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

This surprised some people, as they thought we were solely an iOS development house.

In fact, we’re a lover of all good mobile platforms, and specialise in native app development on iOS, Android and Windows Phone. Although we see less demand, we can also do Symbian and Blackberry development.

We’re really proud of our DoneDeal release; It’s beautifully crafted and has a few nice features.
A personal favorite is the “pull down drawer” for advanced filtering.

DoneDeal App for Android

We gave a talk at the measurement.ie conference (slides here), and in it gave some insights into the Done Deal app on android. See the presentation for full details, but here’s the cliff notes from around 3 weeks’ worth of being “in the wild”

• It has been accessed by 35 unique firmware versions of android
• We’ve seen 145 different devices access the app
• By usage of the app, the top 4 devices are all Samsungs
• Number 5 is a Sony Ericsson

The interesting thing is also how the firmware versions and devices break down. At our talk we showed how 2.7% of the DoneDeal for Android base use their device in Polish. 2.7% is an equivalent audience to:

• 35 of the 45 Firmware versions
• 110 of the 145 devices

The last interesting statistic for DoneDeal for Android? Android version 4.x “Ice Cream Sandwich” accounts so far for 0.83% of the usage. This doesn’t come as a surprise, nor do I think this is a concern. It is probably best explained by our earlier post on that topic

Got an Android Device? Get the app here

Every time you have something to say, no matter what that is, you have to deal with an Android power user who wants the latest version of Android on their 6 month old device.

I didn’t have to look far on the Samsung Ireland Facebook page for this:

So let me make this simple:

If you run and Android device, chances are you are not running the latest version. You can scream and scream at your operator or device manufacturer, but it is unlikely to happen

Here’s why:

Imagine you run the Operating System section of an Android handset manufacturer. You are tasked with building the operating system for your next device.

Now, in order to get this to market, you need a target that isn’t moving. So you grab the current stable version of Android from Google, and you get to work to make this work on your hardware. You do a ton of tests (and this is a LOT of testing); resulting in tweaks, patches and fixes, enhancements to take advantage of your cool chip, and so forth.

Then, you go to sell it; Your clients are mobile operators, who want very specific things added to their build. Simple stuff like reskinning, up to specific apps added as they need. So for each of your customers, you need to add some code, and so carry out per-customer testing.

During this time, Google have added enhancements to the operating system. Your choice now is to try to re-merge this, or release the stable, tested version you’re happy with. This is a no brainer choice. Even if you were to re-merge, the target could have moved again, so you simply aren’t going to do it.

Now imagine your device is out in the market. It has sold 1 million units, in multiple countries and on multiple operators. Google release “Neopolitan Truffle With Flake Topping” (or whatever they call the next Android O/S). Do you
a) Pull the new version, merge back in your changes, test, and then on a per-client basis merge their changes and test again, risking the possibility of releasing a bug which affects your 1 million clients ? or
b) Leave well enough alone, and keep the new version in your back pocket for the next device that you are already working on?

Exactly

I’ve never seen a brilliant app written in a cross platform way. And take a look at the apps that have grabbed recent buzz. Do you think Path or Flipboard ever considered a cross platform toolkit? I think not.

And, then I often get told that the answer is HTML5. One page rendered the same on all devices.

As Wayne was known to have said

“Shhhhyyyeaaah”

Look. Browsers differ, implementations differ, and as a result the output differs. Web designers all over the world still shudder when people mention internet explorer 6. The hacks to get web pages working across browsers was always an issue; and we’re being promised that we won’t have this in HTML5.

Or, as Wayne was known to have said

“And monkeys may fly out my butt”.

How do various browsers support html elements ? Well take a look here.
Wow. There’s a lot of red and green in there. Even a few sort ofs, “incompletes and almost.

How about CSS ? Well, lets look at that.
Oooh. We have yes, no, incomplete and buggy.

Wanna use some HTML5 advanced features. Sure. Go ahead. Just make sure you consult this first, mmmkay?

I know you want basic information, and you want wide reach, using HTML5 is a solution. However the promise of “it will work everywhere” may not be as true as you’d like it to be.

If you want a slick app, that shows your company, brand, service whatever in its best light, do yourself a favour and stay native.

I love new interesting projects. This is a case in point. We already knew the guys in Samsung Ireland; After all they preloaded 2 of our Apps on the Galaxy S-II; We’ve been regular attendees at their developer events, and also at the odd product launch.

This time, they came to us with a challenge – They had a launch a couple of weeks down the road, and wanted something nice on the night to manage the guest list; Could we do it?

After our initial chat with Samsung, we had a quick brain storm. The brief was well…brief. Here’s what we knew:

• The launch was going to be a high profile affair, with irish celebrities, models, etc. present (ok that ruled us out from attending!)
• They location was Krystle Night Club. A well known, high end night club in Dublin.
• They wanted to replace the usual on the door clipboard with a tablet device
• They needed to pre-populate the guest list.

So, we brainstormed and came up with a concept we felt worked well; We called the night club management and spoke to them about how they typically made reservations, what happened when people cancelled, turned up with more people, etc. We visited the night club, and got photos of the various seated areas of the club, we took notes on their occupancy, etc. (Yes this was the boring part).

We wireframed and set to work, and the day prior to launch we had “Velvet Rope”

Velvet Rope allows the Night club owner to take reservations and choose where people will sit. It shows at all points occupancy of each section, and overall occupancy. It allows the host on the door to check people against the guest list; It all syncs to a central server, so multiple devices can run throughout the club (multiple entrances? no problem!)

Velvet Rope runs on Android Honeycomb. It is beautifully designed; It simplifies the job of guest list management. and it does it well.


Oh, and on the night, there were some great publicity shots.

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.