I just wanted to make a quick announcement that the iPhone app I've been building at work just released a major update today. It's in the App Store and it's free. Check it out.
Working on this release was a ton of fun. We cleaned up a good bit of the mess from the earlier version and added some cool new features. What was even more fun was removing functionality that either didn't work well or wasn't obvious to the user. My god, there is nothing I love as much as deleting code. I don't know why I don't look for more opportunities to do this. Not only is it personally and emotionally liberating, it's often the "right" thing to do.
The features we pulled out really had no business being in there in the first place. Of course, we didn't know that until we released the first version, got feedback from folks and spent some time outside of the development process. Y'know, hindsight, 20/20, blah blah blah.
I think it is exceedingly difficult to get perspective on your work while you're creating it. There's just too much personal investment in the activity, especially if you get any sort of "flow" going. Creative types love "flow" and hate giving it up for any reason, even if the work suffers as a result. I think that's fine, but that's why there's a separate process known as "editing". The trick, of course, is to balance satisfying your possibly-self-indulgent creative urges with creating something of value.
Anyway, that's enough of my philosophical rambling. We also put together a little brochure site at http://evriverse.evri.com, including a screencast with music composed by yours truly. That process was a whitepaper-grade case study in "stuff you can do with iLife". I grabbed all the footage using iShow U, did all the music in Garage Band (on the bus using the computer keyboard no less) and glued it all together in iMovie. Super simple, super fun.
All in all I'm pretty pleased with the result. It's free, so check it out and let me (or Evri) know what you think.