The app is super-simple to use; In fact, simplicity is a feature. We put a lot of thought into this, and wanted to share the process behind this.

There are a number of bus apps out there; Some, like the official one is probably mandated to support many different kinds of commuter – the casual commuter, the everyday commuter, and the visitor. Others focus on the various bus routes, and take a map-centric approach to commuting; All of these are important useful features.

But, as an everyday commuter, I find myself needing 10% of those apps, with the other 90% “in the way”. I wanted something “for me”.

So, we challenged ourselves – how do we make it simple to use for the everyday user. I was the straw man. I use the bus every day. If I didn’t need a feature, it was out. This was a cold approach, and we believe the app is better for it.
There were a number of things I set out at the start:

1. I check times pretty much every time I go to use a bus. This needs to be the primary focus of the app
2. I know where I am going – I don’t need maps
3. None of the bus stops I use regularly are termini, so the timetables are irrelevant guesswork
4. I rarely change the stops I use, but it may happen from time to time – obviously I need a way to edit them

The app that sprang to mind was the Weather App bundled with the iPhone. No need to tap anything – Tell it once what cities are of interest, and all I ever need to do is open it. There is no reason why checking my bus times should be different.

So, we came up with “My Dublin Bus”.
When opened, it automatically grabs the real time information for your stops and displays it. No tapping, no finding of favourites – Just give me the information already.

Main Screen

Adding stops is a snap. Other apps ask you to search by stop number, route number, address and so forth. Why? Just find as you type with My Dublin Bus:

Find as you type

And, as we mentioned – The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, we have had some feedback from people suggesting adding feature x or feature y. We consider every request; we really do. But if we feel that a feature may jeopardise the simplicity, we’ve elected to leave it out.

Sometimes, less is more.

Do it.

Zartis is a social recruiting tool to help growing companies attract and hire great people; Think of us as a talent magnet.

We’re constantly trying to find creative ways to help high tech companies grow their teams. So paid ads on LinkedIn and Facebook often comes up in conversation.

The attitudes run something like this:

“You’re in LinkedIn and probably thinking about your career so it’s a good time and place to get someone’s attention.”

“I’ve never clicked on one of those ads.”

“The jobs displayed in LinkedIn definitely get your attention.”

As the saying goes: “I know half of my advertising budget is wasted, but I’m not sure which half”. Pay per click helps answer that, so we ran a simple test.

We created a Facebook ad for a freelance writer. After segmenting the audience by geography and demographics there were about 20,000 people in the target audience.

Because I’m writing this you can probably guess that we didn’t find our writer.

We created two variants of the same ad as a simple A/B test. The ad was seen by about 4,000 people, on average 5 times in one week. Four people in total clicked through. None applied for the job. Maybe I write lousy ad copy. It was pretty disappointing. We know Facebook can work extremely well for job referrals. See here for a quirky case study.

Total cost of experiment $1.60. Teacher’s comment: “Needs more practice.”

Now, one our customers, Tapadoo, is looking for a mobile app developer. That’s one of the hardest roles to fill pretty much anywhere in the world right now. We tried to help by creating a LinkedIn display ad campaign.

The job had already been tweeted by some high-Klout individuals. There were about 300 page views generated from the twitter traffic. But no applicants yet.

We set the ad to a target of 26,853 people, based on the very granular segmentation offered by LinkedIn. Two variants were created for A/B testing. In one day there were 17,189 impressions and 4 click throughs resulting in one applicant.

Total cost of experiment $11.03.

What does this tell us? Not a huge amount sadly because our R&D budget is so low. The laws of small numbers are dangerous.

If we stretched the numbers and spent $1103 buying 400 LinkedIn click throughs would we have got 100 applicants? That could potentially be very powerful.

If you’re reading this with £10k burning a hole in your pocket let me know and we can find which half is not wasted.

From Dermot, Tapadoo:  By the way, the job is still open.  So if you’re interested in working with a great mobile app development company; go take a look here

It was overwhelmingly positive; There’s the odd mention that people should get some perspective, or leftfield swipes at the fanboys (fanbois?), but generally it was people wanting to thank Steve Jobs for the products that have made a change to their lives.

I understand that many see these tweets as pointless, or out of kilter with worse events going on around the world, but I understand it.

You see, different people have different heroes. Your heroes change throughout your lives; I know a girl who cried when Ayrton Senna was tragically killed, many weeped over Robbie being ejected from Take That; the tears of joy flowed when ‘King Kenny’ returned to Liverpool.

The point is this; we laud individuals because of talent. We build our heroes because of their talent.

