The App Clinic: Stopwatches and Timers

>>Reto Meier: Good afternoon everyone and welcome to The App Clinic. My name is Reto
Meier.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: I'm Ian Ni-Lewis.
>>Reto Meier: And today we are going to be looking at stopwatch and timer apps.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Now, just so you know today's kind of a weird day. We've got some people
out of the office sick, we've got some, you know, important meetings going on. So we have
a new engineer, engineer Joe.
>>Joe: Hey.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Joe is well known for his grasp of linear algebra and his oddly ethnic
last name. [Laughter]
>>Reto Meier: So thanks for joining us, Joe. You can tell that they're important meetings
because we're here.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Exactly. Now the truth is we did ask Alex to be our producer because
we thought with the beard and all-
>>Reto Meier: Absolutely.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: But here's what happened, really odd story. So Alex is a really, really,
you know, flexible guy. He does a lot of things. You ask him to do a Google IO presentation,
sure, you ask him to, you know, build a brewery with his bare hands, sure, no problem.
>>Reto Meier: Right.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Industrial solvents meant to be inhaled.
>>Reto Meier: Arc welding. Yep.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Absolutely. He can do all these things, asked him to engineer, deer
in headlights. [Laughter]
>>Reto Meier: I wondered why he was running down the street.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Indeed. So Alex is a man with a comfort zone and we have found the edge
of it.
>>Reto Meier: We've discovered it. It's taken us a couple of years but we have found the
edge of his comfort zone.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Good job.
>>Reto Meier: Yay us.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Alright, let's get on.
>>Reto Meier: Let's get on with it. So we're gonna take a look at some stopwatch and timer
apps today. Like always, our goal here is to not necessarily find the best stopwatch
and timer apps but to try and look at a few and see if we can help you guys out that are
developing your own Android apps to be able to take good apps and turn them into really
great apps. So, what are we going to have a look at today? Big black screen, wow, that's
going well.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Hm.
>>Reto Meier: That's going very well.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Interesting.
>>Reto Meier: That is very interesting. That's a key note not helping me out there.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Right, indeed. Yeah, we started doing all of our titles in key note because
it's so cool but now-
>>Reto Meier: It is doing very little to help us.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: that is sort of hilarious. I'm not really sure what-
[Music plays]
>>Reto Meier: Joe, you should just click back to. Clicking things you shouldn't have clicked,
I can hear. [Laughter]
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: There we go. There we go.
>>Reto Meier: I feel like this is gonna go poorly.
[Laughter] >>Reto Meier: Should have stuck with PowerPoint.
[Laughter] >>Reto Meier: So these are the patients we're
gonna try and take a look at today and we'll see how we go with our overlays but we're
gonna look at Yoga Timer, we're gonna look at Timer, Alarm, Stopwatch and Clock, Impetus
Interval Timer, Hybrid Stopwatch and Timer and the Ultimate Stopwatch and Timer. So we
can definitely see a consistency in naming there so that's something. So before we get
into it I'm gonna try another transition and see what happens. Yeah! So what we can see
here, straight away, is-
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Oh I'm just gonna screw around with other things, well the fact is the camera
is not pointed at us correctly.
>>Reto Meier: Oh, wow. [Laughs]
>>Reto Meier: So what you can see straight away when we look at today's patients is these
are the feature graphics. So we can see straight away that only three of our patients had feature
graphics; Hybrid Stopwatch, Ultimate Stopwatch and one of them doesn't have the name on the
feature graphic which is in and of itself not a bad thing. But what I really wanted
to highlight here is when I'm browsing through the market all the names are vaguely the same.
So I'm gonna try and pick something which looks pretty appealing before I get going
and straight away here, one that really stood out to me was the Hybrid Stopwatch which just
looks awesome. It's got a great feature graphic, it's got a great icon and the others really
didn't stand out so much and so I would, sort of, instantly assume that was the best one
just based on the way it looks. So let's, let's get started, I guess, and have a look
at the first of the apps which is actually going to be Yoga Timer. So, this is the page
that you see on Google Play when you go there. So, as you can see, no feature graphics, so
that's missing.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Let's talk about that for a second cause I don't think we've really
talked about that on the App Clinic. We've talked a lot about how you can make apps interesting,
you might wanna just go ahead and remove this overlay.
