Oredev 2012 - Day 3
My third and last day at Øredev 2012 had some really nice talks, as well as a subpar one.
Jonas Birgersson – Tailwind/Headwind in the pursuit of the Fibre to All
Jonas was one of the Swedish IT Boom’s golden boys in the late 90s. I missed his talk, but will watch it. He’s not afraid to go his own way, which is fitting for this year’s rebel theme.
Felix Geisendörfer – The Power of node
Felix started using node.js in 2009. He decided to ditch the tech he used and went all in on it. To him, it was the right thing to do, although the bleeding edge is sometimes exhausting.
Felix’s talk was extremely entertaining. He used a Parrot AR drone 2.0, and used its api to control it from a simple site that he live-coded in node and express. The page fetched and displayed sensor data and current controls from the drone, then posted new controls to the drone from a simple web-based UI. Using sockets to control the drone, he made it attack.
This was a fun talk, despite some network problems that also affected other speakers. So Øredev, please give the speakers a private network next year.
Gergely Orosz – Building Highly Successful Windows Phone Apps
Gergely has created Windows Phone apps like CocktailFlow, WeatherFlow and many other apps. He was early on the platform and has found a nice design pattern for his apps, which have huge download counts on the Windows Marketplace.
Unlike Johan Lindfors previous session, Gergely’s talk focused less on tech and more on strategy. His talk touched on design, content, quality and marketing, all interesting topics.
When designing for Windows Phone, he thinks following the Microsoft design guidelines too strictly will not do you much good, since:
- Clean Design mostly result in boring design
- Celebrate Typography is most often applied by devs, using standard fonts
- Alive in Motion most often means that developers use standard animations
- Content, not Chrome results in boring apps
- Authentically Digital often end up in apps with no graphics, just gradients
I agree, judging from the many Windows Phone apps that I’ve seen. Gergely’s apps shows Windows Phone’s ability to provide fresh apps, that feel more modern than iOS & Android.
When designing for multiple mobile platforms, he adviced us to start on Windows Phone, then convert the result to the other platforms, to stick out in the overcrowded marketplaces.
When it comes to content, you can create your own content (like he did in his cocktail app) and/or using already existing content. When you create your own, minimize future pains by making content management as simple as possible. When using existing one, be careful to not use copyrighted material without permission.
The perceived quality of an app is the sum of all factors, from presentation to image & text quality, load times, animations, fluidness, crash stability, etc. Put effort into all these things. One flaw may cause people to see just that flaw, ignoring other qualities of your app.
The marketing part of this talk was awesome! Gergerly strongly suggested you to market long before the first release, using press releases, teaser videos etc. to make people wait for your app to be released. After the app is released, focus on getting coverage, tweak how you use freebies and promos and make sure that you put effort into getting featured on the Marketplace.
Gergerly urged us to (while it’s easy to say) think different. When building for the Windows Phone, learn from the ones that exist for iOS & Android. Since most apps are simple and beautiful, yours should be as well. Also, don’t try to be smart. If you find a simple concept that works, don’t cram more features into the app. Obviously, people use the app because they like it. Many frequent updates and features can actually make them dislike the app.
When it comes to monetization, Gergely adds a trial mode to all his apps from start, but disables it at first. When an app goes high on the charts, he disabled the trial mode. When the apps started to drop, he could simply enable the trial mode again, to attract new users. He also suggested give-aways with a twist, like adding bonus content in fun ways.
Gergely advised us to abuse the system in all ways possible. For instance, marketplace keywords could initially be abused to get high search ranks. If you see a feature that you like, but can’t understand how it is done, “just have a look at the source code”.
Besides this, he adviced us to focus on localization, both in the app and the Marketplace material (including the images). One of his apps was actually translated for all supported languages in the Marketplace. Kudos!
Lars Vogel – Whats hot in Android 4.0 + 1
Lars talked about news in the project generator, emulator improvements (host GPU, Open GL support, x86 virtualization, etc.), the new Gradle build system and how you now have one single API for phones and tablets, instead of the previous two.
Lars also talked about new components, like the ActionBar, Fragments, GridLayout (do not use table layout anymore), drag activities, TextureView, etc. It all looks pretty great.
Jeff “Cheezy” Morgan – Test Driven Android
I will keep this short.
Jeff should have learned a set of golden rules by now. Complaining about how terrible you find Android Test to be is OK, since it’s a large framework with a huge company behind it. Bashing on small frameworks created by one person and point out that “this framework was not maintained enough”, “this guy didn’t even test his own system”, “this code looked like crap” is NOT OK. Crappy session.
Hojun Song – From Collective Intelligence to Collaborative Creation
The final keynote was not exactly a disappointment, since I did not know what to expect. It however left me rather annoyed. I’ll try to explain why.
Hojun is an artist (as he tells us many times) who has made some pretty cool things, like a giant hand, an attention seeking apple that turns red when you take a photo of it, a big button that says “I love you” when you hit it with a sledgehammer etc.
This talk was about him wanting to build his own satellite. And yeah, I’m not impressed.
One of the many problems I had with this talk, what that when he started to talk about it, it turns out that many others were already building the same thing, while he seems to only be interested in talking about it, not working on it. I was particularly annoyed that he joked about the “serious Russian scientists” that helped him, while he just wants to have fun.
Why should we care about this project? Because Hojun is an “artist” who can back up the project with cool graphics and nice videos? Well, I don’t buy it. Hojun has worked on his satellite for a while, but most of the time he tours the world, talking about it and selling t-shirts. I don’t buy it.
Summary
Øredev 2012 was a fantastic ride, with some very high highs. I’m happy that I got the chance to attend this year as well.
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