An experienced film maker and scientist, Dr. Max Whitby’s work casts light on the most extraordinary wonders of science. Be it the Periodic Table of Elements or his contribution to the understanding of natural history, his work captures the beauty and elegance of the world around us. Inspired to continue his education and receiving a PhD in Chemistry, Max Whitby proves that following your passion leads to great things. He is the founder of three successful digital media companies, produced numerous Horizon and NOVA documentaries and contributes to a hugely popular website about birds and insects. Dr. Whitby allowed us to learn more about 'The Elements' iPad application recently developed at TouchPress
You have an established science background, what drove you to become so educated?
Well, I m not sure if I’m that educated, but I absolutely adore science and I think knowing about how the world works is really important to life in general. There’s great pleasure in science; it allows one to appreciate the world.
How did you enter into the film industry?
I was very fortunate and managed to join the BBC as a graduate trainee, so when I did my first degree I went into the BBC on a two year training course. They send you to lots of different departments, where you learn by making mistakes on air, and the department I loved the best was the science department. I’d grown up watching the Horizon and Nova series as a child and it had always been my dream to work on that series so it was fantastic to be able to do that.
What was your favorite documentary that you were involved in?
One of the films I most enjoyed making was to celebrate the anniversary of the landing on the moon. I got to meet many of the astronauts who traveled to the moon and I got to spend months working in the NASA film library looking at all the footage that had been shot during the space missions. We then started putting together a documentary telling the story of the space age. We managed to do that without any added commentary, it was just using the live coverage of the space event of the time set to the great music of the ‘60s and ‘70s. That was a really fun project.
How did you first get involved with Touchpress?
Well, Touchpress grew out of an obsession of mine for collecting elements from the periodic table, and I share this obsession with a remarkable man called Theodore Gray, who of course is the author of The Elements. Theo and I have worked together for the last five or six years building up a big collection of elements and periodic table artifacts, photographing them and building real periodic tables with actual samples of every element including gold and uranium, and arsenic, and explosive hydrogen gas, you name it and we’ve got it. It was that project that led us to produce The Elements for the iPad, and that title has been phenomenally successful, and we really enjoyed making it and we decided to start a company in fact.
Whose initial idea was it for the elements?
Well, we were both back in the beginning creating collections of elements but Theo famously created his periodic table - table for which he won his Ig Nobel prize back in the early part of the first decade of the 21st century. Roundabout that same time I was also collecting elements and made some donations to his periodic table-table project, so I think we kind of got started around the same time and soon recognized kindred spirits in one another. For both of us the periodic table was a kind of hobby, we both had day-jobs, Theo was the co-founder of Wolfram Research and I have an interactive media company here in London. We found we had a very interesting fit of backgrounds and skills and talents and we’ve really enjoyed collaborating over the years.
It seems you’ve focused on the iPad and iPhone, is there a reason you haven’t gone to a different operating system such as the Android?
We certainly will be developing for any platform that can provide a really high quality user experience and at the moment I think there’s just no question that the iPad and iPhone are really solid stable platforms with a very good supporting business model around them and they are just the development platform of choice. But we see that the field is evolving very fast, a lot of people are copying what Apple has done, and as a result the software to support great apps is developing extremely fast. When we first produced the elements, there just simply wasn’t any other device that it could possibly have run on except the iPad, so that why it came out first on the iPad.
Could you describe your experience with the apple app store approval process? Such as submitting the application to apple?
Well I have uploaded binaries and have done all the metadata for the store a number of times now, and it’s something you have to be absolutely ready for, make sure to get all your necessary information lined up and ready to go, and as long as you follow the guidelines and do everything just right it’s very smooth and very straight forward. But of course life isn’t like that. If you get something slightly wrong, like in snakes and ladders you can fall right back down to the second square on the board and you have to start things all over a again, so there have been times where we’ve submitted builds that have got “failed” for rather finicky specific reasons, but the flip side is that the quality of what gets published is very high, people can go to the iTunes store and be fairly confident that the software is actually going to work and run. It might not work exactly how you expect but at least it’s not going to break, and we respect that.
When did you first realize that The Elements was a success?
