The journey over the next three weeks involved flying through small airports and driving bumpy roads in various nooks and corners of five 'Stans — Kazakh-, Turkmeni-, Uzbeki-, Tajiki-, and the vowel-starved Kyrgyz-. When we weren't flying city to city, many transfers were by car or van — some long rides on roads ranging from poor to just OK, through landscapes that were sometimes dry and barren, other times epic and beautiful. We even took a fast train from Bukhara to Samarkand.
As the skeleton of the app turned into something of an MVP, the "dead" time turned into "laptop" time — at the airport after check-in, in the car on long transfers, sometimes even during a city tour between landmarks. It became a game to squeeze in functionality during these windows. Here's one of the first results of taking a picture from the car and adding text, with font and color selection — on May 19, "the day after."
[IMAGE: first car SnaptiCard — May 19]
The app got into better shape day by day across those three-plus weeks.
The first part was to take pictures, locate pictures, organize and find them quickly, and edit them into something creative. As that came together, it became clear that communicating with the people in your life is disparate — not everyone uses Facebook or WhatsApp. So we had to enable sharing to the right channel. Slowly these came together: email, text message, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, and more.
The last important piece was managing the events central to what you want to communicate about — birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, invitations, parties, thank-yous. That meant pulling from the built-in calendar and contacts, plus ad-hoc rosters of people and groups, with ways to track, remind, and notify. Most of that came together during the trip, and by the time we returned to the USA on June 7th, we'd already sent multiple greetings to various people using the app.
What remained was fixing bugs, managing memory efficiently, and improving performance. Rightfully, that was a journey of its own — and here we are, ready with the app.
[IMAGE: three-phone Snaptica gallery mockup]
Postscript, years on: Snaptica Pro did ship. You could turn any photo into a SnaptiCard and send a birthday wish, an invitation, or a thank-you through whatever channel the other person actually used. As a product, it's a footnote now. But the trip that built it — the border desk in Tashkent, the limbo at Almaty, the laptop time between landmarks across five 'Stans — turned out to be the part worth keeping.