A few weeks ago, Steve Jobs walked through Apple’s plans for the year at WWDC in San Francisco. I was watching the keynote stream from our office in New York. The format is familiar even at a distance: the packed hall, the lights down, the man in the black turtleneck taking the room through what Apple thinks the next twelve months should look like.
About two-thirds of the way through, one of our apps appeared on the screen behind him.
What happened
During the keynote on June 7, Steve was talking about the iPad. The device had been on sale for about two months at that point. He was making the case for what publishers and developers were doing with it, and he ran through a sequence of apps that, in his view, showed the platform finding its footing.
Epicurious was one of them.
For those of us at Conde Nast who had been working on the app, the moment landed in a flurry of texts and emails. The team had built something that took advantage of the form factor instead of just shrinking a website onto a tablet screen, and Apple had picked it as an example of what publishers were doing well on the new device.
The reaction in the developer community, from what I could see online and from people in the room, was warm. Cooking is universal. A recipe app on a tablet, sitting on the kitchen counter while you actually cook, is the kind of use case that immediately makes sense to people. You do not have to explain it.
The team
The team that built this is the story.
Robert Tolar Haining led the iOS development on Epicurious. I first hired Robert when I was CTO at CoxNet in Atlanta, and I hired him again when I came to Conde Nast in New York. He had built a working prototype of an Epicurious iPhone app back in 2008, before app development at Conde Nast was even an in-house competency, and that prototype is what convinced the company to invest in building a real iOS practice. The Epicurious iPhone app shipped in 2009. When the iPad was announced, Robert led a small team that built the iPad versions of Epicurious and GQ in the weeks before launch, on early devices Apple had loaned us under a strict deadline.
His team worked closely with the Epicurious editors, the recipe database team, and the designers who understood what someone wants when they are figuring out what to make for dinner. The collaboration is what produced the app. The Apple feature is what acknowledged it.
Building a tablet app in 2010 is not the same as building an iPhone app, and it is definitely not the same as building a website. The iPad is barely a quarter old as a product category. There are no settled patterns yet. Every team building for it is, in a real sense, figuring it out in public. Some apps are basically larger phone apps. Some are basically web pages in a frame. The good ones, the ones Apple wants to put on the keynote screen, treat the device as its own thing.
Our team treated it as its own thing. That is why it worked.
What Apple is signaling to publishers
Watching Steve walk through the lineup, it was clear what Apple is signaling to publishers right now.
The iPad is, among other things, a bet that people will pay for high-quality content delivered in a format that respects the source material. Magazines have always been visual, tactile, browsable in a way that the open web has struggled to replicate. The tablet brings some of that back. You can lay out a recipe page with photography and typography and pacing that feels like a magazine, and have it work on a device people actually carry around the house.
For a company like Conde Nast, this is meaningful. We have spent years figuring out what our brands look like on the open web. The web is great at distribution and discovery and lousy at preserving the editorial voice that makes a brand worth anything in the first place. The tablet, at least so far, points toward something different. It is early. The economics are not yet proven. But the surface area exists, and our editors and designers are taking it seriously.
Apple, by featuring apps like ours, is telling developers and publishers that they want this part of the ecosystem to work. They are not just building a device. They are building a market for the kind of content we make.
What I took away from the day
A few things worth writing down.
The work shows. When Apple picks an app to put on a keynote screen, they are picking the work, not the company. The engineers, designers, and editors who built the Epicurious app shipped a thoughtful product, and Apple noticed. Companies do not build apps. People do.
Apple makes these decisions on the merits. That is the right way to do it, and it is a useful reminder that the path to that kind of recognition is the work itself, not the relationship management around it.
Tablets are still a question, not an answer. The iPad has been on sale for two months. There is a long way to go before anyone knows what publishing on this device really looks like at scale. The keynote moment was a vote of confidence in the direction, not a finish line. The harder work is ahead of us.
By the end of the day, the team was already heads-down on the next version. That is the part I like best.
A note of thanks
To the engineers, designers, and editors who built the Epicurious iPad and iPhone apps: thank you. Watching your work on a screen the size of a building, with a few thousand developers in the audience, was a good day. The next one is up to all of us.