>>Reto Meier: No.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: No? [Laughter]
>>Reto Meier: Don't do that.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Don't ask Joe to do things. Hey look!
>>Reto Meier: That we can do.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Ah. Okay, rock on. Nice.
>>Reto Meier: Ah, I see you've put yourself in frame and now I'm off a little.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Yep.
>>Reto Meier: That's nice. That's awesome.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Well, uh, you know, producer Alex did-
>>Reto Meier: We can be friends.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Okay. Hey, I was way over here.
>>Reto Meier: I know you were. I'm not saying that, you know,
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: You know I was. [Laughter]
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: I have-
>>Reto Meier: I set it up. I spent time getting this right.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Alright. Here's the point. We've talked a lot about how to make a great
app on this show but we haven't necessarily covered the merchandising aspect quite as
much and there's a reason for that. We're not merchandising people but there are some
things that we can share with you about app merchandising that will really help you because
there's things that aren't necessarily obvious about how you upload your app into the Google
Play store and the most important thing, the thing that a lot of people get wrong, is failing
to include the giant feature graphic. There's one graphic, I can't remember if it's just
called X Large or maybe it's web or something but you'll know it because the dimensions
are giant. It's 700 by 500 or something.
>>Reto Meier: It's a big image.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: 1024 by, anyway, it's-
>>Reto Meier: It's big.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: It's the one that's really large and a lot of people leave that out and
they don't really notice it because the phone only uses that in one place. And the only
place that image gets used is if your app is featured, then that image will be used.
>>Reto Meier: That seems important.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: But, the web page for your app will use that as the main graphic. You
can see that the web page still fits together fine without a feature graphic, it just doesn't
look quite as good. But the important thing is we can't feature your app unless that graphic
exists. So keep that in mind when you're creating that graphic. A couple other things to keep
in mind are that the graphic does get scaled down for different devices. So on a very small
phone, for instance, that graphic that's, you know, 1,000 pixels wide may end up only
being an inch across. So you do need to make sure that your graphic is not only large but
legible at different sizes.
>>Reto Meier: Yeah.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Let's go ahead and move on.
>>Reto Meier: Excellent. So, we're gonna have a look at Yoga Timer so that's the first piece
of feedback for them is that there is no feature graphic. But let's have a quick look, so we're
gonna do this the same sort of format that we did last week, we're gonna have a quick
look through each of the apps and then we're gonna show you guys what we think it takes
to make a great timer and stopwatch app and then have a look at some of these apps in
comparison to each other keeping those prescriptions in mind.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Right.
>>Reto Meier: So let's switch to the phone cam if we can. Awesome work. See, Joe's doing
a much better job at this than we are.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Actually, that's true. Now, I spent my week drinking in Maui and doing
blow so Reto's gonna review these apps and I'm gonna sit back and have a Black Butte
Porter from Deschutes Brewery.
>>Reto Meier: Nice.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Go ahead.
>>Reto Meier: Let me know how that goes on. So Yoga Timer is an app designed specifically
around being able to create timers to do Yoga workouts. So you can see straight away we've
got a holo themed layout which is nice. Please add workout, so we've got a blank screen but
it's telling us what we need to do to make something happen.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Right.
>>Reto Meier: We've got an icon which has a little plus symbol which is kind of the
Android symbol for click to make something happen. So let's create a quick workout; App
Yoga. This is what we do before and after each show to loosen up. Let's see, pre show,
pre, well interesting.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Now one thing that applies to this app but it isn't necessarily a timer
app is it, it's more broadly applicable, a lot of times you see this thing where you,
this sort of behavior where you have to enter something or create something to get started
with an app and one of my pet peeves is this sort of behavior where I have to create something
and it involves typing.
>>Reto Meier: Yes.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: And I know that there are people that are more nimble fingered than
I am. Apparently some CEOs compose their entire annual report on phones.
>>Reto Meier: On phones? Wow.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: But for me, especially when I've just downloaded your app and I'm trying
to decide whether to return it or not, I don't want to have to sit there typing, maybe pre
fill those fields with something that sort of makes sense.
