, but almost nobody is building for it yet. The ratio of opportunity to competition is absurd.

The App Store in July 2008 was that moment. Five hundred apps for millions of iPhone users. If you shipped anything halfway decent, people found it. The discovery problem that dominates today's App Store simply didn't exist. You could launch a mortgage calculator and get thousands of downloads because there were three of them.

I built Bluespark around this moment. iOS development became my focus from that first day. Over the years I built dozens of apps, but the early ones are the ones that taught me the most.

The Heart Monitor

My best-selling app was a heart rate monitor. Simple concept — use the iPhone's camera and flash to detect your pulse through your fingertip. The technology was straightforward, but the timing was perfect. People were fascinated by what their phones could do. A phone that could read your heartbeat felt like science fiction.

The Heart Monitor taught me something crucial about products: simplicity wins during platform transitions. When everything is new, people don't want complex tools. They want something that makes them say "wow, I can't believe my phone can do this." One feature, done well, demonstrated clearly.

I've carried this lesson into everything I've built since. GoodSign does one thing — eSigning — and strips away everything that doesn't serve that. HeyGopher is an all-in-one tool, but each piece is deliberately simple. Complexity is easy. Simplicity is the hard part.

Platform timing

Being early on the App Store taught me to recognise platform shifts. You develop a feel for it. The technology exists. The infrastructure is being built. The big players are still sceptical or moving slowly. And there's a brief window where small, fast builders have an enormous advantage.

I saw it with the App Store in 2008. I saw it with the web before that. I saw it with cloud infrastructure and SaaS. Each time, the pattern was the same: the early movers who shipped quickly and iterated captured outsized value compared to their effort.

And I'm seeing it right now with AI.

We're in a 500-app moment again

The AI platform shift happening right now feels exactly like July 2008. The infrastructure exists. The tools work. Real users are there. But most people are still watching from the sidelines, waiting for things to stabilise, waiting for someone else to figure it out first.

This is a mistake. The 500-app moment doesn't wait. By the time the platform feels "ready" and "safe," the window is closed. The App Store went from 500 apps to 500,000 in a few years. Discovery went from trivial to nearly impossible. The economics shifted entirely.

AI tools today are where the App Store was in 2008. The people building now — shipping real products, learning the constraints, understanding the capabilities — will have a massive head start when the ecosystem matures. The people waiting will arrive to a crowded market where all the obvious opportunities are taken.

What I'd tell builders

If you're a developer, a maker, a builder of any kind — ship something now. Not next quarter. Not when the tools are better. Now.

It doesn't have to be perfect. My mortgage calculator wasn't perfect. It was a mortgage calculator. But it was there on day one, and that taught me more about the platform than any amount of reading or planning would have.

The best time to learn a new platform is when it's still rough, still changing, still full of gaps. You build intuition that no tutorial can give you. You understand the constraints because you've hit them personally. You develop taste for what works on this platform, not what worked on the last one.

We're in a 500-app moment. History says these don't last long. If you're going to build, build now.

GoodSign donates 20% of revenue to planting trees. Not 20% of profit. Revenue. Before salaries, before costs, before anything. It comes off the top.

The goal is one million trees.

When I tell other founders this, they do quick mental math and their eyes widen. Twenty percent of revenue is not a rounding error. It's not a feel-good line item that disappears when times get tough. It's a real constraint that shapes every decision in the business.

That's exactly the point.

Why revenue, not profit

This is the part that makes accountants twitch. Every business textbook says you donate from profit, because profit is what's left after you've covered your costs. Donating from revenue means the money goes to trees before it goes to anything else.

I chose revenue deliberately.

Profit is too easy to manipulate. You can always find a way to reduce profit — higher salaries, more expenses, reinvestment, creative accounting. A company donating 10% of profit can engineer that number down to almost nothing while looking responsible.

Revenue is honest. A document gets signed, money comes in, 20% goes to trees. No loopholes. No creative interpretation. The trees come first.

