Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Arthur C. Clarke’s third law. Also, our name.

✦

We’re a small indie studio that has been making iPhone apps since the App Store first opened its doors. We write the technology. You decide whether it’s magic.

Pick a card

method: plain HTML, a little CSS, nothing up our sleeves

A small demonstration

Pick a card. Any card.

Act I

It started with a card trick.

In the summer of 2008, Apple opened the App Store to outside developers for the first time. In that very first wave of approved apps was Magic Card: the first magic trick app ever made for iOS. (Brilliant trick. Less brilliant name.)

Apple hadn’t yet decided what to do with an app whose whole job is to fool people. Sorting that out took help from none other than Steve Jobs himself. Magic Card was approved, Apple featured it, and it did well enough that Dylan quit his job as an artist, went back to college, finished his degree, and has worked as an engineer ever since.

Hence the name. Clarke said sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic; we started out using advanced technology to do actual magic. The tricks have gotten more sophisticated since then. The goal hasn’t changed: make something so good it feels impossible.

The company

Starring

Co-founder · Design & creative

Dylan Malone

Leads design and creative direction. Traded a career as an artist for engineering, thanks to a card trick, and still insists every trick has to look as good as it works.

Co-founder · Engineering

Justin Noel

Makes the final call on the hard technical problems. When the trick has to work every single time, in front of everyone, Justin is why it does.

Fifty-fifty partners who have worked together for about fifteen years and shipped a lot of software along the way. Every good act needs one person to make it look easy and another to make sure it actually works. We take turns.

Coming attractions

Now in rehearsal

Name revealed

iKnew That!

A trivia game. We’re only revealing the name tonight; the rest is still up our sleeve.

Back where we started

New magic

A new set of magic tricks for iPhone, the kind you’ll want to show everyone. Details when the curtain goes up.

Nothing from Third Law Studio is on the App Store right now. The next act is in rehearsal.

method: not telling. Yet.