>>Reto Meier: Yeah. So it just gives you an idea of what the app is for, like a sample,
an example workout. Something like that I think would be a good tip.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Yeah. If you're, if you wanna go the extra mile, make that something that
will auto fill if you don't type but as soon as you start typing it'll go away immediately.
>>Reto Meier: Oh, I like that. So let's navigate in here. So, again, now there's a second step.
So we've got App Yoga, now we need to add a timer for that particular exercise. Oops.
Tricky for an angle. So they've got an interesting mechanism here for doing this. So you can
drag things along instead of having to type which is nice. I'm not gonna do a 3 hour workout.
Alright, so.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Although I am kind of curious why they don't just use the spinners.
>>Reto Meier: Yeah. It's kind of an odd choice. We're actually hoping to be able to speak
to some of the developers from these apps next week. So that's a question we might pose
to them. So yeah, keep that in mind if you guys are watching. So now we have an activity
and we have a timer for it. We can have multiple activities and multiple timers. And if we
click here things start to happen. Now we have the, you know, standard sort of countdown
timer. We can pause, got some kind of nice little animations in there for pausing and
resuming. We have it here in the notifications and, in fact, rich notification so that's
nice. That's basically all there is to so it's a fairly simple app for a specific purpose
and I know that the developer of this, this is pretty new, I know he was putting this
together hopefully in time so that we would be able to review it for the show. So, but,
you know, straight forward layout, you got settings behind the settings and the overflow
in the action bar, does what it needs to. The only sort of criticism is exactly as you
suggested. It's, you can't get started right away, you have to do text entry, text entry,
time entry before you can get started.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Yeah and we've seen this a lot in focus groups that we've done with consumers
is that they were very frequently only giving out 30 seconds or so before they decide to
get rid of it and you definitely need to grab them in the first few seconds. We get a little
jaded about things like tutorials and stuff like that but I think that if the consumer
is comparing a couple different apps, getting them into something interesting immediately
is paramount.
>>Reto Meier: Yeah.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: The only other thing that I'd suggest is that honestly, I found the
ad really confusing because it occupies the same mental space as the list items.
>>Reto Meier: Yeah.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: What do you think? I was gonna say this should maybe be at the bottom.
>>Reto Meier: I was wondering about that. The bottom is kind of a more standard place
for it.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Right.
>>Reto Meier: So that the mental cognition here it's like action bar and then ad and
then content, struck me as a little bit odd as well. So, yeah, I'd consider shifting that.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: I think the ad is more visible that way. I think you're gonna get more clicks
that way but I think a lot of them are gonna be accidental.
>>Reto Meier: You wanna be careful about that as well.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Yeah.
>>Reto Meier: A lot of the ad platforms have guidelines against putting your ads anywhere
where it may accidentally be clicked. And I'm gonna be, you know, in fairness here it's
a little bit tricky because if you put it towards the bottom you could be trying to
hit navigation and accidentally hit the ad, if you put it at the top you've got the same
problem with the action bar. So there's not really an obvious answer but this, I think,
just from a usability perspective, seems like it's gonna be too easy to hit the button by
mistake.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Absolutely. It's a great app though.
>>Reto Meier: Yeah. It's a great app. It's nice and clean and we'll get into some of
the specifics about it later but that's the functionality, nice and simple.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Yeah, they themed it nicely which I love that.
>>Reto Meier: Exactly. It's a standard action bar but with definitely a color scheme that's
consistent for that.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Yeah. So, yeah, I think the only other thing that I would say is I think
that this should probably be centered or something like that. What does it do when you go into
portrait, or into landscape, though?
>>Reto Meier: That's a good question. Well, I think it's a list view, right?
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: It is a list view.
>>Reto Meier: So a little centered there so we can add several timers here.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Oh, I see. So that's why, yeah. Gotcha. Okay. Cool, alright. Let's move
on.
>>Reto Meier: Alright. So let's have a look. The next app we're gonna have a look at is
Timer, Alarm, Stopwatch and Clock. And, as you can see, again, no feature graphic here
either so, again, so this is and app where when I first looked at it on Google Play I
wasn't expecting much.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: No.
