5 Questions With Jerry Bowerman: CoFounder of sonarDesign

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I sat down with the co-founder of sonarDesign, Jerry Bowerman, to ask him some questions about sonarDesign and the interactive design and creation service, Mako. Jerry has an extensive background in gaming and technology, which helped launch the idea behind the Sonar platform. Read on to learn more about Jerry's background, why he started sonarDesign and Mako, what opportunities he sees in the industry and what he does with his free time (whenever he gets some).

 

 

When John Talley and I met in 2010 we were both trying to build something online and we couldn’t find a comprehensive solution. We both needed a way to create an app, host it, distribute it to end users, collect money from them, study end user behavior, promote our app and provide customer support. It seemed like a pretty basic idea but the more we looked the more we realized it simply didn’t exist. We decided to create the Sonar platform to make creation free and available to everyone. The Sonar platform enables people to do everything with just a modern browser.

 

 

Let’s start with the obvious: Adobe Flash is dying and taking a whole creative industry with it. Adobe would tell you that Flash isn’t dead because you can still export the final product into various formats, including HTML5. But where does that folder of exported files live? It needs to be on a server somewhere, which requires help from IT.

 

Now suppose within the Flash experience it asks a question or gathers any kind of feedback. That needs to be stored somewhere. And what if the author wants to know how many people viewed her creation and how, exactly, did each person interact with it? Well, the author needs to learn how to hook up Mixpanel or Flurry. We believe when boxed software is reimagined as a cloud service the resulting opportunity is much, much larger. This is where Sonar comes into play.

 

 

Talk to any interactive designer creating for the web and they will tell you all the difficulties they encounter daily when making cross-platform experiences. Back in the desktop-era, they could rely on Adobe Flash to maintain aspect ratio, font, color, etc. However, every single browser handles layout and fonts differently. The only way to make sure a design is faithfully reproduced on each browser is to draw each pixel on the browser Canvas. That means not using CSS or DOM. It also means writing all of those systems from scratch. That is exactly how games are built, which is fortunate since we have a long history of making hit games. We knew if we hired senior developers from the game industry we could create a rendering engine, font system, event system, data-binding, properties, etc. and give control back to designers. They get to focus on making their experiences engaging and beautiful, not on configuring machine instances and databases.

 

 

I’ve built a variety of software systems over the years and games are by far the most complex. If you really look at what Sonar is and all the systems it requires, it is basically a browser-based game engine. It requires things like font systems, rendering engine, event management and animation. The vast majority of the code we write is never seen by our customer. I don’t think I could have understood that and invested so deeply in Sonar, if I didn’t have experience making games. I also think it was a helpful firsthand experience to understand that platforms take time to develop. It’s not something you can crank out in a weeklong hackathon.

 

 

Wait, I’m supposed to have a life outside of work? No one ever told me . . . I spend a fair amount of time with Boy Scouts. I’m Assistant Scoutmaster for our local troop and also the Training Chair for our district. I have two teenage boys and much of my time involves what they find interesting. Whenever I can sneak away to our exotic game ranch, I enjoy watching the animals and fixing whatever broke since my last visit.