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The first iPhone app my pal Dave and me put up on the App Store in 2008 was a tip calculator. The second was 20 Questions. The app provided prompts and a paddl

The first iPhone app my pal Dave and me put up on the App Store in 2008 was a tip calculator. The second was 20 Questions. The app provided prompts and a paddle to keep track of the guess count. It was a nice little app because it made iPhone social. We called the app iQ because the iProduct pattern was still in force and it was cool to camp the name space. We sold a bunch of copies of this game, but not nearly as many as we later made on Baby Names, the first baby name app in the App Store. It was the gold rush era, you could still come up with simple ideas and be the first to put it up on the App Store. https://web.archive.org/web/20090101213438/http://neutrinosllc.com/products/iphone/applications/iq/ https://web.archive.org/web/20090101213438/http://neutrinosl...

tzs 4y ago
I had a tip calculator back then but it was a dashboard widget for OS X rather than an iPhone app which I just made for personal use. It never occurred to me to try to make an iPhone app out of it, and I was actually looking for an idea just to have an excuse to try iPhone programming. I know there were already many tip calculators even back then, and they were maybe fine for tips in general like when you are at a restaurant, but I never saw one except for mine that worked well for the most important case: figuring out how much to tip the pizza delivery guy when you are paying in cash. Say your pizza comes to $16.23. If you usually tip 15% a normal tip calculator tells you that is $2.43 and the total would be $18.66. But who the heck is going to try to pay exactly $18.66 when their are standing in the open door with their home's precious heat leaking into the cold winter night? Same with handing him $20 and waiting for him to count out $1.34 in change. What most sane people are going to do is hand him $19 and say "keep the change", or hand him $20 and say "keep the change", or hand him $20 and say "give me $1 back". With my calculator you would enter the $16.23 price, and the calculator would give you a table something like this: Pay Tip $17 4.7% $18 10.9% $19 17.1% $20 23.2% $21 29.4% You can then easily combine that with your tipping level goal, tipping limit, and the mix of bills in your wallet to figure out what to do to leave an acceptable tip while still having a quick transaction.
- bredren 4y ago
  Could be your app still has legs, slotted into wherever a widget like this might make sense in the Apple ecosystem. IIRC, Amazon has a program allowing plugins for Alexa that your solution might be good for. I searched around for a screenshot and found one with an images and a description of our tipping app, Tiptotaler. It apparently got an A- rating from ilounge at the time, which is heartening still today. :) [1] App functionality description: > You can separately input food, drinks, and tax into three fields at the top of the screen, then note the number of drinkers and non-drinkers, set the tip amount, and then get totals for individual diners. [1] https://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/iphone-gems-all-30-tip-calculators-meal-splitters-reviewed https://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/iphone-g...

tzs 4y ago

I had a tip calculator back then but it was a dashboard widget for OS X rather than an iPhone app which I just made for personal use. It never occurred to me to try to make an iPhone app out of it, and I was actually looking for an idea just to have an excuse to try iPhone programming. I know there were already many tip calculators even back then, and they were maybe fine for tips in general like when you are at a restaurant, but I never saw one except for mine that worked well for the most important case: figuring out how much to tip the pizza delivery guy when you are paying in cash. Say your pizza comes to $16.23. If you usually tip 15% a normal tip calculator tells you that is $2.43 and the total would be $18.66. But who the heck is going to try to pay exactly $18.66 when their are standing in the open door with their home's precious heat leaking into the cold winter night? Same with handing him $20 and waiting for him to count out $1.34 in change. What most sane people are going to do is hand him $19 and say "keep the change", or hand him $20 and say "keep the change", or hand him $20 and say "give me $1 back". With my calculator you would enter the $16.23 price, and the calculator would give you a table something like this: Pay Tip $17 4.7% $18 10.9% $19 17.1% $20 23.2% $21 29.4% You can then easily combine that with your tipping level goal, tipping limit, and the mix of bills in your wallet to figure out what to do to leave an acceptable tip while still having a quick transaction.

bredren 4y ago
Could be your app still has legs, slotted into wherever a widget like this might make sense in the Apple ecosystem. IIRC, Amazon has a program allowing plugins for Alexa that your solution might be good for. I searched around for a screenshot and found one with an images and a description of our tipping app, Tiptotaler. It apparently got an A- rating from ilounge at the time, which is heartening still today. :) [1] App functionality description: > You can separately input food, drinks, and tax into three fields at the top of the screen, then note the number of drinkers and non-drinkers, set the tip amount, and then get totals for individual diners. [1] https://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/iphone-gems-all-30-tip-calculators-meal-splitters-reviewed https://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/iphone-g...