>>Reto Meier: It's kind of, it's a very busy icon which, you know, if I look at it now
I can figure out what it is but it doesn't really strike me. And there's no feature graphics
so I was a little bit apprehensive to begin with. The good news is when I actually opened
up the app, it's actually pretty nice. So we've got the holo theming right off the bat,
it does exactly what we asked for before in that you can press the button and it starts.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Yep.
>>Reto Meier: So you've got the stopwatch functionality there, I didn't have to do anything
other than click it. And right away now as a user I go oh, okay. Well, this is quite
nice-
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: It's pretty too.
>>Reto Meier: Yeah, it's nice, right? You've got the Roboto fonts, ridiculously fast moving
thousands indicator. So I'm pretty happy. I hit lap and I get my lap time, it fades
in nicely, it's got more theme color.
>>Ian Ni- Lewis: Oh, that is nice. Yeah, I like the fade in.
>>Reto Meier: It's pretty nice, right?
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: I mean there's a few things, I'm really excited to see what Roman has to
say about this next week because, to me, it seems like they've done everything right and
yet something is slightly off and I think what that means is it needs a designer to
just go in and kind of lay it out and put finishing touches on it.
>>Reto Meier: I think this is a recent redesign from these guys. I think released just yesterday
or, in fact, early this morning specifically so we could check out the new stuff. So I
think it's a first pass on a new design.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Yeah.
>>Reto Meier: It's looking pretty good. But, yeah, it feels like they may be little things
that can be done. So we're gonna pause the, pause the stopwatch so we can go to a countdown
timer and so I clicked that, same as I did the stopwatch, and it tells me that you need
to add a counter in order to be able to have that counter.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Now it does that with the toast.
>>Reto Meier: I would kind of prefer that if I do this, rather than tell me that, it
just does the equivalent of loading up that button.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Right?
>>Reto Meier: Seems like it, I can see why you have it here as well, that's reasonable.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: You know, but it really reminds me of that, do you remember the part in the
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy when Arthur and Ford are in the spaceship and somebody
pushes a button and he's like, "What'd that do?" and the guy says, "Oh, a little light
popped up that said please do not press this button again."
[Laughter] >>Ian Ni-Lewis: That's what I feel like when
you do that. Its like, "Oh, you interacted with my UI? But not the way I expected."
>>Reto Meier: That's not the way you're supposed to do it.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Yeah, don't be doing that. I think that, I think it's a little more courteous
to just assume what your users wanted.
>>Reto Meier: Exactly it makes sense. You've got the add counter button here and fair enough,
have that too, but let's do both.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Yeah.
>>Reto Meier: So, okay, again, the button star here is a little bit odd. Again, it's
this, it's a very attractive looking app and then you've got kind of an orphan button sitting
by itself. Sort of floating in the middle so I'd consider maybe moving that around but
I'm gonna leave that to the design guys to say their opinion. We've got these standard
spinners here which you can actually see is a pretty intuitive way of changing the time.
So maybe that's a tip for the Yoga guys there is this actually isn't a bad way of doing
it.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: No, it's pretty alright. It's, I think the way that the yoga guys did it
makes sense but it's just not as intuitive.
>>Reto Meier: Exactly. So we can see here it's added a timer. Again, I would probably
be tempted to automatically, so now to set the timer I need to click here which then
assigns it to here and then I click it again to get started. Now, if I'm adding a timer
I think it probably makes sense to-
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Automatically select it.
>>Reto Meier: automatically select that for you.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Yeah.
>>Reto Meier: Don't automatically start.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Well, unless the-
>>Reto Meier: Just select it.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: If there's a timer going maybe you don't wanna do that.
>>Reto Meier: Sure, sure, if there's already a timer in action that's a different story.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: What happens if we add multiple counters?
>>Reto Meier: Let's have a look. [Pause]
>>Reto Meier: So the, we've got a new counter down here, the old one continues. I assume
that if we, yeah, so once you click a new timer it resets. I don't know if it wants
a warning there or not, probably not.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Might wanna do a conformation because you are losing work.
