Schönere Apps verkaufen sich besser! from Dr. Stephan Gillmeier

My good friend and colleague Stephan shares his deep experience in the creation of gorgeous looking graphics and animation.

Key message: It’s all about the experience! From the first encounter with the product though to daily usage and beyond.

According to Stephan, Interface Builder (the drag and drop UI designed built into XCode) on its own is not flexible enough for the creation of truly stunning UIs. However, Apple provides APIs which enables programmatic realisation of such interfaces: QuartzCore, CoreGraphics, CoreAnimation.

Stephan shows how – with relatively little programming effort – subtle but profound improvements in the UI experience can be achieved.

To finish up, he recommends that as much up-front preparation of images as possible should be made. The reason for this is that despite the power of the aforementioned APIs, their use comes at a relatively high cost in terms of computing power. Graphics can be prepared in advance using tools like Keynote, Photoshop, Preview.

After seeing this presentation I feel both inspired and empowered to make big improvements in my UIs. Still, it’s not clear to a geek like me how one comes up with ideas in the first place. I remain convinced that not everybody possesses an aesthetic sense. Not everybody is like Stephan G or, for that matter, Steve Jobs.

Thomas Dohmke @ashtom presents “Der nächste Crash kommt bestimmt” = “The next crash is guaranteed”

This is a highly technical talk, the primary focus of which is how to capture crash data.

I won’t go into the details here but, speaking as an iOS developer, I found Thomas’ hints and tips extremely useful.

Anyone who’s developed apps for iOS knows that the typical stack trace is all but incomprehensible. Furthermore, now that stack traces are being generated on mobile devices, the potentially valuable information that the stack trace provides should not be kept secret.

Thank’s to Thomas, I have now learned about a number if tools, services and techniques which can be used to tap into this treasure chest of information.

To name some of these briefly:

AirBrake, Bugsense, HockeyApp, JIRA Mobile Connect, TestFlight, PLCrashReporter, atos, symbolicatecrash, CodeRunner.

This was my talk and so I can hardly deliver an objective opinion regarding content and other quality attributes.

What I can say however, is that the questions raised during and at the end of the talk were very interesting. I even received a couple of of personal compliments – with no questions attached – which is (a) very generous; (b) received with extreme gratitude.

Should any of the participants read this post… please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or suggestions.

Thanks to everyone who came and thanks to Stephan Gillmeier for giving me the opportunity!

“Prototypen im UI-Design” from Werner Jainek (Cultured Code)

Werner comments that books on UI design don’t emphasise the design process.

The Things app won Apple Design award.

Key points:
- Communication/interaction with the user
- Iteration: required to move from vage ideas to something useful

Werner correctly observes that programming the UI in order to get user feedback is expensive. This is especially true of iOS apps. In prototyping, just as important as time-savingis the avoidance of concern with irrelevant details. Prototying enables you to focus on the “essential”. Therefore: Start with paper prototying.

Trade-off example: Safari on iPad: Use tabs (quicker) or use the “desktop” (more intuitive) metaphor? iOS5 moved to tabs.

Werner describes some of the iterations that the Things app went through.

Interesting is that the ideas – from iteration to iteration – are actually quite different. It’s important not to be afraid to throw away stuff that doesn’t work.

Be aware, Werner says, that the 80/20 rule doesn’t always work. The rule being: If 80% want the feature it’s in; otherwise, don’t bother. You need to be aware of who the 100% is. Finalcut: The 100% is the movie editing professionals – or at least those that want to edit professionaly. Here is not appropriate to exclude features because they’re not required by 20%.

Now Werner takes up through several aspects of the iterations, which were experienced during the development of the Things app.

Introduction from Sebastian Meyen, Chief Content Officer of the conference.

States the main theme of the conference. Roughly: “The mobile revolution is over. Now we’re in the middle of a “mobile transformation”. Why? Because the expectations of today are that Mobile services deliver real substance and business value; forthermore, user-expectations have increased dramatically.”

For example, app designs must address very specific use cases. Functionality must be focussed on this. There is no room for “ok” usability. Furthermore, technology must be performant, robust, secure.

Next up: “Jetzt gibt’s auf die Ohren: Sound wird Mobile” with Maks Giordano

Maks delivers a nice reminder how mobile voice has developed over the years. Lots of nostalgic pics previous generations of mobile devices. Maks reminds is that sound one of several factors important in the user-experience, the importance of which is being demonstrated by many recent apps.

Next up: Manfred Lutzky of Fraunhofer IIS

Frauenhofer responsible for Mp3 and AAC-ELD.

Manfred talks about full-HD voice: Up to 20’000 hz, which means it sounds like you’re hearing the sound directly. AAC-ELD is a full-hd codec. Facetime (apparently) uses this.

Interesting observation: Conventional phone or any sub-20’000hz audio quality relies on the human brain’s capacity to compensate for ambiguities resulting from the information loss. This requires an effort – even if subconscious – to process. Improving sound quality therefore improves the user-experience in a very profound way.

Next up: Philipp Eibach of wahwah.fm Nunatak

Presents wah-wah fm. Philipp critices the modern music experience: It has isolated listeners from one another. The Wah-wah app enables different parties to hear the same music at the same moment. It’s a a kind of decentralised personal radio.

Next up: Michael Breidenbrücker of Reality Jockey Ltd.

Michael describes the mobile device as music platform as opposed to player. Cool demo: Uses his iPhone as a mixing desk by rotating, shaking it etc. In “jogging mode” the beats adapt to the rhythm with which the device is being bounced. Very nice! Reality Jockey worked on one aspect of the “Inception” app – an app based on the movie of the same name.

The central concept is to adjust the music to the environment in realtime.

Michael describes how some early concepts arose before the social Internet wave. But it turned out that was too early. The culture changed and now the kind of experience this app offers matches user-expectations perfectly.

All in all: This was a great kick-off for the conference. Inspiring ideas and concepts. A great mix of academia and coolness!