Proposal: Nouns iOS and Apple Watch app

Hey friends, just wanted to share the draft of the Nouns app proposal here. We’d love to get your feedback.

Here’s the doc: Nouns iOS and Apple Watch app [draft] - Google Docs

Adding the text from the doc below. To see images you’ll need to check out the Google doc. Discourse limits the number of images you can embed in a post.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts, suggestions, and concerns.


Nouns Collective proposal #1

Nouns iOS and Apple Watch app

[draft - please share your feedback]

tl;dr

In the interest of building momentum around Nouns as a cultural phenomenon and helping to reach a wider audience, we propose building a fun and quirky iOS app and companion Apple Watch app. These applications will create a playful Noun o’clock experience, allow Noun enthusiasts to explore all of the created Nouns, as well as play around with creating their own off-chain Nouns in fun and creative ways (among other features, examples below).

Apple Watch Application:

  • Nouns watch face
    • Fun and goofy way to keep track of time (working within the constraints of Apple watch and WatchOS 8)
    • Background photo
  • Custom Watch complication for Noun o’clock
  • Notification about Noun o’clock
  • Watch app can display:
    • Noun avatar as watch face
    • Noun o’clock countdown
    • Generate your own (off-chain Noun)
    • Share Nouns (iMessage, or share sheet)

iOS App

  • Notifications about Noun o’clock

  • Make your own Noun (off-chain)

    • Use it as your watch face
    • Save it and use it as an avatar
    • Share it with others (way to enable virality/spread of Nouns)
    • There’s an opportunity to make this very playful and tactile by letting users shake their phone to generate a random Noun or swipe to edit characteristics
  • Nouns explorer

    • Browse a record/catalogue of all of the onchain Nouns that have been minted and sold thus far, with additional meta-data
    • Browse a saved record of personal “saved” off-chain Nouns created by the user (using the app)
  • Future extensions

    • Nouns iOS widget for your homescreen
    • iMessage sticker pack

Technical Considerations + Source code

  • App will be built in Swift and backend in Node + Typescript
    • Open question: are there any existing internal Nouns APIs we can leverage for some of the data similar to the Nouns explorer project
  • Target operating systems will be iOS 15 and WatchOS 8 which is set to release later this month
  • All code will be open sourced. Our goal is to encourage others in the community to extend the apps and leverage the assets for the Android Nouns app.

Design

The overall design aesthetic for this product is meant to be consistent with the overall visual design of the nouns.wtf website, the Nouns themselves, and just generally be contemporary, modern, and fun.

  • Share figma file and screen shots, enable comments from the community
  • Describe interactions and other functional aspect of the design like flows in the figma file as well for inspection and commentary
  • In the spirit of open source, we will involve the Nouns community to participate and influence the app development in a number of key ways:
    • Open sourcing the code via github for inspection by the community
    • Providing updates on the design and development regularly via discord
    • Allowing actual Nounders and members of Nouns DAO to participate in feedback sessions and select user/usability testing sessions to improve build quality.
    • Open up a public beta of the app for the Nouns community (Noun holders and non-holders) to participate in via test flight.

Timeline

Concept, design, and development are scoped to 4 months. See schedule below:

Co-creation and beta testing

We love to build in public and plan to work in close collaboration with the Nouns community, through co-creation workshops and consistent feedback loops via Discord. We will be running a beta test of both the iOS and Watch applications to identify bugs early and other deficiencies, in the aim of increasing build quality and level of polish before launch.

Team

Collective DAO is a liquid super team made up of friends building playful, useful, and beautiful products with the crypto communities they love.

We’re really excited to focus our creative energy on Nouns (our fav NFT project ).

Inspired by Nouns DAO origin story, we assembled a dream team of experts to bring the Nouns app vision to life. Our goal is to make this the best and most enjoyable NFT and Apple Watch app.

Introducing the Nouns x Collective team:

Rainman, the project lead, is an experienced founder and product leader. He has over 10 years of experience building world class consumer apps. He’s the founder of an award-winning app studio that was acquired in 2016. There he launched several highly regarded apps including top ranked iOS and Apple Watch apps featured in an Apple commercial and ranked #1 in Health, another that ranked #1 in Utilities, another that ranked #1 in Education and another that ranked both #1 in Utilities app and #2 top overall. These apps have been downloaded by millions of people and have appeared in the New York Times and Wired Magazine.

Krish is a technical lead with over 15 years of experience building software products for humans. His passion for product development is based on the belief that technology can be a driving force of positive change in the world. Career highlights include professional work in games, social media, ecommerce, and fintech, with companies like Shopify, Zynga, Bitmoji, Kobo, and Questrade.

