Hasta La Ideas

Reporting by Yin Ho

Fast Track to the Mobile App winners had the ‘best case scenario’ track: get their apps developed, tested and in the Marketplace by early February in time for promotion before (and hopefully during the) Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. However, sometimes life throws wrenches in the best-laid plans. In this installment, we continue reporting on the next steps of the app development process, implementation and testing, and check-in on our winners—both those who are developing apps themselves and those working with Microsoft developers.

To be on track for Barcelona, a contestant’s next step is implementing the app’s core functionality. For each app, that will differ. Geof Harries and Michael Johnson’s cash flow management app, Cash Hound, requires financial functionality so they programmed the ability to add, edit and delete income and expenses in order to run calculations to determine spendable income. They then created charting tools to visualize that knowledge. With that functionality in place, they tested the app to see what worked, and in light of that, what needed improvement.

The testing phase can only take place on a workable prototype (discussed in our last article). Implementing the aspects that make the app functional mean dealing with the real-life problems that may arise. The time for theoretical conjecture is over: at this stage, developers are considering specifically the “hows” and “whats” to best bring the app’s concept to life. Pratik Kothari’s Social Mints tracks what’s being said about a chosen topic of interest (e.g. your company, a celebrity, a sports team, etc.) by fetching data from social media sites. Kothari focused on the core functionality of the app’s responsiveness by improving the sluggishness he initially encountered. He reworked the architecture so a filtered set of results would now fetch from a cloud component, making the initial download of information smaller and faster. Cacheing mechanisms were applied so when multiple users searched for the same topic (aka ‘Mint’), quick response times would be maintained.

Testing makes any necessary modifications to the interface more obvious based on the app’s actual use. Visual elements that don’t fully serve core functionality will be adjusted so they do. Then, more testing, testing, and still more testing. This may mean removing or adding data to test how the app behaves in every imaginable circumstance, and finding and fixing bugs. It’s in this phase that an app developer sees the last holes in the app’s construction and patches them up.

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With our Fast Track to the Mobile App winners, there are two parallel lines of development: those who are working with Microsoft developers, and those who are doing their own implementation/development. In this installment, we’ll take you through this initial phase of taking the app from concept to reality, highlighting steps that anyone interested in designing and implementing an app would take, and give you some background on what the winners are doing specifically.

Contestants were asked to submit up to five screens and a description of the proposed app, with the option of adding supporting documentation such as a video or presentation. Starting with a strong conceptual and design foundation for the app, the next step for existing or potential developers is to build out to a workable prototype. This might translate to different actions depending on the circumstances.

For Social Mints, Pratik Kothari’s app provides business users the ability to monitor social media mentions of their brand, interests or other pertinent topics (e.g., customer service), that meant considering the judges’ feedback on the use of ‘Mint’ and the visualization choices. In response, he bolstered the metaphor by clearly tying each keyword to a mint; he considered different visualization patterns, and settled on one that he felt would most clearly display the data. To think through the app’s interactions, Kothari created wireframes to map out the user experience of the app; these then contributed to the creation of any remaining screens. He’s at a point where he can look at the different cloud-based services that allow for Social Mints to fetch real-time data from various social media sites.

Geof Harries and Michael Johnson, the designer and developer behind Cash Hound, a business cash flow management app that quickly determines how specific costs can impact your bottom line, moved towards building a workable prototype by focusing on the back-end first. Their app was formerly named Rhythmatic. When the winning team found an existing iPhone app with the same name. Even though the app had a completely different usage (rhythm/music gaming), they chose to change their app name to Cash Hound in order to avoid confusion and allow for freedom to develop the business app on different platforms. The core functional concepts will remain the same, but the visual design (colors and textures) will change a bit.

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In less than two weeks, judges start reviewing design submissions for the Fast Track to the Mobile App contest—an international Windows Phone app design challenge. The competition, launched last month by Core77 and the Windows Phone design team, challenges designers to create work productivity solutions tailored for the Windows Phone. The contest theme addresses the work we often find ourselves doing on our ubiquitous little computers (i.e., smartphones) and asks designers to consider how we might do it more effectively.

Applicants design the face of the app—no coding or further app development necessary—and enter anything from sketches to full color comps along with an app description. We’re looking for great ideas and designs—we’ll help the best ideas get built. Part of the prizing is to encourage our winning and finalist designers to take these great ideas and, if they need, pair them up with experienced Windows Phone developers so that these apps don’t just stay concepts, but are actually made and launched in the Windows Marketplace, with revenue going to the designers and developers who made them. We’ll be following the development process as the winning designs are transformed from concept into reality, and are launched in the Windows Marketplace. Our hope is to get as many thoughtful, interesting designs that we can, launched and out into the app world.

The Windows Phone 7.5, Microsoft’s most recent mobile product and platform, was released this September, and has been receiving uniform praise on its 500+ improvements from the Windows Phone 7. With the release of the new Windows 7.5 OS (codenamed Mango), and the clean, uncluttered Metro user interface, it’s been given the critical “thumbs up” for doing a lot of things right, with the consensus being that it’s a worthy addition to the mobile marketplace. But, Microsoft’s ambitions for the phone requires that it grab a bigger chunk of users and app developers. Right now, Windows has some 30,000 apps available, nearly double their number from six months ago. Though the growth is impressive, for comparison’s sake Android has roughly 250,000 and Apple, 500,000. While Windows claim of having quality over quantity might be true, apps and app development are measures of confidence in a device.

Since it’s a recent release, conclusions about Microsoft’s sales performance in the mobile market are in let’s-wait-and-see mode. However, the phone’s design and functionality opens itself to some unique app possibilities. Live tiles can be double-sided and have multiple uses, and App Connect links search with apps (e.g., searching for fast food might yield a delivery app alongside other results). It’s getting praise for Metro’s out-of-the-box differences like its blocky, non-grid user interface and Window 7.5’s integration of features like barcode scanning and song ID into the OS. The Fast Track to the Mobile App competition encourages designers to experiment with Windows phone particular functionality in app development. For example, for Foursquare’s Windows app, they utilized the live tiles to pin ‘places’ and ‘specials’ to the phone’s start screen. The phone is also notably person-centric, meaning that communication is grouped by person rather than medium, so, your chats, emails and texts from your best friend are all grouped under her as a contact, along with her chat availability.

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