This creates a very specific kind of discipline. Every feature I build, every pricing decision I make, every cost I take on has to work within the constraint that a fifth of the top line is already spoken for. It means I can't be sloppy. I can't over-hire. I can't subsidise growth with unsustainable spending. The trees are a forcing function for a lean, honest business.

The constraint that makes you better

People assume that giving away 20% of revenue is a handicap. It is, in the way that good constraints are.

Sonnets have fourteen lines. That constraint doesn't make them worse than free verse — it makes the good ones better. The constraint forces creativity, economy, precision.

GoodSign's 20% commitment works the same way. Because I can't waste 20% of revenue on bloated infrastructure or unnecessary features, every dollar has to count. The product is lean because it has to be. The pricing is fair because it has to be. The business runs efficiently because there's simply no room for it not to.

I genuinely believe GoodSign is a better business because of the 20% commitment, not in spite of it. The constraint removed the option of being lazy, and what's left is a business I'm proud of.

Not corporate greenwashing

I need to be clear about what this is not. This is not a CSR initiative designed by a marketing team. It's not a carbon offset scheme to make up for a private jet. It's not a tax optimization strategy with a green wrapper.

It's a commitment I made on day one, before there was any revenue, because I wanted to build a business that did something tangible with its existence beyond making money.

The trees are real. We partner with organisations that plant native trees in New Zealand and globally. Every tree is tracked. The numbers are on our public dashboard — right next to our revenue and customer count, because transparency means all of it, not just the convenient parts.

Every document signed on GoodSign directly funds reforestation. That connection is real, traceable, and public. It's not buried in an annual report that nobody reads. It's on the homepage.

Pick a number that scares you

Here's my advice to anyone thinking about building purpose into their business: pick a number that scares you.

Five percent is comfortable. Most people won't notice it in their P&L. It's the business equivalent of rounding down at a tip — technically generous, practically painless.

Twenty percent is not comfortable. It changes how you operate. It forces trade-offs. It makes you think differently about growth, spending, and value. And that discomfort is the signal that you're actually doing something meaningful.

If your purpose commitment doesn't constrain you, it's decoration. It's a logo on your website and a line in your investor deck. Real commitment changes behaviour. It should be visible in your decisions, not just your marketing.

The long game

We're not at a million trees yet. Not even close. But every month the number grows. Every document signed adds to it. And because the commitment is 20% of revenue, the trees scale with the business. If GoodSign does well, the forest does well. The incentives are aligned.

I think about this a lot. There's a version of GoodSign that's more profitable. One where that 20% goes to my bank account instead of into the ground. But there's no version of GoodSign that I'd be prouder of.

When I'm old and looking back on what I built, I don't think I'll care much about revenue charts. I think I'll care that there's a forest somewhere that exists because people signed documents on a platform I made.

A million trees. We'll get there. One signed document at a time.

Heart Monitor

iPhone Heart Monitor can be used to quickly find your heart rate. It uses the inbuilt microphone on your iPhone 3G or headphone microphone to listen to and detect your heart beat.

It can be used to find your resting heart rate (a good measure of fitness), track how your heart rate changes and check your heart rate immediately after training.

Because Heart Monitor uses sound to detect heart rates, you can use the iPhone 3G directly over your heart or directly on the pulse in your neck or wrist. Heart Monitor works best in quiet areas.

Technologies: OpenAL, Beat Detection, Core Graphics, Quartz

Octopus Oracle

The Octopus Oracle is based on Paul the Octopus who successfully picked 8 winning teams from 8 matches in the Euro World Cup 2010.

This app was created by copying nearly the entire contents of a very popular online blog, then converting the HTML contents to text using Ruby. The next step was to do a word frequency analysis from all this data and store that in a SQLite database.

Glenn Jones created the application graphics and some of the other ideas that went into this application.

Technologies: SQLite, Core Animation, AdMob + iAD, Illustrator

BNZ Term Investment Calculator

The BNZ Term Investment Calculator iPhone App features a highly polished slider for data entry and adjustment. The slider can be flicked which will cause it to fly by, grabbed to stop it or slowly dragged for accurate data entry.

