The Smilebooth iPad App – a deeper look

Sometimes people ask me what I’m working on, and I’ll say things like “a website for so and so”, or “a mobile app for blah, blah, blah” or I may whip out my phone and quickly show them something like the demo video below. But in reality, what people see is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much that happens to bring a project to fruition, and most of the time it’s stuff that’s really difficult to communicate, or just goes unnoticed all together. So in an effort to dig deeper and illuminate the craziness that is a “Blackpulp project”, here’s the story of how one of our recent projects, the Smilebooth iPad app, came to be:

A few months back, the Smilebooth crew came to us with a question, which went something like:

“Hey dudes, people are in love with smilebooth, and because people dig it so much, a ton of people are lining up to get their picture taken, and that line is long… is there anything we could do to move people through the booth as fast as possible?”

So, Blackpulp & Smilebooth got together in our “war room” to brainstorm, identify areas we could improve upon, and come up with our plan of attack.

In those initial meetings, we generalized the booth has two basic functions:

1. Take a person’s picture in a really fun way
2. Digitally share that picture with the person

From there, we concluded that function #2 doesn’t have to take place within the booth. In fact, if it didn’t happen in the booth, people would spend less time in the booth. Bingo!

We were onto something, but there was still a problem. In order to share a photo with someone, we needed to ask a person for their contact info which requires more time from that person, and some kind of interface to ask them for their info.

First, we considered modifying the existing software inside the booth. But that meant people would sit inside the booth longer, so we scratched that.

Then we wondered if there was a way to create a new interface outside the booth. That way people would get their picture taken, get out, and another person could hop in quicker.

One idea was to throw a new kiosk into the mix, which would be used by the person after taking their photo, and serve as the solution for function #2 (sharing the photo). At this kiosk, a person would select a picture they wanted and have it send to them. This meant the kiosk would need to be:

1. connected to the booth (wired or wireless?)
2. able to read photos (in real time) from a specified folder on a separate computer (the booth)
3. display those photos
4. allow one to be selected
5. allow the user various options for sharing (phone, email, facebook?)
6. send that photo to that person.

While this solution would’ve ultimately worked, the idea of adding this huge, clunky kiosk, ATM thing felt a little like something from the 90′s, not to mention the cost of the machine would be expensive. So back to the drawing board we went, but this time with the realization we needed some kind of computer to handle diplaying and sharing the photos. That’s where the iPad came in.

We started playing with the idea of using an iPad as the kiosk, and immediately we knew we had a winner. Not only could the iPad do everything we needed, it was smaller, cheaper, and a heck of a lot cooler.

From there, we had a ton of issues to solve, like network connectivity, filesystem access, whether or not the booth was connected to the internet, application performance, and interface design. But at this point, I’ll summarize. We went on to build the coolest iPad app ever. After a few more weeks of design, testing, and revision went by, blackpulp brought into being the very first Smilebooth iPad App. Here’s an early demo video I captured on my iPhone… sorry, but it’s all I could find… and the pictures loading into this thing are from my personal pictures folder.

And not only did we build an iPad app, we also constructed an entire web service for sending SMS, MMS, and email messages to support the app. Which by the way, if any of you readers have need for sending SMS/MMS on a project you’re working on, contact us, we’d be happy to share it with you.

All in all, this project was a blast, and on behalf of us @blackpulp, much love goes to the folks @smilebooth for letting (and paying) us to have fun, and geek out with the iPad on such a cool project & idea.

Check out Smilebooth @ http://smilebooth.com