iPhone, iPad and Windows 7 Phone Apps At ConvergeSouth
October 01, 2010
Brian Hitney StructureTooBig Blog and Jeff SanGeorge @jeffsangeorge spoke on iPhone, iPad and Windows 7 Phone 7 apps.
Windows 7: Brian is from Microsoft and had a phone with Windows7, he talked about Metro. How the device's interface's is designed. There are a lot of colored icons that are easy to see. The icons stand out. The idea is to make the phone glanceable. You can pin any number of these tiles to your start screen. MS made the hardware consistent, if the hardware is inconsistent, its a lot harder for the developer. Problems for developers in testing across all the devices.
Two flavors of applications. You can use Silverlight, or xna. xna is the development platform for developing games.
What Makes An App Cool?: Relevancy to your life. Feel and user experience. Ease of use. Humor, the MBTA app if you shake the phone will state that will not make your bus come any closer.
Pricing Apps?: Perceived value. You can sell app's for as low as $0.99 an app. The app called "I am rich," only eight people bought it costs $999.00. Market has completely changed, allows entry into the marketplace by people who are not professional developers.
Successful Apps: Red Laser, you scan the bar code and the app finds retail locations near you with the same products. Star Walk - an interactive astronomy guide, let's you point your phone to the sky and pan the phone and chart the stars. Shazam - a music discovery engine, help you find sections within the song. You can access other data from other service providers to use with your app. Bump - A way to exchange business information, phone, number, social media, etc. Sleep Cycle - monitors your physical movement in bed, and tells you the best time to wake up.
iPhone Features: Front facing VGA camera, 5MP camera for HD video recording. GPS, accelerometer.
3rd Party Platforms: AppMakr pulls fresh content from RSS feeds. MonoTouch - a mini .Net framework. Code in C# instead of objective C. Titanium create iOS apps with html, CSS, Javascript. PhoneGap - Open source framework to build cross platform mobile apps. If you develop through a 3rd party can you sell on the Apple app store. Yes, you can, 2 months ago no, but Apple has a list of concerns you need to watch. Today you are really targeting the Apple app store, so when designing make sure it works for the store.
Bin33 Wine Case Study: Waiter has an iPad, built to use with safari using kiosk mode. Restaurant introduced an app and because people interacted with the app, it increased wine sales and satisfaction. First looked at the SDK, found this to be a good business model. If he had to distribute this through the app store, it would not work. The app is really just for the restaurant. Bin33 wants the wow! factor. It does cost more than print, but there's a big wow! factor. Just an added benefit in increasing wine sales, by letting people explore the wine more. The more people learn about wine, the more wine they buy.
Advantages of Web Based Apps: Jeff suggests that to get all of the functionality on the iPhone you need to develop a native app.