Ziad has a master’s degree in Computer Science, and is a Senior/Lead iOS Software Engineer with nearly 12 years of experience in end-to-end software development life cycle from architecture design, development, testing, and support. Ziad has built the most popular water tracker on iOS, Water Minder. He’s worked on complex problems like integrating features of the eBike system at Robert Bosch to turn the bike into a cutting edge smart bike. He developed solutions to fix the unreliability of Bluetooth RSSI level using LEDs to act as Li-Fi. He extended Google’s PDFium library to support a custom render driver device using C++ for importing PDF files into the vector graphics editor.

Mohamed, is a junior iOS engineer and designer based in Toronto. He started building and designing websites as a freelancer in middle school which helped him build an appreciation for fluid user experiences. Inspired by Apple, he moved on to building out iOS apps and was lucky enough to be a WWDC scholarship winner in 2018 and 2019. Since then he’s worked at a health tech startup called mettleAI as a full stack engineer, primarily focusing on iOS, building out the first versions of the app and backend. More recently, he’s interned at Shopify for 8 months followed by an internship at Apple - both for iOS dominant roles. On the side, He’s working on a better version of GoodReads, a weight lifting / fitness social app, and has been experimenting with AR as well.

Shawn is a multidisciplinary designer with more than 14 years experience in user experience, research, and interface design. He’s built products for the NFL, Twitter, Humana, Deloitte; ran product at an AI startup; and worked on smaller e-commerce, fintech and crypto products. Shawn also has a background in computer animation, graphic design, and strategic foresight.

​​Matt is a multidisciplinary researcher and designer with over a decade of experience in the field of product design. He specializes in human centered design, systems thinking, and various approaches to using design thinking and other frameworks/methods to solve complex problems for his clients. With a background in Industrial Design, Matt has built extensive expertise in digital design and customer research, using these skills to build digital products for clients like Google, Facebook, Autodesk, as well as a number of smaller crypto, fintech, and proptech startups.

Compensation

We ask that the Nouns DAO fund the design & development of this project. We also ask that they fund the maintenance and updating of these applications for a period of 1 year. All code and designs will be open-sourced and published to Github.

  • 90 ETH for design, dev, and deployment of the Nouns iOS & Apple Watch app
  • 10 ETH for 1 year of maintenance and up to 4 app updates including bug fixes and feature enhancement as well as an update for iOS 16 and WatchOS 9.
  • Payment to be made to the Collective DAO multi-sig
  • Proposed payment schedule:
    • 15% upon approval of the proposal, 15% after designs are completed, 30% once the initial beta is delivered and final 40% at launch
6 Likes

This is really exciting. Dev team looks very impressive and would be great to have in the ecosystem, and this type of project is perfectly in line with the type of thing I think will increase public awareness of Nouns, and something I would personally use.

3 Likes

Nothing but love for this proposal! While I know most of the early community will love this, it also feels like a great opportunity for non crypto natives to explore Nouns.

Big +1 from me. Thank you to the team for considering building on Nouns. We’re lucky to have you in the ecosystem!

1 Like

Can you address the likelihood that the app will pass Apple’s App Review? My understanding is that other apps that were used to display NFTs have been blocked.

Given the caliber of the team and that all builders are doxxed, I think it would be fine to go with a 100% up-front payment. If the community feels otherwise, I’d say a simpler structure: 50/50 up-front and on completion. This would prevent delays caused by the current proposal process.

2 Likes

Thanks for sharing this! It looks like Apple is taking a stance against storing and sending NFTs.That’s my read on this. I think we should be fine since we’ll be focused on exploring and viewing. We’ll also have off-chain Nouns (playground), this should make it clear to Apple what the intention and focus of the app are - it’s more of a companion app with the aim of making a fun experience around Nouns. I don’t think we even need to mention “NFTs” in the app description. From a risk mitigation perspective, we have some contacts at Apple and can use that relationship to try and get some clarity around the guidelines. And we also have the option of scoping out any problematic features, if it comes to that.

2 Likes

nothing but good things to say here. imo this proposal is a (literal) game changer and we should work to get it on-chain as soon as possible and support the team however we can

3 Likes

I like it and rhink ir’s a great idea. But, why just Apple? Why not Android too?

1 Like

What an exciting proposal! Love it.

However, I’m concerned about having an expenditure that uses such a high percentage of our treasury at this point. I’d be very supportive if we had projects up and running that were generating income, and we will. It feels premature to spend our $ on fun stuff, (albeit fantastic PR), statues, and charity BEFORE we are successful at monetizing our position.

I advise patience. Let’s put our focus on strengthening the Dao in a sustainable way, then do the fun cool stuff when we’re on terra firma. :slight_smile:

Idea: if you own the noun you have on your Apple Watch, what if you added a blue verification checkmark (or a symbol to indicate you own it that’s aesthetically pleasing)? Would be a cool way to “flex” lol