Happy Birthday Magic Window!

Celebrating ten years of virtual views.

This week we celebrate Magic Window’s 10th birthday. It is amazing that the product continues to not only exist but thrive given how much technology has changed over the past decade. Here we take a moment to reflect on the origin of the Magic Window product line.

Before getting into that, here are some party favors:

• Free Zoom Backgrounds - A new set of free background videos for video conferencing.

• Naturescapes for Apple TV - Free ($2.99 value) to first 50 who redeem.

Please note when you REDEEM a free Apple TV app the App Store will launch on your device to complete the process. Once this happens, the app will be available to install free in the App Store on your Apple TV. Depending on your settings it may automatically install. The REDEEM process works best on iPhone and iPad.

The origin of Magic Window - how it all began.

The App Store Opening

Jetson founder Josh Michaels began development on apps for the iPhone in 2008 as soon as Apple announced the iPhone SDK. Josh had been enthusiastic about mobile apps for a long time and saw the potential that apps could bring to the iPhone. While ubiquitous now, the general population didn’t get excited about apps until 2011-2012.

In addition to wanting to build apps, Josh wanted independence. He observed the emergence of developers who were operating independently and monetizing games and apps on the web and mobile devices. He was enthralled with the idea of a lifestyle business, one that worked to support the lifestyle of the participants.

During the first year, Josh worked with Map My Fitness to release their first iPhone app Map My Run (later acquired by Under Armor.) While this app showed early success, Josh desperately wanted to publish his own independent apps.

Josh built several apps independently in 2008 and 2009 all of which encountered problems. The first few were rejected or struggled to make it through app review. The apps that did get out were not successful at getting either attention or installations. It seemed that the overall methodology was just not working.

At this point continuing to spend $2,000/month on rent in San Francisco seemed untenable without going back to full time employment. This is where Josh had his first breakthrough. He realized that even though he was failing to generate significant revenue, he could stretch the revenue he had by radically reducing spending.

Winter in Tahoe

Josh’s economic situation coupled with personal lifestyle aspirations led him to spend the winter of 2009 living in South Lake Tahoe. The owners of the home he rented in San Francisco lived in Tahoe and offered Josh their basement for the winter for just $500/mo. With the cost of a season snowboarding pass coming in at just $300, the entire winter would cost less than just one month in San Francisco.

This ended up being the first of four winters in Tahoe where Josh followed the same blueprint. He would wake up and snowboard in the morning (when possible) and then work on building apps and app concepts in the afternoon. This combination of natural and digital experience is what created the mental environment in which Magic Window emerged. Josh had finally, at least temporarily, achieved the lifestyle he wanted.

iPad Announced

In February 2010, right in the middle of the snowboarding season, Apple announced the iPad. Having seen how others succeeded building apps around the launch of the iPhone, Josh saw this as the perfect opportunity. He missed the iPhone launch, but he could win the iPad launch.

One thing that was evident from the announcement was that Apple did not appear to be offering a clock or weather app for the iPad. This seemed like a huge omission as these were standard apps on iPhone. Were they really going to leave these out? If so, there would be a real opportunity for developers to build apps to fill that void.

The earliest version of what would become Magic Window was actually a Dashboard style app. The app offered a selection of widgets including time, weather and a selectable background. The idea was to basically emulate the Mac’s dashboard on iPad. The default background was a wood laminate texture.

Then much to Josh’s surprise Apple announced that Dashboard style apps would not be allowed on the iPad. This threw a real wrench into Josh’s plans, as the app was too plain if all it did was display a clock and weather. It needed something more substantial to work.

Winters End

At this point other pressures were starting to mount up. The winter was ending and Josh needed to find somewhere to live in April. Josh still didn’t have a solid app plan beyond clock and weather and time was running out until the iPad launch. We can’t screw this one up.

Josh made what he considered to be a risky decision and rented a room in a shared live/workspace known as Radish Research in San Francisco. Several of his friends lived in the space and Josh really enjoyed the creative and productive vibe it had.

This turned out to be the best decision he could have made for a variety of reasons. The workspace was fertile for creating creative projects and was occupied by talented people who could help make anything happen. That summer, Josh would meet Hal Bergman who lived next door, setting up the partnership that kept the app going into the future.

San Francisco is an expensive place to live (though historically the prices look cheap.) The cost was $1,300/mo which Josh could swing for at least a few months. But if he was going to keep living there something he built would have to succeed at generating money. The level of urgency to make something work was almost intolerable.

Move In

Josh packed up his things in Tahoe and headed back to San Francisco. As Josh began unpacking one of the drawbacks of the new workspace became apparent. It had no windows - just skylights. Josh was going from being surrounded by nature to working in a closed white box.

As Josh proceeded he needed to get a network cable to his desk. He traced the path of an existing cable that went up to the roof. Much to his surprise there was actually a video cable running from the back office to the front roof of the building. The front offered a great view of Twin Peaks. Why was there a video cable here and not a network cable?

