Tag Archives: mobile

Friday Links: Would you ever let your widows and orphans hang?

• Your must read, if you haven’t gotten to it yet this week: Interview with anonymous Facebook employee.
• If you can stomach one more decade retrospective, take a look at The Most Relevant Identity Work of the Decade from Brand New. It’s a quick, interesting read.
• Let ‘em hang: Orphans and widows, widows and orphans.
• Have you taken Pentagram’s What Type Are You test yet? The password is: character. I’m Cooper Black Italic. What are you?
• Guerrilla Marketing’s Newest Revolution: The traditional street-level ‘gotcha’ has been reinterpreted — and made more effective — through a digital lens
• Toy Lamp: 48% awesomer than you’d think.
• Why marketers must go mobile.

Google’s Nexus One

Many nerds waited with bated breath for the announcement of Google’s new phone, Nexus One, and it’s finally here! Wired already has a pretty in-depth review on the new phone and it looks slick. Mashable’s got a nice little bullet list of features.

And, best of all, Google has a fun 3D product tour for people who want to see what the Nexus One will look like in their hand.

As an iPhone user and devout Mac fangirl, I hope Apple’s paying attention. That threaded e-mail makes me jealous as does the dark interface. Sometimes it’s the little things people.

Agency Primer Notes: Mobile Web Design

If you missed Tuesday’s Agency Primer on Mobile Friendly Web Design, don’t worry there’s still time to sign-up for tomorrow’s primer (that’s Thursday, December 18, at 3:15 p.m. CST). Still can’t make it? Well, we have the second best thing the slides from the primer as well as a video you can watch to go along with them. Sure you won’t be able to ask your own questions, but you know that you can always contact us if you want a live-action private session for your agency, right? Well you can.

The slide deck:

And the video:

The Nerdery’s Mobile Friendly Web Design Agency Primer from The Nerdery on Vimeo.

Agency Primer: Mobile-friendly Web Design for Agencies

This week The Nerdery continuse its series of Agency Primers with Mobile-Friendly Web Design where you can learn what you need to get your clients’ big message to the small screens of millions of on-the-go web users.

RSVP for one of our public sessions held on Tuesday December 15th at 10:15 a.m. CST or Thursday December 17th at 3:15 p.m. CST. If you’re interested in a private session, the contact information is on the RSVP page.

This primer offers a one-hour tour of the things your agency needs to know about when it comes to making your web projects mobile-friendly. We’ll cover:

• Sizing up the mobile web market.
• Understanding the difference between mobile users and “normal” users.
• Technologies available to enhance the mobile web experience.
• Common mistakes brands make in the name of mobile-friendliness.
• Example implementations and cost estimates.

Sign-up today, it’s totally free!

Flash Apps on iPhone! The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

Yesterday at Adobe MAX, Adobe dropped a bombshell. In the upcoming version of the Flash Pro (Flash CS5), developers will now be able to export directly to iPhone. This isn’t an Adobe Flash Player on the iPhone, but rather full applications being exported to native iPhone byte-code. For a place like The Nerdery, it turns our army of Flash Developers into a potential army of iPhone developers. This has really energized the Flash developer community, but some of the iPhone pundits are starting to harrumph about the downsides as well. This also comes on the heels of the announcement of a product called MonoTouch that allows .Net developers to write native iPhone applications as well. It seems like everyone is finding ways to get their favorite programming language to work on an iPhone.

Personally, I’ve spent my first amount of time here at The Nerdery as a Flash/Flex developer until I moved to become one of our senior-most mobile developers. I have the unique position of spending *a lot* of time in both environments. Being in this position, I have some thoughts on the whole situation:

First off, the positives. It is much, much easier to write code in Actionscript (the language that drives Flash applications) than it is to write Objective-C (the language that drives iPhone applications). Ted Patrick, the Platform Evangelist at Adobe, released source code and a applications that, in my estimation, would take 3-4 times longer to write natively in Objective-C. Flash is king at animation and ease of development which will allow for people to make potentially great looking games very quickly.

Also, as hinted at before, the developer pool just grew exponentially. Before, iPhone applications were the realm of developers who wanted to climb the steep learning curve of Objective-C and it’s wonky syntax. Apple announced in late September that there were 125,000 registered iPhone developers. This number could easily grow into the millions now. This will drive down the cost of developing iPhone applications and make this space much more competitive.