>>Reto Meier: Exactly. So you don't wanna be like, oh but I was just clicking it to
edit it and that's not how you edit. Then that's pretty annoying. You can see here,
as well, we have a countdown timer which is nice and, in fact, I think it's even progressing.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Oh.
>>Reto Meier: I didn't actually notice this before.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: That is cool.
>>Reto Meier: But that's really slick.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Yeah.
>>Reto Meier: You can see, probably just here, the little blue circle representing the amount
of total time remaining as well as the active countdown. I really like this. I think this
is it shows two things to me. One that there is an ongoing foreground service running so
that my timer isn't gonna stop just because I'm browsing and using up all my memory and
I don't need to go back into the app to see how much time I've got remaining.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Absolutely.
>>Reto Meier: Which is fantastic. So, again, we click to pause or click again or we can
reset that, we can delete these, they disappear, all of that works really nice. We have alarm
functionality which works the way you would expect it to and a nice little tip here as
well, they've got a world clock which is nice. Totally, you know, not something I was expecting
to have as part of a stopwatch and timer app but, you know, why not? If you're doing stuff
with numbers. Overall the theming I think looks great, we've got, I guess, a full screen
button here for the world clock that's quite nice. Don't know what that does, ah.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Ah, change it to daytime mode.
>>Reto Meier: So we can actually switch modes. That's interesting.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: I like that.
>>Reto Meier: So if you prefer the white, I think this one's a little-
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: It doesn't appear to have been designed for, yeah.
>>Reto Meier: Exactly. So, and I note here that I can't actually change it from here
I need to, well I see it's dropped down into the-
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Oh, switch theme, yeah.
>>Reto Meier: It's dropped into the overflow menu. That's interesting. That is interesting.
That's probably a reasonable way of doing things, having it in the action bar if there's
room. I would say, though, that this theme looks a little less polished than the dark
theme. I think a lot of people prefer the white theme, I think you probably wanna tweak
your colors particularly down here on the lap timing a little bit.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: It looks like they just haven't gotten around to that yet.
>>Reto Meier: Exactly. And knowing that this is a relatively recent release I'd say that's
fair enough. So this one did a little bit of everything and it looks pretty nice.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: It's not bad.
>>Reto Meier: It's not bad at all. Let's have a look. We're gonna move onto Impetus Interval
Timer next. So this one does have a feature graphic.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: But it's a terrible feature graphic.
>>Reto Meier: It's not good. It has a huge amount of text all over the place. I should
point out that our green screen is what is making the-
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: That's true.
>>Reto Meier: The middle part there, see?
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Yeah, ohhhh!
>>Reto Meier: There we go.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Yeah. Ahhh!
>>Reto Meier: Nice. You know, that would be a much better feature graphic. No, so, in
fact, that part is us at least. But in any case you can see here that it's a feature
graphic full of text and one of the big places that this is gonna get used is when it's shrunk
down for featuring and none of that's gonna be visible. And even still, this is more what
you would expect from the screen shots rather than from a feature graphic.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Yeah, in fact, you should never put screen shots in a feature graphic.
We will never feature something that just has a screen shot in the feature graphic.
And, in fact, and this goes for a lot of things like I've seen games with screen shots in
the feature graphic and that's no good. What you really have to ask yourself is when you
go into a software store, let's say you're going into Best Buy and you're gonna buy some
kind of software, I don't care if it's a game or if it's a business suite or whatever, what
do you see on the front of the box ?
>>Reto Meier: Well, it's not a screen shot.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Right. [Laughter]
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: It's usually some sort of beautiful art, sometimes it's conceptual.
>>Reto Meier: Which makes you go, "Oh, this is professional. They paid a designer to do
this."
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Now where do you find the screen shots?
>>Reto Meier: Screen shots you find when you're playing the game.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Well, that's not the answer I was looking for but the answer I wanted
was on the back of the box.
>>Reto Meier: Back of the box.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Right. But that's okay because I know you only buy software digitally these
days.
>>Reto Meier: Right, box, what is this box of which you speak?
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Exactly. They've completely gotten rid of them in the rest of the world.
[Laughter]
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Here we're still playing football with a ball that's not round. So.
