Willow Tree Apps

A look at CottonCandy

Charlie Fairchild

The cotton candy computer was announced around December 2011 and ever since I have been anxiously awaiting it’s release. For those of you who have not heard of it, the cotton candy stick is being marketed as a usb size computer that allows you to put Android or Ubuntu on any screen with an HDMI input or on anything that supports usb mass storage. I’ll let you look over most of the specs yourself but here are some of the specs and features that caught my eye

• It can be controlled from your phone or a bluetooth mouse/keyboard.
• It can play 1080p video
• According to the administrator on the forums, the operating system is installed on the sdcard and can be switched out easily. This sounds like it would allow for custom android builds.

While the device is sure to be more of a hobbyist’s toy at first, if the setup is easy enough and the hardware holds up then I could see this device becoming more mainstream. With the ability to make any TV “smart”, it makes one wonder if this could substitute for the advanced features that the state of the art TVs now ship with. Add in the fact that I can take it with me on vacation and it sounds even more tempting. Of course all this depends on the device actually shipping. While they haven’t shipped the first batch yet, pre-orders are supposed to ship this month and the company has said that it will become available for everyone by the end of the summer. While it may be difficult now to have your favorite apps and movies available on any screen, things might be a little different by the end of summer.

Pebble and the Future of Mobile Platform Extensions

derekbrameyer

The recent hype surrounding the Pebble Kickstarter project prompted me to do a quick investigation into the genius behind the concept.  Pebble is still funding as the largest Kickstarter project ever, with plans to ship 60 to 70 thousand watches in September of this year.  Recently they’ve catered to community requests and are adding Bluetooth 4.0 capability to the watch.

Wearable technology has been a popular concept for some time now, but no one has really gotten it _right_.  Time will tell whether Pebble will see widespread success, but the significant number of backers solely on Kickstarter might be an indication of what consumers want.  Previous platforms like the WIMM offered smart phone capabilities on a watch, but it looks like consumers are more interested in an extension of your mobile device.

Pebble has a lot of amazing things going for it; first of all, they have experience in the field, having released previous wearable technology to some success.  Secondly, and most importantly, they have significant community backing.  The Pebble forums are abuzz with feedback, and the Pebble team appears to be actively monitoring how the community feels.  Finally, the Pebble team is releasing an SDK to allow developers to create their own novel applications for the watch-phone combination.

From a developer standpoint, the SDK is far and away the most interesting thing that the Pebble team is working on.  I think the ultimate end goal for the mobile developer community is a single SDK that allows universal interaction among any number of networked devices (be it Bluetooth, WiFi Direct, etc.).  The Pebble SDK will likely be tailor-made for the watch hardware; while it’s a very important first step, mobile extension hardware will really start to get big when there’s an easy way for developers and manufacturers alike to communicate among devices and support a variety of hardware.

Apple may be a great bet here, as they already have a single stack of hardware: iPhone, Apple TV, iPad, and even iMac/MacBook all communicating together is already feasible.  This hardware, however, is still too general; what’s really missing is an open SDK to facilitate communication among very specific hardware applications.  It’s a lofty goal, but one that would aid hardware manufacturers and mobile developers alike.

Good Design

Tes Tabilas

What is good design? Some may argue that design is subjective and simply a matter of personal taste. Or is it? Design serves a purpose and use, therefore good design is useful design. One of my takeaways from the MoDevUX Conference I attended late April is as user experience designers, what we create must perform in response to human needs.

So with that said, does beauty and aesthetics matter greatly in a successful app? We all want to release state-of-the-art apps where the visual representation is key and the app has been tested by usability experts to ensure a friendly-user experience. Ideally, yes all the above is what makes an app successful. But what if we just focus on the basics? What if we focus on simply user experience?

The little details matter to me. Minuscule parts of a view can be worked and reworked on with subtle differences, and most people probably would not even recognize the change. Yet, time and time again, hours pile up and I end up with a result that can always be reworked aesthetically. I received a different perspective out of mobile technology and design from Sze Wong’s talk, UX of the Third Kind, at the MoDevUX Conference. The interface of this kind does not necessarily have to be sexy because what is more important here is the use.