So, if it’s faster and cheaper what could be the downside? Just like the old saying in project triangle – “Fast, good, and cheap — pick two,” this comes at the cost of quality. iPhone applications aren’t easy to make and there are a lot of nuances to getting an application just right. In the previously mentioned samples from Ted Patrick, a simple app of putting four circles on the stage and spinning them comes in at a whopping 3.7 MB. Adobe also pointed at seven applications that were developed in Flash Pro CS5 that averaged in size of 10 MB. This is in contrast to the size of the apps developed The Nerdery that average 2.3 MB. . . and I’d wager our apps are just as graphically rich as theirs and as full featured. Why is this important? At 10 MB, your application can no longer be installed over AT&T’s wireless network and your iPhone user needs to find a wifi hotspot or go back to their computer to download the app on iTunes.

It may be that file size is acceptable since your application is going to be large anyway. Using my personal iPhone, and handing it around to our other developers at The Nerdery, performance on these apps has been uniformly been described to as “less than ideal” and “there clearly needs to be some optimization here.”

Then there is the ugly. Apple isn’t the type of company that sits back and lets people circumnavigate the rules that they have laid out. Apple likes having the keys to the development kingdom and don’t like other companies playing around in it. One can see this in the fact that Apple creates new versions of iTunes seemingly just to break the ability of the Palm Pre to sync music with iTunes.

In the iPhone SDK agreement, Apple mentions that you may not “decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, attempt to derive the source code of, modify, decrypt, or create derivative works of the SDK.” So how will Apple react to this potential violation of the SDK? They have pulled apps that had Google Voice support, so it wouldn’t be unprecedented for Apple to pull these apps. Also, what happens if Apple creates a new firmware update that is incompatible with Flash apps? How responsive will Adobe be to changes in the firmware and releasing patches to Flash Pro?

It should be noted this is all speculation as well. Apple may have blessed this whole process and those concerns are moot. It just seems strange that Apple wouldn’t have been announced as a partner in all of this if they hadn’t.

This is very exciting new for Flash developers. If this is an approved way of developing apps, sign me up. However, until a release date for Flash Pro is announced or Apple comes out and says they endorse or disapprove of this method of creating iPhone applications, I think the only thing that we here at The Nerdery can say for creating iPhone apps in Flash Pro is “caveat emptor.”

Mobile TC user group welcomes non-nerds

Looking around but not finding a user group fit for developers and non-developers alike who are interested in mobile apps, Justin Grammens founded the Mobile Twin Cities user group in March. Programming experience is far from prerequisite for Mobil TC members and visitors – the door is open to anyone wanting to talk/learn about what’s possible on mobile platforms, including Android, Blackberry, iPhone, Palm, Symbian and Windows Mobile.

“Being more on the technical side myself, I somewhat jokingly said, ‘I want to have people at these meetings that are NOT like me,’” said Grammens. “I decided that if I were to form a group, I wanted it not to segment anyone. I wanted presentations on both technical and non-technical subjects, by people who were interested in mobile technology and allow for networking, companies and new products to grow. I wanted it platform agnostic and skill level/knowledge/interest agnostic as well.”

Having outgrown its table at a coffee shop, Mobile TC makes its Nerdery debut tomorrow evening (Sept. 15, 7-9 p.m.).

On tap: Alex Brekken will demonstrate on a high level the Palm WebOS and the technologies involved on getting going with development on the platform. Justin Grammens and Sam Schroeder of Recursive Awesome will show some differences in a trivial iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Palp Pre applications they wrote. And representing non-developers, self-proclaimed Nerdery senior account nerd Matt Albiniak will talk about how to make a paycheck as a mobile developer – come see if he also regurgitates some of what his ad agency contacts tell him about their ambitions for going mobile.

Want to make sure the Nerdery orders enough pizza for all? Then RSVP by replying to Justin here or by leaving us a comment. Same goes for those wanting to speak their mind – as mobile developers, users, interested parties, passersby – at an upcoming Mobile TC user group meeting.

Interactive marketing expected to trump traditional advertising by 2014

Everyone who works in the interactive/digital marketing space is sort of fluttery with anticipation and hope today. Why? Because of two studies released this week pointing to a huge increase in the interactive space over the next five years.

First came the Forrester Research that predicts interactive marketing in the US will grow to $55 billion by 2014 and includes this delightful nugget:

Unlike the last recession, digital marketing is no longer experimental. Now it looks more like advertising is inefficient, relative to digital. More than half of the marketers we surveyed said that effectiveness of direct mail, TV, magazines, outdoor, newspapers, and radio would stay the same or decrease within three years. In contrast, well over 70% expected the effectiveness of channels like created social media, online video, and mobile marketing to increase.

