MachineCodex is not a large company. We love Cocoa, and we love our little media player. We don't see it as a threat to anyone, it is just a tool that we ourselves have a use for. We'd love to sell a million copies of course, but if we don't - well, we sure had fun and learned a lot along the way.

By the middle of 2007, we were feeling quite good about MachineHead and our growing user base. We were gradually eliminating bugs and our users had begun sending in encouraging and useful feedback.

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We were feeling so good, we went from version 0.6b to version 0.8b in two months! We were powering along, and 1.0 seemed to be just around the corner.

What's in a name?

In July 2007 we were dismayed to receive a cease and desist order from a law firm in Houston. Their client had taken exception to our use of the name "MachineHead". There is a popular band named Machine Head, but this letter was not from them. Instead it was from a different firm who are perhaps best known for unsuccessfully suing the band.

We considered our options. On the one hand, we loved that name. We weren't sure that there was a clear jurisdiction over us here in Australia. On the other hand, basically anything we could do to defend ourselves, beyond simply ignoring it, was going to cost oodles of money. And we had not yet earned a single cent from our work on the app.

Dropping the name was going to cost us dearly as well. Much of the goodwill, marketing and brand awareness we had spent a year building was down the gurgler. Links on various sites would be lost. The Google ranking we had accumulated, gone.

After seeking legal advice we concluded that we simply had no choice but to change the name. Sadly, we informed our customers and closed the site. Back to the drawing board yet again.

We gave ourselves one week to come up with a new name. Anyone who has to choose a name for something - a business, a pet, an application - goes through the same basic process of elimination. Throw up some ideas, winnow them down, repeat. There are many considerations. The more time you can spend on it, the more complex the decision becomes. I have friends who took an entire year to name their child.

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In a networked world, name is everything. A unique, memorable name is gold. Ironically, names are everywhere, and names are free. It may have taken no more than a second to think up the name "iPod"".

Yet names are meaningless on their own. "iPod"" was simple nonsense in the year 2000. Now, iPod is a multibillion dollar industry. The term itself is aggressively defended, and understandably so, names are capital in our era. Coinage indeed.

Such are the things that go through your mind when you are trying to choose a new name for your product. Of course it is not the name itself, but what it becomes associated with that creates the value. It doesn't really matter which name you decide upon, as long as it is unique, and vaguely catchy. Generic names are often the best. "Word" - now there is a brilliant product name.

In the end we settled on AudioCodex. It's not really catchy, it's not really short, it's not really inspirational. Yet it is unique, and it's our app's name. It's kinda descriptive. Most importantly, if you Google it, every single hit has something to do with our app.

Lesson 2: You gotta have a name. Make sure it's yours.

The long dark tea time of the soul

This setback dampened our spirits somewhat, not least because of the sudden drop in our download numbers. But we rolled up our sleeves and pushed on with the release cycle, updating to 0.90b. The interface changes we made focussed on refining the formula we had arrived at with version 0.6b.

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The biggest change we made was the removal of the dials from the toolbar and onto their own subpane. This freed up a lot of space for more display control buttons and made the whole interface clearer. This marked the last significant interface change to AudioCodex.

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In November 2007, Apple finally released Leopard. The IndieHIG was decommissioned in favour of Apple's new interface guidelines.

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A this point we reached that most infamous stage of software development: the death march. All the easy and fun work is done, all that's left is the stuff you've swept under the carpet. People are using your stuff, and they expect it to work as advertised. Bugs seem to magically appear from nowhere, taunting demonically.

AudioCodex took six months to make it to 0.97b. We released every month and ruthlessly squashed every bug we and our beta testers could find. (Our thanks go to CalSD, noach, johnny retard and the rest of you.)

Each month we repeated this cycle, and gradually the bug reports thinned out, the interface fairly gleamed, and we ran out of decimals less than 1. Slowly but surely we have rebuilt a reputation around the new name.

Please release me

AudioCodex 1.0 final icon

Real geeks ship, to paraphrase Steve, and it feels fantastic to finally have a v1.0 product out there. AudioCodex feels polished and ready to take on the world. Of course we have a slew of new features waiting in the wings, but now that we have reached this milestone it is nice to stop and take a look back. Thanks for reading!

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