The "Jailbreak Era"

In January 2008, the iPhone had been around for a year in the USA and for three months in the UK. Recognising the awesome potential of the device, enterprising hackers around the world had successfully reverse-engineered and decrypted the software guts of the device, and had worked out how to write and install their own programs. A significant number of people (but minor in comparison to the total iPhone users) were following instructions published on various Internet Blogs and "Jailbreaking" their phones. [A Jailbreak is the term used for freeing a mobile device from various restrictions put in place by the manufacturer].

A cat-and-mouse game between Apple and the Jailbreakers followed, with each new firmware upgrade breaking the Jailbreak, and then in turn being broken again. These pioneers risked irreversably breaking ("Bricking") their phones, but the attraction of being able to run new applications was huge. Apple had taken note of this activity and announced a Software Development Kit (SDK), but this was to appear in March and no one wanted to wait that long when they could have third-party applications right now.

The current CEO of MooCowMusic, Mark Terry, became interested in the multi-touch qualities of the iPhone, and followed the trail blazed before to experiment with his own iPhone demos. Lacking a Mac, the early work was done on a PC with a specially constucted "toolchain" a command-line compiler, and Windows Notepad, and progress was slow thanks to a complete lack of official support and documentation. But the hacker community was very supportive, and slowly more and more functionality was eeked out of the device. Being able to process up to five finger touches simultaneously, and play back complex audio, led naturally to the concept of playing chords on a piano. And so Pianist was born.

Pianist was a virtual piano where the small size of the iPhone screen meant that only one octave could be displayed at once, but the user could scroll up and down the keyboard to reach four octaves. Complex chords were possible, and the keys were animated to look as if they were really being pressed. Pianist was released with little fuss and little expectation, but became a huge hit within the Jailbreak community. [In fact, there was so little expectation, that it was originally entitled "iAno" as a play on words of "piano" and the Apple usage of an 'i' prefix on everything. How very clever. Unfortunately it quickly transpired that 'ano' is Spanish for 'anus', and soon the MooCowMusic inbox was flooded with emails from enraged Spaniards. The name was quickly changed to something less explosive - MooCowMusic:Pianist, and 'MooCowMusic' was born]

Pianist was downloaded over a quarter of a million times, and the response was so great that MooCowMusic sought a follow-up project. A group of Austrians who called themselves 'iBand' (www.iband.at) had had huge success with a YouTube viral video of a close-up of their hands playing musical applications on various mobile devices, including Pianist. Their video was watched over three million times! For a rhythm section they were using a game for the Nintendo DS called Electro Plankton, which made blippy beepy sounds. MooCowMusic contacted them and offered to make them a drum application, and from this Drummer was born. Drummer was a virtual drum pad, offering a number of drum kits (rock, jazz, dance, electro) each with 15 drum samples. The key feature of Drummer that set it aside from it's competitors was the extremely fast latency, which made real-time drumming possible. But what really grabbed the Jailbreak community attention was that it was easily expandable by anyone via the ability to make and swap 'User Drum Kits'. Soon YouTube was buzzing with videos of various kits with Drum and Bass, rap, or even animal samples. Seb, the iBand drummer, produced some amazing videos of his own unique drumming style, with a performance almost indistinguishable from one on a real acoustic drum set.

For an encore, MooCowMusic wrote a new app Guitarist. This brought an entire guitar fretboard to the iPhone and allowed notes to be played by simply striking the fret, using as a metaphor the standard guitarist technique of 'hammer-on'. Although another guitar application existed for the iPhone, it was bogged down in emulating the fretting and strumming aspect of a guitar (which was never going to be totally successful due to the limitations of the multi-touch). Where Guitarist succeeded was in allowing complex solos to be played. The audio routines at the time were limited and so only a short sustain acoustic guitar sample could be used, but the YouTube demo video for Guitarist showed a credible rendition of Led Zeppelin's Stairway To Heaven. Cheesy? For sure! Impressive coming from a 4.5 inch phone? You bet!

Having conquered individual instruments for the time being, MooCowMusic looked for the next challenge. The core audio routines were rewritten to allow variable sustain and increased polyphony. A simple to use recording system was written to allow users to record and overdub notes and remove unwanted ones, yet all accessible from the tiny iPhone screen and completely intuative. And then came the fun part: designing the instrument user interface. The next application would combine multiple instruments together into a single application, allowing people to record an entire multi-part song on their phones. And, following on from the Drummer 'User Drum Kit' idea, people would be able to actually make their own instruments. Band was a huge hit on the Internet. The MooCowMusic forums were heaving with discussion and links to various instruments, and the jailbreak forums were overflowing with praise.

But the end of days when homebrew Jailbreak apps could hog centre stage was fast approaching as the arrival of the iPhone App Store loomed closer.

The "App Store Era"

The App Store was the answer to jailbreak developers dreams. After months of the war between hackers and Apple, jailbroken devices were in a sorry state. The constant, hasty application of hacks by non-technical users had rendered a lot of phones incompatible with the 'repositories' (the Jailbreak equivalent of the App Store), and it was the app developers who were bearing the brunt of users' frustration. In addition, the jailbreak funding approach of "Give it away for free, and hope that someone sends you a PayPal donation to cover your costs" was proven to be totally inadequate. This was fine for quirky homebrew software, but more complex and professional applications would require much more time and effort, and there needed to be a motivational reward for this effort. The App Store was going to simultaneously wipe out all the problems of incompatibility and distribution, and finally allow developers to charge a fair price for their work.

Apple had released the SDK at the beginning of March 2008 (giving everyone three months to develop apps before the App Store opened), but there was a problem. To test your application on the actual device (as opposed to on a simulator on the Mac) you needed to be part of a 'Developer Program'. This program was hugely oversubscribed, and there was a long waiting list. All the MooCowMusic applications relied heavily on multi-touch (not possible on the simulator), and there was no indication from Apple that they would ever be admitted to the program due to their unsavoury past. So work continued on the jailbreak apps for the time-being, with Band being released at the start of May. It was not until May 20th that MooCowMusic was finally given the ability to test their own applications, and two of the most promising ones - Band and Pianist - were ported over to the SDK.

A side-effect of dealing with Apple involves censorship: both self-inflicted, and via NDAs. MooCowMusic, by necessity, became reclusive but was unable to be drawn into the reasons why. This became apparent to all when, on the 9th June 2008, its CEO, Mark Terry, entered the stage during Steve Jobs' WWDC Keynote speech to demonstrate Band to the world. It was very likely the biggest thing that was ever going to happen to the company. Although sharing the stage with nine other huge companies by the likes of eBay and Sega, MooCowMusic held it's own, and out of all the third-party apps, received the biggest applause.

The stage was set for the official launch of the two initial products - Band and Pianist - on the App Store on the 10th July 2008, when MooCowMusic could expand from a userbase of a mere 250,000 hackers and reach out to the millions of iPhone users worldwide...