Chicago developer cracks top 10 most downloaded iPhone applications

The life of John Haney can be summed up by the 11 words in the "about me" section on his Facebook profile page: video game programmer by day, dad/husband/Mac programmer by night.

The 28-year-old Plano, Ill. resident keeps plenty occupied with his job as a video game programmer at the Chicago-based company Chewy Software LLC. But it's his evenings dallying with Apple Inc.'s iPhone development software that has Haney gaining popularity with the iPhone and iPod Touch crowd.

"Whatever spare time I manage to squeeze around that, I do my Mac programs, and iPhone is now my new passion," Haney said. "In a weird way it's down time for me, even though I'm still working and still creating something."

Down time or not, Haney's creative "relaxing" helped him develop the 10th most downloaded application at the successful iTunes Application Store as of August 28. His free Flashlight application-which fills your iPhone screen with your choice of four colors and white-is one of more than 2,300 applications available for download. People have downloaded applications from the App Store upwards of 60 million times since it launched one month ago, Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs recently announced.

Haney wouldn't reveal exactly how many people have downloaded Flashlight from the App Store because of the terms of the non-disclosure agreement developers must consent to when they register to receive and work with Apple's iPhone Software Developmental Kit. (The contract restricts developers from discussing the SDK or exchanging ideas with anyone including forums, newsgroups, tutorials, news articles, and books. Oddly enough, the free SDK is publicly available to anyone who signs up for it on the Apple Web site.)

"I'm uncertain whether I can share the specific numbers with you, but I can tell you based on my Web site blog [downloads] at least, that there are at least 300,000 people who have downloaded Flashlight and there may be more," he said. "It's been only six weeks roughly."

Inspiration for Flashlight came from an old Mac OS X shareware program called Backdrop that Haney developed nearly five years before the launch of the App Store. Backdrop is a helper tool that fills the user's computer screen with a giant white window to make it easier to "take screen shots and not have to do much editing to post it online," Haney said.

The program also has a pixel test feature that fills a monitor with a red, green, blue and black screen to check for dead pixels not showing one of those colors.

"I was looking at my programs in Mac and thinking, 'Is there a way to translate these programs over to the iPhone?'" he said. And Haney found his way when Apple opened the App Store, which welcomed amateur and professional software developers to share their wares through iTunes.

Soon Haney was modifying his existing Mac OS X programs like Backdrop to serve a more practical function on the iPhone.

"I've had the experience, and other people have too, where you're in the dark and the one thing you happen to have with you is a cell phone. So, you flip it open and use the screen for whatever light you can get out of it to navigate around," he said.

Haney was proved right about the necessity of the tool, because after redeveloping it for the iPhone and tossing in a strobe light feature for fun, Flashlight rounds out the top ten most popular downloads in the App Store.

One of his three sisters, Karen Haney who lives in Kansas City, Mo., said John has always been interested in making useful things that are fun. She said growing up he would make a computer program to help draw names for grab-bag gifting around Christmas time.

"Each year he would make it better and better," Karen said. "Eventually you could have links to sizes that you wanted and pictures of things you like online. Instead, of drawing names out of a hat, we would be drawing names out of a computer."

Still, Flashlight's popularity in the crowded application field is surprising to Karen, who finds it "neat" to run into strangers who have it on their phones. But according to Thomas Howe, a service provider consultant who blogs about the communications business, service-oriented programs are the way to go for small developers, since the iPhone "isn't a phone so much as it's a really small computer you put in your pocket."

"If you were to look at the market traditionally for that kind of device or any computer, those small utility programs have a very wide audience they play to. Everyone would want one," Howe said.

But John's creation almost didn't make it to the store. He was vacationing during the July 7 deadline Apple Inc. gave developers to be considered for releasing on the first day. John submitted Flashlight two days late, but it was still approved and went live on iTunes the Monday after the iPhone 3G was released.

Flashlight is John's most popular offering to the Apple application world, but it is not his first. John released the Web application Cintos, a strategy board game, in 1997. But Karen said his programming history reaches back even further. John used to write programs on the family Atari 800 in grade school.

"He did like to have [his four siblings] be able to spend time and play together. I think that was a motivator for him," Karen said.

Money could become a new motivator. Hot on the heels of Flashlight's success, John will submit the word puzzle game, CryptoQuotes, to the App Store in the next week or two. It will be a paid application unlike its predecessor.

John stands to make a bit of profit with his hobby if CryptoQuotes flourishes on the market. Last month the top 10 paid-application developers received nearly half the share of the $21 million revenue from the App Store, or $9 million.

Though John said he does iPhone development for the enjoyment of "programming the way I want, to work in the way I want to," his pastime may follow him to his day job. Chewy Software is looking at expanding into iPhone games, too.

While John's other jobs, being a dad to 2-year-old Samantha and a husband to wife Katie, come before coding-both on his Facebook profile and offline-programming remains a fixture in his life.

"I guess it's somewhat in my blood," he said.