The story behind MagicSteve is a little long-winded, and the conclusion has already been spoiled by the title of this post, but I will regale you with it nonetheless.

It all happened earlier this summer when myself and some friends found ourselves getting increasingly drunk at a Thai restaurant in Shibuya, central Tokyo. As one of the guys there was enjoying some success with his own iPhone application the discussion turned to the difficulty of making a splash on the Appstore. We were trying to figure out if there was any reasoning behind the success of certain titles while others, more polished and better ones lingered unnoticed at the bottom of the pile. The conclusion we came to is: no, there is no rhyme or reason to the Appstore at all.

During the increasingly loud and drunken conversation someone - I will say now it was me but alternate retellings may also be true - came up with the idea of making a quick, throw-away little app that might just fire up the viral success we all so crave; a little magic 8-ball application featuring none other than Apple CEO Steve Jobs, and, after shaking, presenting you with a collection of actual and imagined but funny Steve Jobs quotes. Bish bash bosh, charge a buck, profit! We laughed and annoyed the people at nearby tables coming up with possible quotes, some of the better ones being "I'll be there in a Flash!", the "plug-in unavailable" lego brick that has become the icon for Apple's refusal to allow Flash on its platform and an endless variations of single-syllable replies with "sent from my iPod Touch" signatures.

In the cold, headache-filled morning of hungover sobriety the idea had stuck, it seemed, and in no time a prototype was up and running. We spent an inordinate amount of time selecting the best actual Steve Jobs quotes for the little bobble-head MagicSteve to spout, that would still be relevant to its function as a magic 8-ball and...well... finished the app. Then, we looked at it and paranoia creeped over us.

What if Apple, or more precisely, Steve Jobs himself didn't see the joke? What if they saw it as a stick in the eye instead of the respectful tribute/satire of its most public figure? What had started off as a quick app to reap the riches the Appstore is purported to hold suddenly became an albatross around our neck. Swallowing hard and keeping our fingers crossed we submitted the application for approval by Apple.

And then we waited.

After about two weeks, the expected amount of time, though being on the long side, for the submission and approval process we received an ominous automatic email from Apple. Our application submission, it stated, has been delayed and if we would please hang on just a tad longer. Paranoid as I am, this fired my imagination in all sorts of wrong ways. I imagined a representative of the submission team, sweating and cowering, knocking on the door of Steve Jobs' cavernous office. He would turn around in his high-backed swivel chair, stroke a long-haired white cat, look at the app on his prototype iPhone 5, put it down and turning calmly to his employee say "kill them". I started looking out for helicopters and black-suited SWAT teams to burst into my apartment at any time. Being busy finishing off Piczle Lines these paranoid delusions didn't last long and the matter was pretty much put out of my head entirely within a few days.

Until we received another email asking us to speak directly to a named person at the submission team regarding the application MagicSteve. My heart skipped a beat. Was this the call where they'd be saying our developer license was to be revoked, our other applications pulled? I gulped and called the number provided. It didn't go through. It had seemed the person in question had shot off the email just before leaving the office on a Friday evening. On a holiday weekend, of July 4th. We weren't going to find out our fate until at least Tuesday. A long, sweaty and paranoid weekend followed.

When we eventually failed to make telephonic contact a few short emails were exchanged, which culminated in the polite statement: "The issue is with the basic concept of using Steve Jobs as the prognosticator in your application. Please revise it and resubmit without using any Apple Executives in this manner in the application."

Now it's not as if we hadn't expected this. We thought it was worth a shot anyway, and in the end Apple had not taken it the wrong way at all. We wouldn't, of course, resubmit the application with another, anonymous character, as the entire point of the app was to have fun with the abundance of Steve Jobs quotes out there, but in the end it was of course never going to happen.

For now the application has a home as an adhoc on my own personal iPhone, which I occasionally start up to give bobble-head Mr. Jobs a quick shake and get some sage advice. And the main lesson learnt here is, of course: beer and design brainstorming do not mix as well as you might think.

Sent from my iPad.

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