>>Reto Meier: Weird.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: The point is that you do wanna have screen shots but the place that they
go is in the little screen shot column where everybody expects them to be and you should
have something beautiful and conceptual on your feature graphic.
>>Reto Meier: Exactly and you've got a nice icon as well. That's exactly the idea we're
talking about. It's conceptual, it's artistic, it looks nice, gets you an idea of what it
is.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: You know what, actually, I have to mention that since you brought up
icons. The one thing, the one thing about Yoga Timer that really needs to change is
it's icon.
>>Reto Meier: Yeah. Looking at it now I agree.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Yeah. In general, the guidelines for Android icons are that it should be the
outline of the icon. It should not be a square or a rounded rectangle or something like that.
>>Reto Meier: Distinctive shape or distinctive outline, I think, is the guidelines.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Exactly.
>>Reto Meier: Alright, let's have a look at Impetus. If I can click it. So, right away
I start this up and this one's a little confusing. It's not obvious to me straight away what's
going on. There's a lot of text on screen.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Well, apparently to you've finished.
>>Reto Meier: Well, indeed. So, let's move on.
[Laughter] >>Reto Meier: That's not fair. So that's kind
of the biggest challenge here that you need to figure out what's going on. So if you click
on edit you get an idea that, oh okay, this seems to be some sort of exercise timer rather
than just a straight up timer. So that's themed and that's fine but, again, nothing was obvious
about that in the name or in the feature graphic, nothing was telling me, "Hey this is an exercise
timer." So go back to timer. I click on stuff, that's not doing anything. You can hit "go."
no time set.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: In a toast again. Please do not press this button again.
>>Reto Meier: Okay, so now I've got some presets. So I can say, let's do pyramid preset.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Oh okay. So now we're gonna-
>>Reto Meier: Now we're gonna work out. So we don't exactly know what it is we're doing.
I don't know what pyramids are but that's probably-
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: I thought I knew what pyramids are but I'm struggling to make it make sense
with this.
>>Reto Meier: So the overall way that it's displaying things with the progress timer
here is nice, you know, showing us the total time and the time for each repetition, or
in this case rest is nice, we've got lots of notifications. Let's see, alright, so we
can see that we've got an Impetus session in progress. It isn't rich, it doesn't show
the ongoing details but, you know, at least it's going.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: At least it gets you going.
>>Reto Meier: Which is a good start. We can pause-
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Oh, I know what it's doing, right, it's you do a little rest, you do a
little more then rest, you do a little more then rest, yeah.
>>Reto Meier: Okay, so it's, I've heard of this as a way to build up your endurance training
for running and stuff.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: I guess so. I've never done it with time, I've always done it with reps.
But that's because I have no endurance nor need for any endurance really.
[Laughter]
>>Reto Meier: Fair enough.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Just raw strength.
>>Reto Meier: Raw strength, that's what it's all about.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Exactly.
>>Reto Meier: So you can see we've got these alarms and these kind of fall off the edge
of the screen here, you can see-
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: That's odd.
>>Reto Meier: that isn't great. This whole dialogue is a little odd like how do I dismiss
it? Is it the back button?
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Right.
>>Reto Meier: It is but it's not a standard dialogue which-
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Now is that all hooked in into the, no, in fact, check that out. I'm
just pressing the volume keys.
>>Reto Meier: Okay, it's overridden the volume keys.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Yeah.
>>Reto Meier: I guess maybe if we bring this up. No.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: But certainly not in a-
>>Reto Meier: That's just very strange. Yeah, so.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: I'm at a loss to explain what they've done there.
>>Reto Meier: Something custom's been done there and it's not something good.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: That's right.
>>Reto Meier: Let's see, so we can, this is how we create new presets. So, you know, I
was clicking here, we can use the existing presets, abandon the current session so you
can't browse for a new set while you're doing one which I guess makes sense cause you're
in the middle of an exercise you really shouldn't be looking at things.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Yeah.
>>Reto Meier: Then you can do all of your new presets, save preset, again, seems like
you created a new one you should have already been able to save it.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Well that's true. Actually, seeing a save button, in general, is sort
of a bad smell to me in UI design now. It used to be important because you were saving
to, you know, floppy discs or something, right? For a long time the only reason to have a
save function is so you can give whatever it is you're saving a name. When you don't
need a name or if you can give it a default name, you should just save automatically.