Mobile is big. (We get that.) We tend to think that mobile devices are luxury items, but mobile is making a wave in third world countries. Third world countries need the technology and these mobile devices more than the developed world. Sze questions “How can we let someone who has never touched a computer to use a solution with no training? How can we design a system to share data without any internet/cell infrastructure?” For more information view Sze’s case studies and ikapadata.

As designers we are very involved in how our product looks. It is all about the appearance, but what is the bigger picture here? I’m not saying it isn’t important to pay attention to those little details when designing. Our goal here at the end is to help the user. We want to create an experience worthwhile, and although the visual greatly matters, there are more important needs in our world.

5 Factors in Mobile App Localization

ron.duplain

Nous avons créé cette appli. We built that app, in as many as 16 locales in a single app install. I’d like to share our experience, to help understand the costs and requirements in building a mobile application for internationalization (i18n) and localization (L10n).

First, some context. Our mobile applications start with a detailed UX/UI design. These designs include pixel-perfect layouts and assets, copy for articles and documents, and microcopy for the various dialogs and buttons throughout the application. A successful localization process must take the entire design into account — it’s not just a matter of translating text.

Ready for an international audience? Here are factors to consider:

1. You need translators. That’s a given, but a good workflow in managing content across your target locales is essential! You can save on costs by passing around Excel spreadsheets between content owners, but this kind of unstructured process will incur costs later on. Mistakes in the spreadsheet will slow down development, and copy/paste in Microsoft Office can sometimes lead to inconsistent or unusual character encodings, which cause infamous unicode errors.

A good workflow will support the quality control process, the next two factors:

2. Translations do not always fit within the initial design context. A button which says “OK” in English might prefer a different dialog workflow in another locale. Counting “2 out of 7 total” is reversed in some locales, translating roughly to “7 total, currently 2” where the numbers are reversed.

3. Translations do not always fit within the initial design layout. Translating copy could kill the pixel-perfect layouts in the design, where a one-liner in English could be four lines in German. This is especially challenging when image assets include words which must be changed in another locale, which can force the translated image to change dimensions.

4. Accept the OS’s localization setting. Do not circumvent it. You might be tempted to add a language/locale selector to your app, and you might find a developer willing to implement it. Don’t. Both iOS and Android are doing an impressive amount of work to choose the right text and assets when displaying your app. Any attempt to build this into the application itself will not only be a lot of work to build in the first place, it will work against the OS, break unexpectedly, and cause a headache for everyone involved (and the OS developers will not have sympathy).

This means you’ll need devices on hand which have the OS configured to allow selection of your target locales.

5. Note the increased app size of localization. If you deploy one application across all target locales, it will include the text and assets of each locale, no matter which one is used. This is by design; it lets the OS figure it out depending on the user’s system wide setting. If your user only uses one locale, they have all of the other supported locales sitting around taking up space, with a larger initial download.  This is especially important if your application requires translation of its images.  Note it’s much simpler to publish one app with all locales, than to try to distribute your application to each locale individually.

When you publish your application internationally, note export controls on encryption software, including HTTPS (which many apps have).

Best mobile app development company in the world!

Tobias Dengel

SourcingLine, and independent research company, just ranked WillowTree Apps as its number one mobile development company among its list of top app design and development companies in the world.  SourcingLine gave us best rankings for our profile, portfolio and references across iPhone, Android, Windows Phone and other platforms.  Check out the the SourcingLine top rankings of iPhone, Android and other mobile app development companies here:  http://www.sourcingline.com/research/top-mobile-application-developers

Smart companies must build apps (and “one API to bind them all”)

Michael Prichard

Living Will iPad App Development Review

Tobias Dengel

Check out the very nice review of the iLiving Will iPad app designed and developed by WillowTree.  We feel it’s by far the best app out there for creating a living will:  http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/create-living-loved-ipad-web/

Apps for Venues goes live with Sprint Center

Tobias Dengel

TV station covers new Valpak Apps

Tobias Dengel

WPIX did a great story on the new Valpak apps, and couponing in general. (WillowTree helped design and develop the Valpak iPhone, iPad and Android apps)…..

Great analysis on the future of mobile and apps

Tobias Dengel

Henry Blodget delivers some great slides on how fast mobile is growing, where it’s going and how the app market came out of nowhere and is exploding.  Worth the read:  http://www.businessinsider.com/the-future-of-mobile-deck-2012-3#-1