Mobile App Development

This week in class we had a guest speaker, Chuck Hudson from Control4 speak about mobile application design.  He was very interesting and gave a great presentation.

He started his talk by telling us that the term 'mobile device' doesn't just mean smart phone anymore.  The mobile device market includes phones, ipads, tablet, car displays, integrated pandora in cars, etc.

Key points from his talk:

• Android is growing much faster over the past 3 mo.  According to nielsen
• Android has taken over smart market in the UK according to guardian
• Ads are mostly for iphones or android
• Apps - some make money purely from people purchasing the app - angry birds
• Some free apps  - make money from ads - ie. you have to watch ad in order to get to the next level, etc.
• Companies are keeping track of what they sell through their apps (opposed to their websites)
• Mobile apps - about 1/3 of all apps never get launched more than once so companies and developers have to figure out how to make them so people will continue to come back to them.

       Looks , orientation, larger realestate with  tablets than on a phone

       1 screen on a tablet - 2-3 screens on a phone - so do you make 1 app or 2?

       Envision how customer will use - 1 handed or 2 handed, with thumb - thumb dynamics - where do you  position the buttons, etc.

• As a developer, it is very import to do some storyboarding - gives you an idea of the live of the app from beginning to end
• An app should do one thing really really well rather than do many thing kind of well

Balsamiq - use for app development - quicker  than omnigraffle - but omnigraffle good for storyboarding

Apple hig - for ios app development

Challenges - mobile - size constraints, etc

•  Device can always over ride the app
•  Support for multiple devices
• Great place to learn and gather resources:

          Google io conference
          Apple conference
                Most info is online if you can't attend

Android challenges - relatively young

• Because it is so open, you don't always know what you will get - support for different resolutions and sizes - 4 general sizes - 4 dpi of interface - combination of these 2 allows you to create a layout on different devices (scaling, button placement)

For Android App development, Chuck recommends using Eclipse

• Detailed instructions on android developers site
• In the early days if android, there was no graphical layout, but now there is.

ios - older, more mature - use xcode and instruments - for building an app

How will you measure success?  How many installs, how many upgrades, etc.

The future of Mobile Development is webbased mobile apps - could be the next big thing - html 5 is changing this area.

I loved hearing Chuck, it sounds like a very exciting field.  These days, almost everyday, you hear the phrase, "and there's and app for that".  It looks like the possibilities are endless.