Following on the heels of the AdAge comes news from Forbes on Outsell, Inc.’s prediction that $65 billion will shift from traditional advertising to interactive.

Both articles are absolute must-reads for anyone who works in the interactive space — marketer, sales person, designer, developer, executive.

Where is my mind/smartphone?

Minnov8’s Steve Borsch buried the lead nicely in his article on the forthcoming iPhone 3GS – let’s skip on down to the last four paragraphs of his story,  “Smartphones — computers in your pocket — extend your mind and your reach”:

“I’ve been in conversations with educators about technology and social media — and about the current paradigm of cramming kids’ brains with facts — and my asking why we need to teach rote facts about the countries that surround, say, the Baltic Sea when it can be instantly looked up? Are there ways to focus on how to search, ways to seek and verify authentic material, and move toward an educational model that would assume an always-on, always-connected student population?

In our working world, enlightened companies are realizing that providing a solid and good experience to employees with access to information and work processes (and email, of course) allows the employee to access and deal with a task, communication or even an idea when they have a moment or when inspiration strikes, rather than hope that all that can be stored up and dealt with when they’re in the office.

Tapping into the streams of consciousness of people one follows on Twitter, reading blog posts and staying abreast of news and other information mean that all of us are more aware of the meaningful inputs of others in whom we find value.

Then there is just the simple utility of having movie showtimes, a dictionary, time zones, airfare lookups, stock tickers, and even games. This means that smartphones extend our minds, so that we’re no longer tethered to a desk for computer and Internet use in the same way that the mobile phone for voice made us free from a phone line.”

Read Borsch’s entire Minnov8 article reposted on MinnPost. 

Agency Primer Notes: iPhone Wrapup

Yesterday marked the first in our Nerdery Agency Primers series, this one centering on what a creative agency needs to know about the iPhone market in order to vision and pitch iPhone projects to their clients. Thanks to those of you who attended and we apologize to those of you who were turned away because of capacity (we were a little overwhelmed with over 50 attendees turning out for it).

As promised on the call, we’re posting the slides from the presentation here along with a list of links where we drew the data that we shared on market statistics and demographics.

Source Links

• 148apps
• Apple’s iPod touch sales double, nearly on par with iPhone
• Study: iPhone generates 43 percent of mobile web requests
• The Life of an iPhone App According to iPhone Ad Network
• What iPhone Apps Are Used Most? Hint: Not Games
• Apple Reports First Quarter Results

If you missed the Primer the first time around, don’t worry, you’ve got another chance. We’ll be holding the talk again next Tuesday, June 9th at 11:00 a.m CT. You can register using the form on the right or at event page at http://nerdery.com/iphone. This next event will be after the WWDC announcements so we’ll hopefully have plenty of new tech and insights to share about what’s next for the multitouch platform.

If your agency has a bunch of people interested in learning more about developing ideas for the iPhone platform contact us and we can arrange for a “private screening” of the talk.

Think Ink: Color Unleashed; an iPhone app created with And Partners

And Partners, a brand experience company in New York, had a cool idea for their client, Neenah Paper, Inc. They conceived and designed an iPhone app that lets users peruse color combinations to create palettes, shades and hues of their choice – and order paper samples.

When asked what he thought was cool about this project, The Nerdery’s Mike Woods got right to the point: “It’s a frickin’ iPhone app,” said the software development manager. “No, seriously, this app was amazing. We built some custom UI components, and built interface gateways to process orders and authenticate users. We also did some complex color calculations and other nerdery.”

Think Ink, a free iPhone application, helps users find colors using the Dewey Color System, the world’s only validated, color-based personality testing instrument. It scientifically predicts the recognized major psychometric personality factors without language – it’s practical application being a reliably quick reference tool for the correlated brand attributes of colors.

“During the creative process, the paper is often a decision that is left until the end,” said Woods. “This application was made to help a designer pick some simple coordinating colors for a given color and then offer recommended paper for the product to be printed on.”

“And Partners was a great partner. They provided very detailed wireframes and workflow documents,” added Woods. “These made it very easy to communicate about features and organize the project development. And Partners was always willing to listen to our UI and iPhone Human Interface Guidelines feedback. It’s great to work with a partner that can give you amazing designs and is willing to collaborate with you during development.”

“It’s likewise great working with a team of dedicated, competent, professional developers and project managers who are constantly striving to make the best possible application. Michelle, Jon, Minh and Blago are all amazing people to work with.”

Color me impressed.