Sometimes life takes you on a journey you never expected to go on. App development can be the same. An initial concept or idea for an app can be completely different from the final product. Other times, one project failing leads to an even more brilliant idea surfacing.
Interestingly enough, the story for 24 Hour Wallpaper begins when Josh was five years old. Two interests that would later become central to his life – photography and computer science – were stoked by his father and grandfather. He nurtured these skills throughout childhood and into high school, before he landed a job at Microsoft post-college.
After a few years at Microsoft living the corporate life, Josh felt disconnected and started looking for other ways to approach living. He began to seek inspiration from other hobbies, snowboarding most notably.
“Around 2005, I read an article in the local Seattle paper about Wil Shipley’s Mac app company, Delicious Monster,” he said. “Wil was one of the first modern indie Mac devs. He had a small team of people working for him.”
The article highlighted how Wil and his team worked from various places, including local coffee shops and even on the mountain during snowboarding trips. When he read this, Josh was immediately inspired and knew what he wanted his next career step to be.
“I realized at that point that the ultimate goal was not to have the most senior position at a technology company, or even to start a startup that achieved great success,” he began. “The goal was to build a company that supported my lifestyle, [one] that allowed me to build software I loved, travel the world, take pictures, and snowboard.”
Trial, Error, and Escaping to Tahoe
The next few years involved Josh saving up some money, making connections through friends, and experimenting with mobile game development. Some were successes, while others were flops. Throughout all of this, he learned a lot, but he didn’t know what life would throw at him next.
He ended up meeting one of his role models, Wil Shipley himself, at the Macworld conference. Wil gave him an unexpected piece of advice for how to stay motivated: be desperate.
“I asked him for advice on how to start a company like his while working a job. He told me that when he started, he had lost his job at Omni and needed to figure out how to pay rent. What I needed was a dose of desperation, which came right around the corner when the startup I was at blew up.”
Because he’d devoted time to pursuing this new lifestyle, finances were tight and living in San Francisco no longer made financial sense. So, he picked up his things, moved out of his $3000/month rental, and into a $500 basement rental in Lake Tahoe – owned by the same owner of his San Francisco unit. He had figured out how to live a version of his dream, but it wasn’t sustainable.
In early 2010, while living in the Tahoe basement, Apple announced the iPad. Josh knew he had to be one of the first to launch something on the iPad App Store, and so he got to work.
“I spent the rest of the winter in Tahoe ideating on iPad apps. Apple had chosen not to include a weather app on the iPad by default, which I saw as an opportunity.”
To push himself even more, he moved back to San Francisco into a live-work share, which he notes was “completely outside of my budget.” The coworking space in this unit was, to say the least, a huge adjustment for Josh. It had no windows, and just two skylights. Craving some sort of landscape or natural views, he came up with the idea to turn the iPad into a window that featured a beautiful view, leading to the launch of Magic Window for iPad.
The app became the basis for 24 Hour Wallpaper as well, with both apps featuring hundreds of stunning photos and videos from various landmarks around the world.
Josh and his team have dedicated countless hours to on-site filming for 24 Hour Wallpaper, which requires extensive coordination, research, and patience. When asked about how the team decides which locations to film, Josh explains that it’s a combination of personal interest, customer requests, client demands, and practical realities.
“Depending on how intentional we are with the shoot, we will do extensive location scouting in advance using tools like Google Earth, Apple Maps, public webcams, and AR tools like Sun Surveyor. Studying and understanding the behavior of the weather at the location is the key to success.”
While ultimately depending on the location, these shoots also come with dozens of challenges, including navigating bad weather, technical difficulties, objects or people disrupting the shoot, and more. The team also has to remain onsite for the entire 24 hours to monitor the equipment and ensure the camera is stable and secure.
The team’s latest showcase wallpaper features the Golden Gate Bridge, in line with Apple’s upcoming release. Prior to WWDC, Josh had read rumors about what place Apple might choose for their next macOS version, and among them were Marin, Tiburon, and Sausalito - all locations with proximity to the bridge. To adequately prepare, they scouted out several of these places. When they heard it was going to be Golden Gate, the team jumped into action to develop a plan.
Featuring notoriously temperamental views, frequent fog, and dozens of flocking tourists, the Golden Gate Bridge shoot was most likely going to be a challenge for the team. Thankfully, the shoot went ahead without much trouble.
“We got extraordinarily lucky with the weather. In the summer, the bridge is fogged most of the time. There can be just a few days in the month of June in which there isn’t fog covering the bridge at some point in a 24-hour period. Two of those days happened to be Tuesday through Wednesday of WWDC week.”
“Even better, the timing was such that when we showed up we were in the clouds, but the clouds cleared within an hour of us being there. There were almost no people parked at the viewpoint when we got there, which gave us our choice of places to set up. Once the fog cleared, the area was swarmed, and parking became impossible.”
Josh was proud of how the shoot turned out, and mentioned how the Golden Gate Bridge represents things that echo many of Apple’s own values.
“The Golden Gate was a beautiful destination long before the bridge was ever built there. You can go back and see photos Ansel Adams took before the bridge was built. So they had to not only build a bridge, but build one that would aesthetically enhance a region that was already at the peak of beauty. And with early 20th-century technology. That’s no easy feat. In some ways this is a metaphor for Apple's products.”
Scaling Success
Going forward, Josh has no plans to slow down development of his apps, and hopes to provide users with even more breathtaking landscape content. Soon, he hopes he can venture outside the US to capture landmarks around the world.
“I would like to spend much more time outside of the United States. One weakness of the product is that most of the wallpapers are from the US West Coast, because that's where we live. I would really like to come to Ukraine to film, and hope to do that in the next two years.”
Despite all the challenges he’s faced when launching and scaling the apps, he’s incredibly proud of the progress they’ve made. Understanding that success isn’t guaranteed, he isn’t afraid of what lies in the journey ahead. He’s reminded of this every time he does a shoot, with the nature of photography being much like that of success.
“For every sequence we succeed at filming, we fail at filming at least one sequence. Failures hurt, big time. But this level of commitment brings back what I loved about classic film photography. You’re in the field, and you get a limited number of chances. If you don’t get what you want, that’s just how it goes.”
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