– Driving Formula 1 Cars.
– Singing Pop Songs to 50,000 people at a time.
– Scoring goals, then being an even better leader off the pitch.
and even
– Making great products, that for some unknown reason, the owners don’t just like, they love.

So. When Steve Jobs announced his resignation, great software developers, brilliant designers, gadget lovers, techies..us…We felt the need to say thanks.

I’m not gonna apologise for that.

Jason brings a wealth of server side API development experience to the company which will further strengthen our offerings; We all know that Apps are rarely standalone; A server side element is often required; Sometimes our clients have existing APIs, often we build them for them.

When not writing code, Jason is a keen gamer, reader and movie watcher.

Find him on twitter as @jasonconnery. I hope you will join me in wishing Jason all the best.

I’ve worked on a PCI compliant secure credit card store in the past, so I’ve some experience, and there’s a number of unanswered questions.

In a PCI compliant secure credit card store, you do not store credit card numbers in the clear – you must encrypt them. Encryption is easy (or rather, by standing on the shoulders of giants, it is) – Pretty much any platform offers you robust encryption libraries. The hard part is securing the key(s) used to encrypt/decrypt the data.

In the system I worked on, we used a dedicated hardware security module (HSM). This was a piece of hardware that was military grade – it never allowed the keys to leave the system, and had all sorts of physical tamper-proof capabilities. Basically it worked like this:

1. The user supplies their credit card details
2. The software asks the HSM to encrypt the data on its behalf
3. The encrypted data gets stored
4. When the system needs to use a credit card (i.e. take a payment), it supplies the encrypted data to the HSM and asks it to decrypt it
5. The decrypted data is used to make the payment, and never stored

The security lies in the fact that the keys are secured, and cannot be obtained. If the database is compromised, the data is useless without a key; assuming you’ve used a large enough key, you’ll need a supercomputer to find it by brute force.

Sony have stated that all accounts have been compromised. This suggests a database dump as opposed to some ongoing “trace” to retrieve credit cards in the clear as they are being used. So here’s the questions I have

1. Was a database dump stolen?
2. Were the credit cards in the stolen data encrypted or in the clear?
3. If they were in the clear, why?
4. If they weren’t in the clear, has the key been compromised? If so, how?
5. The same questions apply to users’ passwords

Of course, here’s another possibility:
The credit card data was encrypted and the key wasn’t compromised; Sony did everything right, but are using full disclosure to tell the worst case scenario. After all, a criminal with the resources to breach a major corporation may well have a supercomputer at their disposal.

Answering the above questions could put a lot of minds at rest.

No it isn’t.

If you’re a journalist and you write a prophetic article on the iPad killer you are either looking for attention from trolls, or are dumb.

I wrote about the “iPhone Killer” last year. Nothing has changed, and all the arguments remain the same.

Move along now, nothing to see.

Related: I’d love to have a product that everyone writes is about to be trumped by a new “killer”. Its a sure sign you’re doing it right.

Hey. Isn’t that what we do?

So, we put aside a day a couple of weeks back, and invited a highly recommended talented graphic designer Feargal Halligan to join us in coming up with a concept and entry.
The morning was spent brainstorming, while the afternoon was spent wireframing and doing graphic treatments. The evening was spent writing …and we put our entry in.

And earlier this week, we got a call…

to say we’d won!

We’ve just come from the announcement. I’ve an electric car for a month, beginning in January, and ESB love our ideas.

I’ll post on some pics later.

See ? This is what happens when you have the right people on your team.

People who use Apple’s Keynote to give presentations give better presentations.

There. I said it.

There’s more to this. I’m not suggesting that Powerpoint is a lesser tool than Keynote. I’ve my thoughts on this, but this is not the point I’m trying to make.

If someone arrives to a presentation, and he’s carrying a laptop, he’s going to use powerpoint. This presentation may be good. It may be bad.
If someone arrives to a presentation, and he’s carrying a MacBook, he’s most likely going to use Keynote. The presentation is overwhelmingly more likely to be good.

Of course, I’ve seen great presentations given using Powerpoint, and rubbish ones given using Keynote, but these are both their own exceptions.

Why is this? To me its a question of taste.

• If someone has gone to the bother of switching to Mac, they’ve done this consciously. And usually, they’ve done it because they prefer the experience. If they’ve learned Keynote, they’ve gone to more effort again. (Look: we’re all switchers in Ireland. Macs really were niche for many, many years).
• So, my assertion goes like this. If you’re using Keynote on a Mac, you’ve got taste. If you’ve got taste, you’ll put more effort into your presentation.

I know there’s arguments that the software should just support the talk, blah-de-blah; I’m just sayin’.

And so, I’ve watched this over the last two years or so, to see if my theory holds true.

It does.