There's no reason not to.
>>Reto Meier: Alright. So then I guess I have to save. Yeah, so the workflow around this
is kind of complicated and not entirely obvious. I'm gonna leave the guys from Android Design
and Action to sort of go into some of the details about the design.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: I don't know if they're going to talk about this one. It's got-
>>Reto Meier: I think they are. I think that they like a challenge.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: I don't know. Okay, but all I'm saying is I don't wanna be anywhere near
Roman on Monday. [Laughter]
>>Reto Meier: See this is where Roman is being very clever. He's not in on Tuesday so the
other guys, Adam, Nick, Rich, they're gonna be doing the design show with Roman's help
in creating some marks but the rage will be elsewhere at home probably drinking.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: I'm joking a little bit but the truth is that this app breaks almost all
of our UI guidelines. There's custom buttons that don't quite work, there's these buttons
down here, you can't quite see them let me just lift that up, it's difficult to tell
on screen but these buttons have a little border around them which A, they don't need,
B, looks shabby.
>>Reto Meier: Yeah.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: We call that the x motif style of Android design. We're trying to get away
from that.
>>Reto Meier: Yeah, so this seems like it's a fairly useful app. I like that it's a news
theme, it's not just a timer and it's able to build a workout flow around timing but
I think the workflow around being able to get things set up and going is a little bit
contrived, a little bit difficult to understand and the overall look and feel, I think if
we compare it to some of the other apps we've looked at today could do a little bit of work.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Absolutely. Now, I just wanted to break in for a second and remind everyone
that's watching that producer Alex is monitoring the live stream, diligently. Right?
>> Reto Meier: That's what diligent looks like.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: So if you have anything you'd like to ask or some comments you'd like to
make, please go ahead and let us know because we do this live for two reasons; one, so that
we have an excuse for all the mistakes that we're sure to make and two, because we'd like
to have your input.
>>Reto Meier: Absolutely. Let's move on to the next app which is going to be the Hybrid
Stopwatch and Timer.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: I wanna buy that right now.
>>Reto Meier: This really caught my eye.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Yeah.
>>Reto Meier: I clicked through a dozen or so timer and stopwatch apps when selecting
them for today's show and I got to this and I was like, oh I can't way to play with this.
This looks cool.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: It looks beautiful.
>>Reto Meier: It's got this great icon, this massive feature graphic which is just totally
in your face and if you compare this to the screenshots we took of the other listings,
it's just night and day, right?
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Yeah.
>>Reto Meier: It's like; clearly someone's put in some effort here. And to be honest
it looks like it's basically effort done once. Like they put in the effort to create something
which is an awesome looking stopwatch and then they've just used that as their theme
throughout. And I have a hunch that when we open up the app it's gonna look pretty similar
which is exactly what you want, you know, give people the idea of what they're gonna
get without having to get to, you know, screen shot like.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Right.
>>Reto Meier: Okay, so let's have a look. So, the Hybrid Stopwatch, we open it up and
boom, looks like exactly what we would expect to get.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: I believe that's what we call in the business skeuomorphic.
>>Reto Meier: Possibly. Yeah, yeah. So, as you can see, it works as you would expect.
We hit start and it starts and we see the timer on the top going off, we see the little
dial going around which is nice. Stop stops it, nice the button depresses and undepresses.
Now this doesn't use the Android design guidelines at all but I don't think it's necessarily
a problem. Now I know the guys are gonna look at this as well and I'm sure they've got some
ideas to make it a little more holo like while still maintaining the same, sort of, overall
look and feel but just generally speaking-
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Yeah, this is great.
>>Reto Meier: I'm not bothered that there's, you know-
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Yeah and that's one thing that we should say, too, I think that a lot
of times on the show we're saying, oh they don't have an action bar or they've messed
this up and the truth is we don't want every app to look the same. We want all Android
apps to look the way that's gonna be most effective.
>>Reto Meier: That's right.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: So when we say you're not following the design guidelines what we usually
mean is it looks as if you might have been trying to follow the design guidelines and
you got it wrong. These guys went a completely different way.
