SeattleParks App
Team Danielle Gatsos & Corey Christiansen
“Don’t miss the adventure that’s just down the street!” – Seattle.Gov Parks
With 400+ city parks, 100+ state parks, 180 King County parks, two national forests and six national parks; the Seattle area is full of more than enough natural resources to attract the 1.9 million that live within King County and those who visit. Most of us live within 30 minutes of lakes, rivers, hiking and biking trails, play-fields, golf courses, playgrounds, skate parks and amazing views!
Unfortunately, in order to locate our nearby parks we have to search several different sites, download a couple of apps or drive around all day. Seattle’s outdoor enthusiasts need a mobile application that helps them locate parks that fit their needs. They need an app that opens directly to a map of parks in their location and gives them access to information such as directions, hours and if there is anything else they need to know before they go. There is an inherent need for this app to be mobile because many outdoor enthusiasts are very active and often need access while walking, driving, riding in buses or even on their boats.
My 9 week exploration into the iPhone App Market
[Image via Intomobile.com]
This past summer I took a MCDM Mobile Applications course that focused specifically on researching, planning, developing and marketing an iPhone app. When I put together my goals for this class, I hoped to learn about both the iPhone and Android platforms but now that I’ve completed the course I’m glad we focused specifically on the iPhone market due to the complexity involved. Read more
Hitting the jackpot with an iPhone app
One of the most important topics we’ve covered in the MCDM Smartphone class I’m taking has been getting our apps in the hands of people who need them. When I began this course my main goal was to learn how the overall development process works and after listening to all of our speakers I’ve become even more intrigued with how one person or a small team can create a strategy, code and successfully market an app to a large audience. While skimming technology blogs I often come across stories of such success but never understood until now how few people actually hit the jackpot. The iPhone app market is as far as I can tell an unparalleled market that can look like a desert oasis for developers hoping to make a quick buck.
Back in June some of the press turned sour when Apple announced that it had just passed $1 billion in revenue paid to developers and $1.43 billion in total app sales. While this seems like an impressive number to some, Tomi Ahonen, a writer for The Bright Side of News equated this out to be on average $6,355 per app (over two years) in his article Are iPhone Apps a Failed Business Model? Although this is just an average, it’s definitely cause for concern if you’re planning on investing a significant amount of money or time into developing an app. Read more
Optimizing app development strategy to optimize profits
Much of the content we’ve studied so far in the MCDM smartphone class I’m taking has been centered around optimizing all of the different elements of a smartphone application development strategy. Even if your not in it for the money, optimizing your strategy will consume the least resources and save you from wasting countless hours. There’s obviously a long list of things you can go do to ensure you’ll get the most out of your investment but I want to focus on the five that I believe are the most important. These tips should be helpful no matter what platform your developing for (I often reference iOS because it continues to be the most popular).
1. Solo, small team or large group-
GeekSpeak: Mobile Gestures
For my MCDM Smartphone GeekSpeak presentation I’ve compiled a brief presentation describing the basics of gestures on Apple, Nokia, Blackberry, Andriod, WebOS and Windows Phone devices. I’ve also included some examples and what I think are the next steps in gesture recognition. Read more
Mind Mapping Smartphone App Ideas
App Idea: GovCast
Audience: Reporters/journalists, gov workers, educators/students, people who watch C-Span
Purpose: Ability to watch public videos from all branches of gov.
Competing Apps: C-Span Radio (iPhone), The White House (iPhone), NASA App (iPhone)
Possible Sponsor: Gov grants
GovCast could provide anyone with a smartphone the ability to watch videos from a wide variety of gov databases that may or may not already be available online. A small data center consisting of several video encoding systems would be required to standardize and compress the audio/video. A script would also need to be written to parse through XML meta data. Read more
A few above average iPad apps and some that need work
In this post I compare and analyze one application from three different categories that I use daily and three of their competitors that could use some work.
Above Average:
DropBox for iPad | App Store (free)
DropBox is essential because it lets you easily share all types of files with all kinds of devices. It provides excellent central storage for files that you regularly access. One thing I recently learned is that it’s possible to transfer files from DropBox onto your iDevice internal storage so that you can open them in other programs and access offline (i.e. loading PDFs into iBooks).
The ever-changing development strategies for smartphone apps
I’ve recently had the pleasure of reading through the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines as well as several other articles related to iPhone development strategies and I want to explore how these strategies are changing based on the growth and innovation or other mobile platforms. Several months ago I read through the Windows Phone UI Design and Interaction Guide and I’m somewhat familiar with the resources that provides a basis for developers interested in Windows Phone 7. In this post I want to focus on examining how smartphones are becoming more and more similar in-terms of developing a strategy for an app and on how Windows Phone is integrating with other devices. Read more
3 sites for the latest mobile developments
Here are three online resources for communication professionals who want the latest developments on mobile. I’ve been watching these sites for several months now and have been quite impressed with their posts. Read more
