Touchgram
Touch-sensing interactive messages inside iMessage
This isn't quite as exciting as it sounds because it's a "refund grant". We got back roughly 50% of what we spent on export marketing costs June 2020 to 2021. That includes the cost of foreign patents.
Australia's federal government has now revised the basis under which they calculate eligibility for these grants. We won't be able to get any more money until we have actual sales income from subscriptions overseas.
As written up in more detail in this article we just published:
https://medium.com/touchgram/blindsided-by-bitcode-2adca2993ecf?source=friends_link&sk=57bf3ffc6478e3f323c914d320ffc08d
Apple's processing of apps on the store, which optimises what they download to your specific phone type, broke all apps using the new Concurrency features. The bug hits anything deployed on iOS versions earlier than the current iOS 15.
v1.3.0 was released just prior Christmas ending 18 months of work doubling the size of the core program. This makes it "future-proof" able to cope with Touchgrams for years to come & play most of the new features.
Unfortunately, within a day, a crashing bug was noted if people deleted all text in an element. A workaround was quickly promoted through social media and debugging commenced. Another 3 minor bugs were fixed in v1.3.1 mostly for iPhone 8 and SE/sized phones. This version also exposes the start of easily copy/pasting elements from one Touchgram to another.
We started with a "Provisional Patent" in Australia in 2014, to ensure the core idea was protected for future international patents, before it could be explained in a public broadcast at the Founder Institute Perth Chapter graduation. About a year later, this was transitioned to a full patent application and the world-wide process commenced. It's a bit ironic we had it granted in Singapore, the USA and Indonesia before we finalised the Australian one.
One of a number of countries worldwide in which the core Touchgram patent has been applied for. Indonesia is likely to be a major source of art generation and has a vibrant visual art culture so is a strategic country. We will also be doing a localised version of the app once the UX is improved.
Published https://medium.com/touchgram/to-nft-or-not-to-nft-cce3771eb3d8 clarifying our position on NFTs, with some background. Artist credit tracking was being added as part of the (overly) long work on the Touchgrma core and for the forthcoming marketplace. As this feature was being finalised, the NFT (bubble?) erupted.
This was the big one. It came after multiple rounds of rejections on being too broad. Patent examiners are entertainingly creative in thinking up ways to misinterpret your claims. They are like really good software testers with a more evil streak. Having a US patent hopefully makes Touchgram a much more attractive acquisition target or investment prospect.
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A patent granted in the United States is a property right issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to an inventor granting them the exclusive right to make, use, sell, and import their invention for a set period of time. A patent may be granted for any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof https://www.ipprism.com/. The term of a new patent is 20 years from the date on which the application for the patent was filed in the United States or, in special cases, from the date an earlier related application was filed, subject to the payment of maintenance fees. Once a patent is granted by the USPTO, the patentee must enforce the patent without aid of the USPTO.
First release adding an onboarding experience which has animated arrows pointing to areas of interest and help buttons.
Initial help displayed in a little panel in the window with a "more..." button taking you off to a web page for a deeper explanation.
Added a "Refresh Page" action so people could have the same background appear with a page effect. You could already do this just by doing a Goto Page with the same page number but that wasn't obvious.
Major gotchas fixed that kept surprising users:
- When you specified an area for "Tap inside" people were not drawing something big enough. It was even worse for a "Tickle Inside" or "Swipe Inside" sensor. Now there's a warning and you can't save a sensor with the inside area being too small.
- I observed two users create Touchgrams with multiple pages but no way to get off the first page. Now, if you add another page but there's no Goto Page, a Sensor or Sensor plus Action are automatically added to the previous page.
Two big features in this release. Handling images transferred using AirDrop/iTunes from macOS or from other iOS Apps. The Touchgram app remembers the images you provide and you can use them in the editor to set a background.
A new sensor for page opening added combined with the ability to repeat sounds, so you can have a simple background sound loop start on new pages.
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