This is when another roommate clued Josh in - a previous resident had mounted a camera on the front roof and run a video feed to a display mounted on a wall in the back. This brought the view from the front into the workspace. The brilliance of this solution, mixed with Josh’s continued thinking about iPad apps, set the stage for Magic Window to emerge.

Jesus & Waterfalls

Things were really starting to come together now: make an app that worked like a virtual window, offering views from many different places around the world. However how that window would actually be compelling was still a question. We couldn’t just make video loops - that would be too boring. We needed something visually unique.

As he was considering this he walked through a store in the Mission district and encountered two old fashioned animated displays, one of a waterfall, and another of Jesus Christ. Priced at $35, they were about the size of an iPad, and offered a dazzling, but somewhat antiquated, visual animation.

This was the most critical moment of inspiration. Josh now had an example of a real product, at a real price point, that he could emulate. Josh began trying to come up with a way to create animations similar to the moving pictures in the store. Through conversations with his roommate Michael Ang (Mang) the idea came up to experiment with time-lapse.

The First Photographer

While time-lapse photography is ubiquitous today, back in 2010 it was still an emerging art. Digital camera technology was just getting to the point that it could be used very effectively to make time-lapse, and photo and video editing software and techniques were emerging to help with production.

This is why it was such luck that Mang had a friend who filmed time-lapse. This is how Mike McCabe became our first photographer. He provided us with a collection of his time-lapses to experiment with. Through a process of continued experimentation and iteration, Josh was able to transform McCabe’s photo sequences into an interactive animation.

The Name

The name Magic Window was first suggested by roommate Michael Ang. Mang, who also worked on the app for the first few years, suggested the name during a brainstorming session. At the time Apple was heavily using the “Magic” language in their marketing (Magic Keyboard, Magic Mouse, etc.) So the name fit the marketing language of the time and very literally described the product. From the moment it was first said out loud, it was obvious that “Magic Window” was the right name. The real magic came when we later discovered that “Magic Window” had been used historically to describe what a camera or photograph can be.

But would it run on an iPad?

All of Josh’s experimentation was done on the iPad simulator. Unlike the launch of the iPhone App Store, the iPad store would open before developers ever had their hands on the hardware. While the animations looked great in the simulator, there was absolutely no way to know if they would look good on the iPad without the hardware.

This led to a disappointing realization - we would not be able to ship the app at iPad launch because we needed the hardware to test it. Surely, other developers were in a similar situation. But not all apps needed to be high performance like ours. It was clear we had to wait.

We waited anxiously for the iPad to arrive in the mail on launch day. The moment it arrived the first thing we did was connect it to the computer and run Magic Window. While the first execution wasn’t perfect, after a few minutes of tweaking and adjustments, the vision had been realized. The app worked on the iPad. Not just that, but the touch interaction was beautiful.

From this point it took 14 intense days to complete the first released version of the app.

Launch

Josh was banking on a promise made by an Apple executive that every app released around iPad launch would be featured in the App Store. Josh was well aware that being featured could produce significant exposure and was previously unaware of any way to get an app featured.

He couldn’t just bank on the promise of a feature though. For the first time, Josh executed a real app launch, including promotional videos, an outreach campaign, and even a complete presentation at an app launch event in San Francisco. Josh sent free copies of the app to anyone interested in the iPad he could find.

At the time the app offered such a novel experience that it really stood out among other launch apps. It was a must-have way to experiment with this new device. Sales of the iPad app remained high for the rest of the calendar year. This provided the foundation from which the next generation of Magic Window products would be developed.

Into the Future…

In its original incarnation, Magic Window remained an interesting iPad app for about 12-18 months. Once the world saw what the iPad could do many other developers jumped in and produced compelling and competing apps.

Keeping Magic Window going required expanding to the iPhone, Mac, Apple TV, and eventually Microsoft Windows. Unlike some apps that found their sweet spot on their first release, the Magic Window product line didn’t mature for seven years. Our Apple TV apps along with 24 Hour Wallpaper truly complete the vision that we began with.

The app would have probably ended on iPad if it was not for the partnership that formed between Josh and Hal Bergman. The two met randomly outside of Radish Research. Hal’s photography skills and willingness to experiment led to a process of iteration that resulted in the high quality scenes we release today. If you go back and look at our earliest work the difference in quality is dramatic.

Thank you!

None of this would be possible without the help of extraordinary collaborators, family, friends, and fans. Along the road we have received help and guidance from countless people who in many cases saved us from difficult or impossible situations. We could not keep the quality up if it wasn’t for the help and feedback from our Early Access list. And of course none of this would be possible without Apple, who both provided the foundation and the inspiration for the product line.

Thank you to our friends, fans, and everyone who helped us on this journey.