The Term Investment Calc is one of two applications developed for the BNZ by Bluespark.

Technologies: Custom UI, OpenAL, Photoshop

Tweetr

Tweetr is designed to optimize your exposure of very important Tweets. Tweetr has many powerful features for composing rich tweets then allows you to set a time in the future to publish this tweet.

Tweetr stores all tweets online allowing multiple users to compose tweets which can then be edited by other team members. Tweetr is powered by Google App Engine allowing it to infinitely scale and handle very large traffic loads.

Technologies: MapKit, WebKit, CoreLocation, Twitter API, Python, Google App Engine

Phone Finda

Phone Finda helps you find your iPhone/iPad when you mis-place it. Using a dashboard widget or the Mac Menu Bar app, you can quickly send a very loud sonar sound to your iPhone to reveal its location (sometimes still in your pocket).

The app is built around a custom Apple Push Notification server that can send messages to your lost device for free, which can be either a message, sound or badge alert. The system uses MongoDB for speed and scalability, hosted on Rack Space hardware.

Technologies: Apple Push Notifications, Three20 Framework, MongoDB, Rack Space, PHP

Juice King

Juice King is a game developed between Bluespark and Glennz. It is based around the concept of mixing different colours (i.e. Fruit) to match the desired colour of the recipe.

The game starts with fruit that are red, green and blue which are the colour primaries used for electronic screens. Then on the second level it uses primaries used in painting — blue, red and yellow. Finally the last level is to mix cyan, yellow, magenta and black to produce the required colour.

Technologies: Core Animation, GarageBand, OpenAL, AdMob + iAD, Illustrator

Mini Mortgage Manager

Use Mini Mortgage Manager to quickly find out how much your home loan or finance is going to cost in the short term and during the lifetime of the loan. All the important information is displayed on one screen and the numbers can be adjusted using the simple sliders or by just typing the desired amounts in.

Mini Mortgages has been tested world wide and even works in Canada where mortgages are calculated semi annually. You can view your mortgage or loan amortization table with a single tap, then email this data to yourself and copy and paste into Excel or Numbers for further analysis.

Technologies: Email Export, Illustrator, Photoshop

Incognito 2

Incognito is based on the super powerful WebKit browser engine used in Safari. Incognito is a browser that takes user privacy very seriously — it prevents the browser from saving any history about sites visited. Furthermore it also prevents cookies from being saved and can find and delete Flash Cookies created when using Incognito.

Other features include the ability to prevent certain groups of files from being downloaded, including Flash files, image files and/or Javascript files. Incognito will also prevent HTML5 databases from being created on your hard drive.

Technologies: WebKit, Cookie Management, Flash Cookie, Privacy, Icon Design

Kiosk Monster

Kiosk Monster is a powerful tool that can turn any Mac into a "Kiosk-Browser" so users cannot exit the app and optionally can be locked to just your website.

One of the very cool features of Kiosk Monster is that it allows you to completely copy a website for use offline — this works for nearly all forms of media including simple flash animations. Once a site has been copied there are two major advantages: data costs are now zero, and the site loads instantly because there is no waiting for each page to be downloaded.

Technologies: WebKit, Backup, Kiosk

Winmail Extractor

Winmail Extractor can open those super pesky winmail.dat files that appear in emails from certain friends. These winmail files contain attachments from the sender and if you are not using Microsoft Outlook it is very hard to view the content of these files.

With Winmail Extractor you can now easily open these files simply by double clicking on the attachments, easily view these files with QuickLook and save any file by dragging out of the Winmail Extractor window.

Technologies: Winmail.dat, QuickLook, MultiThreading, Privacy

KLCK

KLCK is the place to buy and sell electronics online. It makes selling items online fun again by removing anonymous user names and publishing all details of how to contact the seller. Serious buyers can simply call the seller and sort all questions out over the phone, or email the seller directly.

