Last Saturday I attended a meetup in Shinjuku from the Tokyo iOS Developer group. The organizer is Matthew Gillingham, and the group consists of experienced iOS engineers, designers and entrepreneurs.
In the first hour of the meetup, Matt gave a presentation to share the technical information he got from WWDC, briefing to us a bunch of new capabilities and possibilities with the upcoming version of the iOS. We then go on had some discussions regarding these new features and the future of iOS business. Here are some topics that I had discussed with the group.
iCloud and mobile Internet service — with the new iCloud and data storage/syncing over the web, will it introduces more trouble to mobile Internet service? I’m an E-Mobile user and is already suffering slow data transfer rate and occasional disconnection in places. With the promised push syncing with iCloud, I can only imagine more difficulties using the existing networks. Not sure about the U.S., but the mobile Internet over the cel-phone network in Japan aren’t very speedy to begin with, and the situation is probably going to be much worsened after the introduction of iCloud.
NFC and mobile payment — While Google and it’s developers are actively exploring the possibilities of mobile payment with the NFC technology, the next iOS doesn’t seem to deal with that issue. While we see third party solutions like Square who are trying to tackle the mobile payment demand, it’s a natural move for Apple to integrate the NFC and provide a smooth experience in the near future.
By the way, I recently notice increasing traffic to my previous mobile payment posts (http://www.calvin-c.com/blog/tag/mobile-payment/). Perhaps more people are interested in the topic now?
Prototyping, how designer and engineer communicate — surprisingly, this question seems to amaze everybody. I got answers like paper sketch and wireframing, PowerPoint for interactive presentation etc. A lot of “talking” is required as it’s the only effective way for designer to express the interaction between controls and views.
Yet, the way of “talking” is also tricky. Designer and engineer must have a common language in, for instance, describing the rich transitions of views and screen objects. Core Animation, Core Image, Open GL, UIKit, video buffer…these are hard-to-digest stuff designed for engineers but not the designers. So here’s a potential project to create an open-source dictionary of these under-the-hood technologies in layman terms for “normal people”.
I told the group about the recent prototyping app Prototypes, and they seem to be very interested about it.
The next XCode will hopefully coming with a “storyboarding” feature. Not a lot of people are talking about it at the moment, but I really hope that it’ll be as easy to use as the Prototypes app.
However I’ve learned about Flurry, the user interaction logging and tracking service that can be useful for usability testing of apps. It’s works like Google Analytics which programmer can include a lightweight library and tracking code into your beta or production app, and your interaction will be send to the Flurry server for later research and analysis.
Money — App Annie is the only service I know that can track and keep you some idea about the app market. However, what I’m looking for is a more powerful market research tool that can show number of downloads, estimated revenue, etc.
Some folks I’ve met at the event
- Matthew Gillingham (http://www.twitter.com/gillygize) the organizer of the iOS Tokyo Meetup and a seasoned iOS developer specialized in gaming, but he actually seems to know just about everything iOS.
- Peter Mac Innes (www.fluid.jp)
- Frederic Nouel (papanouel.com, 3rdkind-inc.com) from France
- Richie Nguyen (3psports.jp) who’d lived in Hong Kong for a few years
- Danielle Kelly (newmediaeye.com) a creative director and editor who’s interested in user experience
- Anthony
- John, engineer working for Nomura
- Gary, entrepreneur and the “idea guy” who’s interesting in financial app for iPad
