<h4>How would you describe your company, and what are the apps you offer?</h4>
I currently have 4 apps in active development: Filterstorm (iPhone/iPad), Filterstorm Pro (iPad), Light Compressor (Mac), and Torii (Mac). Briefly, FS and FSPro are closely related image editing and workflow apps, Light Compressor is a cheap and limited HDR app for mac, and Torii ( http://toriiweb.com ) is a WebKit based web browser I recently made available publicly as a beta.

The vast majority of my time is spent working on FS and FSPro, but I enjoy working on Light Compressor and Torii, and will slowly but surely release updates to both.

[imageeffect type="frame" align="aligncenter" width="243" height="350"  alt="Filterstorm" url="http://thebeginnerslens.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/filter4.png"  ]<p>&nbsp;</p>

<h4>How many developers do you have on your team? Do you all work from the same location or are you globally based?</h4>
My development team is made up of me and my rabbit, Thor, working together in my apartment in Manhattan. The "storm" in "Filterstorm" is for Thor, being god of thunder. I tacked the word "filter" in front to make it photography related and easily searchable. Actually, the original name for the app was Pixelstorm, but that name was already taken by a Canadian game company. 

[imageeffect type="frame" align="aligncenter" width="243" height="350"  alt="Filterstorm" url="http://thebeginnerslens.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/filter2.png"  ]<p>&nbsp;</p>

<h4>Can you tell us about your flag ship app, Filterstorm and give us a bit of the story behind the app?</h4>
I started work on Filterstorm as soon as the iOS SDK was updated to include iPad. I think it was either the same day as the iPad announcement last January or the day after. I had wanted to write an iOS app for some time, but didn't really know what to do. When I saw the iPad reveal, though, I instantly knew I wanted to use it for photo editing. My goal was to create the canonical photo editing app on iPad—it's good to aim high—but I can't say I expected that, or even the level of success I have had. 

I released FS for free when iPad launched and turned out to be terribly crashy. The iPad simulator was a good tool, but it didn't manifest the same crashes as the actual hardware. Had I been developing for iPhone beforehand, I probably would have been much better prepared for the actualities of the hardware. Still, I got those initial issues cleaned up fairly quickly; FS was featured in the staff favorites section soon afterwards and rocketed up to a peak of number 11 on the top free iPad apps chart. At the time I was both ecstatic it was so popular, and annoyed that it happened right before the update when I started charging. In the long run, though, the additional downloads while free may have offset the short term monetary gain by helping to spread awareness.

I redesigned FS for Version 2 late last summer, then a year ago today (Sep 23) I added on the iPhone version with version 2.5. After seeing the results of the first week of iPhone sales I quit my day job and started work on a near complete rewrite with FSPro and FS3.

I've had nearly 200,000 downloads in total since April 2010. 

[imageeffect type="frame" align="aligncenter" width="400" height="250"  alt="Filterstorm" url="http://thebeginnerslens.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/filter1.png"  ]<p>&nbsp;</p>

<h4>What improvements will you be making to the app in the next update?</h4>
I've been hard at work on FSPro2 and FS4, bringing by far the most requested feature: layers. FSPro2 should come out fairly soon, then I'll begin work on the iPhone interface for layers and release FS4 once that's done.

[imageeffect type="frame" align="aligncenter" width="243" height="350"  alt="Filterstorm" url="http://thebeginnerslens.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/filter3.png"  ]<p>&nbsp;</p>