From humble origins   22 June 2009

32×32 wasn’t suppose to be “the next project”. It began as a tool for me to use while commuting. I often whip out the sketchpad and doodle stuff while commuting, but I felt the need to draw some good ol’ fashioned pixel art.

It was never going to work though. I decided that the minimum size of the canvas would have to be 32×32 pixels which, in order to fit on the iPhone screen, would mean a 10×10 px on-screen representation for each pixel. There’s no way you could accurately tap on a 10×10 px space on the iPhone screen. I gave the idea of a zooming/scrolling canvas a brief thought, but dismissed it due to being too fiddly. (A later prototype found this assumption to be true) But then the crosshair occurred to me. I’ll talk about exactly how the crosshair works in a later post. But the idea is what made me think, “maybe, just maybe, this’ll actually work.”

So one night, lying on the couch watching a re-run of America’s Next Top Model with my sister, I started working on the prototype. After an hour of hacking away at it I had something usable. And it worked. The rest, as they say, is history.