Technologies: PHP, MySQL, RedBeanPHP, Smarty

Chair Bro

Chair Bro is the place to buy and sell furniture online. It has been designed so that it is very clickable, where users can quickly click around the site to find content and information easily. The site is trying to fill the void where there are so many furniture shops online in New Zealand but they are very hard to find and the quality of each site varies immensely. The images on Chair Bro are large and very detailed, allowing the person browsing the site to instantly see more images by simply scrolling down the page.

Technologies: PHP, MySQL, RedBeanPHP, Smarty

Mix Foundation

Mix Foundation is New Zealand's specialist DJ store both online and with a retail unit in High Street, Auckland. The scope of this project was to bring the website into the 2011's since commissioning the site 6 years ago. The new site features product images 400% larger, a new centred layout, larger banners and a more refined navigation with a site map in the footer. The checkout system now uses the industry standard DPS payment system and also features a new shipping system that can consolidate orders into packages that reduces the overall shipping cost.

Bluespark worked with upgrading the existing site and HTML and admin, saving the customer from having to have the site rebuilt which would have been cost prohibitive.

Technologies: PHP, jQuery, e-commerce, DPS

Inov-8 Solemate

Inov-8 Solemate was developed for Inov-8 running New Zealand. Inov-8 sells cutting edge technical running shoes for off-road and trail.

The Solemate website helps guarantee that a runner is selecting the right type of shoe for their body weight, foot shape and running terrain. This powerful recommendation tool is run on Google App Engine which makes it fast and scalable. It also features a carefully crafted logic engine that can make complicated recommendations yet is very easy to manage.

Technologies: Google App Engine, Bluespark Logic Engine, Recommendation Tool

Under The Mountain

Under The Mountain is a Facebook app that was used to promote the New Zealand film of the same name.

The key ingredient of this app allowed users to use their webcam or any photo that would be converted into the Wilberforce character from the film. The application allowed the user to align this photo then applied an ageing treatment to this image to make the photo appear a lot older.

When the user was done they could click a button to quickly save and share this photo to their wall.

Technologies: Facebook API, Post to Wall, WebCam, Amazon S3, Flash AS3, PHP, SQLite

Web09 Auckland

Web09 Auckland is a web conference that flew in 9 international speakers to present on a huge range of subjects relating to web development and design.

The event was run by Bluespark and held at the Langham hotel in Auckland over 2 days and also had 2 days of hands on workshops. An incredible amount of work and energy went into making this event a massive success.

Technologies: Conference, PHP, H2O Templates, E-Commerce, PayPal, Ticketing

Phone Finda Website

The Phone Finda website is used to promote the iPhone app of the same name. Users can download the Mac Phone Finda client, the dashboard widget and for PC users they can login to the site to find their iPhone.

Phone Finda runs on RackSpace hardware which is rock solid and provides the ability to scale if required with either hard drive space or processing power.

Technologies: Push Notifications, PHP, MongoDB, User Admin, Mac App, Dashboard Widget

Olay For You

Olay For You started in 2008 together with Talk Me Into It to build the site and tools around Olay For You. This site has been designed to provide women with a tailored routine for their daily skin care needs.

The site has been so successful that it has been translated into Russian, Spanish, French and British English. Olay have also used this tool to create for their body care products.

Behind the scenes is a custom asset management tool used to manage and update all the assets and a customer service tool for telephone operators to assist Olay customers.

Technologies: ActionScript 2.0, Google App Engine, Bluespark Logic Engine, Flash, Flex

Tweetr Website

Tweetr is the HTML website for the iPhone app of the same name, which is used to send Twitter messages at some point in the future.

Technologies: HTML, Javascript, Glyphish

Garage Sale for Christchurch

Garage Sale for Christchurch was launched only a few days after the second major earthquake in Christchurch. The idea was pretty simple — get friends to list some of their un-wanted goods on Trade Me then donate the proceeds of the sale to the NZ Red Cross. Trade Me also agreed to refund any fees for proceeds donated with a proof of receipt.

This application used Trade Me's new OAuth API to help users select which auction would be listed on the Garage Sale website.

Technologies: Google App Engine, Python, Facebook Like, TradeMe OAuth API