This book would not be possible without a number of people. First, my beautiful wife, Stephanie, put up with me spending considerably more time in my man cave than normal. Without her support and understanding, this book would probably have been completed sometime in 2012. Similarly, I must thank my parents, family, and friends because even though I didn’t talk with many of them through the first half of 2010, they decided not to disown me.
Of course, I wouldn’t even have had the opportunity to alienate my loved ones without my editor, Brian Jepson, taking a chance on a first-time author. From my first interaction with him, Brian showed incredible interest in my ideas, super-fast responsiveness, and a desire to collaborate; that hasn’t stopped. To that extent, Brian reflects the demeanor of the entire O’Reilly team, who impressed me through every step of this process.
Along with Brian, my technical reviewers, Jeremy Olson of Skookum and Chris Brown of Millennial Media, wrestled with the earliest version of the text and provided extremely detailed and insightful criticisms. Jeremy and Chris were initially interviewed in the book, but continued to provide some of the more helpful feedback after their interviews were finished. They were asked to do a formal technical review of the book once the first draft was completed.
I’m extremely grateful to everyone who agreed to be interviewed, and their names are listed in each of their respective chapters. There are others, though, that were not interviewed but were always willing to chat about anything and everything related to apps and this book. These people included David Smith, Doug Kushin, and Trace Johnson. A special thanks also goes to Thanny Young for her amazing design work on a couple of my apps, Bert Bates for his editorial comments while working on his own book, Graham Dawson for his perspectives on App Store rankings, Kevin Dewalt and Brant Cooper for their reviews of the customer development principles described in Chapter 3, Cody Fink of MacStories for his thoughts on estimating development costs, and Eric Ries for his generous introductions.
O’Reilly’s Open Feedback Publishing System (OFPS) provided a great way for interested people to provide comments on the in-progress draft. I’m thrilled that many took the time to comment, but am especially indebted to Sean Mountcastle and Yixin Qiu for the amount of time they spent reviewing the book, both in OFPS and, later, with me directly.
Finally, this book represents a culmination of many, many years of personal and professional encouragement and love. These acknowledgments would be unbearably long if I expressed my appreciation to everyone who has been a part of this journey. To those I have not mentioned, and you know who you are, thank you.