The App development blog of Simon Monk, CTO of Meme IDE the cross platform development tool for Android, WM and IOS apps. free download from www.memeide.com

Thursday 13 October 2011

Android Open Conference October 2011

This was a great conference. Well organised with a good range of talks.

I found the cross-platform talks particularly relevant and interesting given what we are doing with Meme IDE. For most of our current customers using rugged-brick-phones the emphasis on design and elegance of the user interface, would frankly not be their top priority. However, for some of the software builders there, this is a reason not to use any cross-platform IDE. And understandably, the subtleties of design are clearly paramount for a consumer app.

Interestingly, in LinkedIn's talk by Kiran Prasad on their cross-platform development, the presenter sited a design rule of breadth < 4 and depth < 3 so that the user does not get lost. I tried to think how this would map onto some of our field service applications with a complex workflow and lots of information to collect. We rarely have depth > 1, but in some places we have chains of next / previous buttoned screens that are 10 or more steps wide.

Other interesting talks that add to this argument were:

* Design, Building and Architecture for Twin Towers: Android & iOS by Bess Ho
* Cross-Platform App Development with Flex Mobile by Stephen Chin
* Awesome Apps and Agile Development by Dan Clifford

Its a different world. So the question arises, is our next step with Meme IDE to make it more 'consumer capable' and relevant to this more general market? or do we stick to the customers we know and sell it as a premium field service mobile development kit?

Tricky!

Wednesday 12 October 2011

Droidcon 2011



I had not been to one of these events before and I was pleasantly surprised.

The 'bar camp' is a great idea. Those who wanted to talk about something stood up at the start of the session and pitched for it. Then the rest of the first day was broken out into three tracks for the sessions that were voted in. In fact I think all the talks were voted in.

It produced a big range of talks, and yes many of them were promotional (including mine), but there were also some good technical discussions. This included a good talk about using Aspectj to weave Google Analytics code into an Android app without filling the codebase full of fluff. I would love to be able to tell you who gave the talk, but I cannot find the Barcamp speakers list on the conference website anywhere.

This event was full of consumer app developers, working on shiny devices. Where do we find our target audience of 'rugged-handheld-computer' users who are stuck with Windows Mobile 6.5 but see an escape route through Android?

They must be out there somewhere. Or, maybe they are not, and we just need to make Meme IDE more consumer oriented.

A penny for your thoughts.

Wednesday 5 October 2011

Droidcon and Android Open


I'm really looking forward to an Android, Android and Android end to the week. I will be attending Droidcon in London tomorrow and Friday.
Then I'll flying out to San Francisco at the weekend to speak at Android Open. for info on my talks check the links below.




 Hopefully see some of you there.

will be tweeting all the way through @theappmonk