Morning

I met Chris Masterson when he was a summer design intern at Rdio. He was still in high school, and we hit it off immediately. After Rdio, I wanted to make something with him.

In October 2012, Chris posted a concept for a morning dashboard on Dribbble. I started building a working version of his design to show him.

That became Morning, our first app together as Tamper. I wrote the iOS app, and Chris designed it. We launched in June 2013, shortly before he graduated from high school. He then moved to San Francisco and started working as a designer at Facebook.

The idea was to bring the information you checked over breakfast into one screen: the time, weather, news, reminders, calendar, stocks, commute, or a countdown to something you were looking forward to. You could choose the panels that mattered to you and give the dashboard a color theme.

Chris's design gave each panel a different shade of the same color, with large type and simple symbols. The clock, weather, headlines, and appointments could share the screen without becoming a dense list. His theme explorations show how much of Morning's personality came from those color combinations.

Morning launched as an iPad app. Chris's launch announcement introduced the finished app, eight months after his original concept post.

The finished app kept the six-panel composition of Chris's concept. Each part of the screen had a job: a large clock, a list of reminders, the forecast, a headline, calendar events, or a stock quote. Completed reminders could be checked off right in the dashboard.

The theme picker folded out from the edge of the screen. Choosing a color changed the entire dashboard, with lighter and darker shades separating the panels.

We had just launched Morning in June 2013, and Apple had featured it in New & Noteworthy, when App Review called about our first bug-fix update, version 1.0.1. They wanted me to remove drag-and-drop panel rearrangement. Section 10.4 of the review guidelines prohibited alternate desktop or home-screen environments and simulated multi-app widget experiences. Apple applied that rule to Morning's movable panels and asked us to lock them in place.

It was frustrating to take away something people had just started using. I asked why Panic's Status Board could offer rearrangeable panels while Morning couldn't, and pointed out that ours even worked with VoiceOver. But to get the bug fixes out, I removed dragging and resubmitted 1.0.1 on June 24. Apple approved it that day. The dashboard remained, and users could still replace one panel with another.

Apple later made room for widgets through its own extension system. In 2014, iOS 8 let developers add widgets to Notification Center. By 2020, iOS 14 let people arrange widgets on the iPhone Home Screen. That shift makes the launch-week argument over moving Morning's panels seem especially strange in hindsight.

Apple featured Morning in New & Noteworthy during launch week. In August 2013, it selected the app as an Editors' Choice and gave it a large banner at the top of the iPad storefront.

Morning was installed on demo iPads at Apple's October 22, 2013 event at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, where Apple introduced the iPad Air and the iPad mini with Retina display.

The app's blue icon appears on the demo device in TechCrunch's hands-on coverage. Something that had started as a design Chris posted online was now on the hardware being shown to the press at an Apple launch.

Apple also asked us to make a special demo version of Morning for its retail stores. Beginning in November 2013, Morning was preinstalled on iPad Air and iPad mini demo units in Apple Stores around the world.

The store version had different requirements. Someone could change the panels or colors, then leave it for the next person. I made the demo restore its original panels and blue theme between visits. I also added backup weather and stock data so a failed connection would not leave the display empty. Later, the iPhone demo needed extra care around permission dialogs, which could accidentally trigger a reset.

Chris and I went to see it for ourselves. These photos include our December 2013 visit, holding an iPad running Morning right there on the store table. Other photos came back from stores farther away, including this Japanese version of the dashboard.

Apple included Morning in its App Store Best of 2013 collection, under Smart Productivity. It appeared alongside other apps selected by the App Store editors for the year.

We were exploring an iPhone version during 2013. The early designs kept the colors and information panels, but arranged them vertically to fit a much narrower screen. The theme browser let you preview a whole dashboard before choosing its color.

For the iPhone launch, we photographed Morning at the breakfast table, in a chair, and out in the hallway. These are a few outtakes from February 2014.

On April 10, 2014, we released Morning for iPhone as part of a universal update. People who already owned the iPad app received the iPhone version without buying it again.

The iPhone version carried the same overview into a screen you could check wherever you started the day. Each horizontal band held one part of the dashboard, with the time and date above reminders, weather, news, events, and stocks. The blue, green, red, purple, and gold themes carried over from the iPad.

Apple featured Morning on April 10, 2014, the day we released the iPhone version. It appeared in Best New Apps on the main iPhone storefront, with a Now on iPhone promotional tile farther down the page.

The iPhone Productivity page also gave Morning a large banner and a place in Best New Apps. The following day, it appeared in New Releases within Only on the App Store.

Apple featured Morning in App Stores across many countries, including in its Best of April roundup. These screenshots show a few of those features.

Morning was featured across the web, in magazines, and in video reviews. Uncrate recommended the iPad app for putting the day's information on one screen, with rearrangeable tiles and five color themes. In June 2013, CBS MoneyWatch covered it as a personal summary for the start of the day, and Gizmodo named it App of the Day. Cult of Mac reviewed the iPad dashboard, while iGeneration and ifun.de introduced it to French and German readers.

The iPhone launch brought another round of coverage. On April 14, 2014, Thorin Klosowski at Lifehacker welcomed the iPhone version. It also appeared in The Next Web. In 2014, TIME included Morning in its 50 Must-Have iPad Apps, and Macworld's App Invasion video walked through using it to organize the day.

Morning also appeared in Spirit, Southwest Airlines' inflight magazine.

In January 2015, Thorsten Schröder reviewed Morning for ZEIT ONLINE. The review also called me "one of the brains behind Rdio," which was a flattering stretch.

Morning also appeared on TODAY in May 2014, in a Tech for Moms segment. The presenters showed the blue iPad dashboard in close-up and on the studio table.

Watch Morning on the Today Show, the 1:02 Morning excerpt, or the longer 3:42 segment, Today's Tech: Mom Tech. Both are on Tamper's YouTube channel.