As many of you, I’ve always loved —with a few exceptions in the Apple dark era—products designed by the Cupertino company. When I was a 20 something, I couldn’t afford to buy a Macintosh Classic, so 20 years later I started collecting vintage Apple hardware. I loved the idea to own a piece of computer history design. Thanks to eBay and some friends I got a couple of Macintosh—Classic II and SE—, 3 Powerbooks—165, Wallstreet and Pismo—, a Newton, one colorful iMac, an Apple Writer printer and an Apple IIe. When the first iPhone was released back in June 2007, I bought one as soon as I could find a friend of mine coming back from the USA.

That iPhone is still one of the favorite pieces in my small collection: it is beautiful, and it was clear it had the potential to change the mobile world forever.

MacWorld 2007

The iPhone was cool, but the coolest part has been the birth of an entire new ecosystem when Apple opened the App Store one year later. Soon after the iOS SDK was open to developers, thousand of them began to learn how to code these new “apps”” and hundreds of thousands apps showed up in the App Store almost overnight.

Creating an iPhone app has never been an easy task though. You need to learn a lot of things before you can start creating even a simple app. You need to master the process of creation, the iOS APIs and Xcode of course—the IDE provided by Cupertino.

Xcode is a powerful development environment that runs on MacOS. It comes with an iOS simulator to let you test your app while coding, and it is not the smartest software component ever created by Apple. The main problem complained by a good part of the developers community is that the development process centered around “Xcode + iOS simulator” is pretty slow. Part of the reason for its slowness is that the iOS simulator has been built on top of the Apple UIKit. Try it by yourself: searching on the Internet you can find tons of programmers that complains about both simulator and UIKit performances. Apple did a lot during the years to improve the development process, but there’s still lot to be done in this area.

A fast and seamless app development cycle is the first thing that every developer wants at the end of the day, because the most boring task you can experiment as a programmer is writing a hundred lines of code to create your “Hello word” app or waiting until you app wakes up after you pushed the Run button. I had the same feeling in 1992, when I was teaching myself coding Windows applications using C/C++ 7.0.

In 2013 Marco Bambini — the creator of Creo — and a small team of pioniers decided that is was time to change the way things used to work and Creolabs was born.

A bit of history

Marco’s goal —as a developer—was to make programmer’s life a lot easier —not just a little bit better—and because he has been a Mac developer since System 7, he tackled the most pressing issue for every software developer in the app era: making iOS development simple and fun—maybe for the first time in history.