We got a kind of graph of our sales of The Elements day by day, and we were just astonished because within a few days of launching the app, we had this huge number of people buying it. We were in the right place at the right time, we had a piece of software that was interesting, was carefully and beautifully produced, and that did something that no other title had done and in terms of showing off the capabilities of the iPad. It’s really unlikely that tens of thousands of people would buy an electronic book on the periodic table. What they’ll do is buy tens of thousands of copies of a book that shows what a new electronic book can be like, we got some incredibly good reviews and comments, and Steven Fry Tweeted his very kind comment that our app was alone worth the price of the iPad. That was a really nice endorsement. I think that something else it taught us was just how impossible it is to market an electronic book in an old fashioned way, you just have to really produce something that’s extremely good so that it gets recommended by word of mouth and that is the single most important thing you can do to ensure you’re successful.
How big was your part in the actual day to day development of the elements?
Well there were four of us closely involved in making the title. Theodore, who was the author of all the text in the book and the mastermind behind the project was really the creative leader of the project. My role was to be the project manager, a coordinator, making sure that everything happened and got in place that we had all the necessary information to interface with the apps and iTunes stores properly and that all the graphics were processed in a timely manner and were available to John Cromie, who was the chief software engineer. The fourth person involved in the team was Nick Mann, who took all the photographs and many of the rotation photographs, matter of fact Nick had done most of his work last year when we were making the book, the hard cover book, and this is a lovely example of Theodore Gray’s vision, when he told Nick to go out and take all of the photographs to go into the book, he didn’t want then all taken as a single still, but he wanted everyone taken 720 different positions on a great big custom brass turntable so that we had rotation for all those hundreds of object. It was having all that data ready to go when the iPad was announced back in January that made it possible for the four of us to produce that app in about 60 days.
Can we expect any other future ipad/iphone hits from Touchpress?
Oh yes, were investing all the rewards of the success of The Elements into half a dozen titles we’re working on this year which will be appearing towards Christmas. I can’t at the moment talk publicly about what they are because obviously it’s a very competitive field, and we want to make sure when they come out that they’re going to be surprises, but what I can say is that if you like the elements then you’re in for a real treat because we’re not just repeating what we’ve done with the elements but were taking the kind of underlying philosophy which is to delight you when you pick up that machine and explore a subject. We’re going to be doing that with a whole range of different topics. Some of them will be really surprising, they won’t be in the area of science, they’ll be much more in the area of literature and the arts. Those projects are particularly exciting to me, and we’ve got a lot of really good stuff under development now. We’ve got a fantastic team of people based both in the US and the UK, it’s a really exciting time to be working electronic books, and I’m having a fantastic time.
Do you have any advice for aspiring iPhone app developers?
Focus on quality. Concentrate on doing really good things, and it goes back to what I was saying a few moments ago about how you market these titles, but the bottom line is what you produce has to be just excellent, and if it isn’t you might sell a few hundred, you might even sell a few thousand copies, but you’re not going to have a really big hit so concentrate on quality. The other thing I’d say is don’t try to do it all yourself. This is a new medium that really needs a collaboration between designers, software engineers, authors, writers, photographers, animators, and you don’t want too big a team, but you do need a combination of talents, so if you’re a individual and you want to get into this area, see who you might work with who have skills that match yours and compliment yours.
Out of all the business ventures you’ve been involved in, what has been your absolute favorite?
Well of course I have to say the one I’m in now, actually one thing that I think you’ll hear from a number of people like me who have been around in the interactive media world for a while is that the wave of new media development we’re seeing currently with tablets and touch devices and mobile devices has a lot of echoes of what happened before the dot-com revolution. There was an interesting period in the 1990’s when CD-ROMS and DVD-ROMS were first coming out and there was a lot of excitement about producing interactive titles that you could sell for people to play on the computer. Now that revolution never really went anywhere exciting, it kind of got pole-axed by the arrival of the internet, there was never a satisfactory distribution channel for getting CD-ROMS and DVD-ROMS into the market the technology wasn’t right because you had to consume media at a computer, rather than lying on a sofa or lying in a bed or traveling or whatever. So I think this current opportunity is built on much more solid foundations but a lot of the lessons and ideas which were around ten, fifteen years ago I think they are going to have a second life now, and it’s very very exciting to have an audience and to also have computers so fast that they are able to do stuff that would have been unthinkable back then.
So thank you to Max Whitby and
TouchPress for taking the time to speak to us. Be sure to checkout their
iPhone and
iPad versions of "The Elements", along with their
Twitter.