>>Reto Meier: They really did.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: It's intuitive; it's very beautiful, great. We have no problem with
that.
>>Reto Meier: Right, if everything works the way it would and I really like their attention
to detail here. So when I push stop, if I hit reset, it's actually gonna move the needle
back, right? That's nice because that's what a mechanical device would do.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Absolutely.
>>Reto Meier: You go along, you hit lap and it leaves a little marker behind for each
lap timings which is nice. Let's see, now it does use the old style menu button which
is a bit of a shame.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: What is it?
>>Reto Meier: But it does do stuff so we'll lift it up here.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Yeah.
>>Reto Meier: So you see it's got the menu. Given that you have a menu button it would
be kind of nice now to have an action bar to hold it in that more modern style.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Right.
>>Reto Meier: You know, you've got such a nice looking app it's kind of a shame. But
if we go through each of these, like, lap times, it's all, again, same sort of, oops
you can't see it, same theme style, consistent which is nice.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: I will say that, as we've said before, the gradient effect can look
really nice but when it's just applied over and over again it sort of looks like, wow,
I guess somebody got a hold of Photoshop this week.
>>Reto Meier: Yeah, it's a little bit of the lens flare effect, it kind of looked cool
when no one else could do it but now everyone can do it and it doesn’t look quite so cool.
Send laps, unfortunately this should just be a share intent rather than e-mail and SD
card.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Absolutely.
>>Reto Meier: I should just send it however I want. If I wanna tell my friends on Twitter
how fast I can run then I should be able to do so. Now you can switch to timers, kind
of the other key here. So they've got kind of a custom standard theme.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Which is too bad because this is how Android used to work and it wasn't
very easy to use and now we've gone to the spinner that you can fling which is a much
better design and it's too bad to see this sort of thing still popping up.
>>Reto Meier: This is a real risk that you have if you go, oh I almost like what the
platform has done there but I wanna create something which looks a little bit nicer so
I'm going to modify it slightly but then the platform changes under you and you get stuck
with a slightly nicer version of a crappy old way of doing things rather than sort of
straight away getting the advantage of the shiny new way. Just something to keep in mind.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Can't, you know, I first noticed this in Windows '95 when I was working with
Novell and they had a whole set of apps where they'd rewritten parts of the windowing system
and so, I don't know if you remember Windows '95 came out and they had the three buttons
on the right and they had the title moved over to the left side and Novell still had
all these old windows that looked like Windows 3.1 and it was terrible.
>>Reto Meier: That's unfortunate.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: It is unfortunate. But you can see how you could; you could move some
of the activity that's going on here into an action bar.
>>Reto Meier: Oh sure and the action bar would say whether it's timer or stopwatch, you'd
have like potentially tabs or something to be able to switch between the two. I don't
wanna step on the guys from Android App Design and Action so.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: But I did wanna point one thing out about that which is, you know, we've
called this the button of shame and it's a little bit, you know, obviously you shouldn't
be ashamed of having a menu. The main reason to switch to the new technique, though, is
because action bars work in one very specific predictable way whereas this button is now
being implemented in many different ways by different manufacturers.
>>Reto Meier: Very true.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Alright.
>>Reto Meier: So you can see the timer actually works nicely. It goes in a reverse direction
to the stopwatch which is intuitive, makes sense; we can see the overall time being displayed
as well as each minute. We can see we do have the timer set up here as well; it does display
in the notifications, again, not a rich notification.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Not as cool as that other one, though. That was the best.
>>Reto Meier: It is updating but only every minute.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Right.
>>Reto Meier: It should.
>>Alex Lucas: YouTube wants to know if it rotates.
>>Reto Meier: Does it rotate? No.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Nope.
>>Reto Meier: Sadly it does not.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Sorry, YouTube. [Laughter]
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Was that a particular commenter or just YouTube as an, as an entirety?
>>Alex Lucas: Just a particular commenter.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Okay.
>>Reto Meier: Alright.
>>Alex Lucas: Someone on YouTube wrote it.
>>Reto Meier: Someone on YouTube.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Who was it?
>>Alex Lucas: Um, BRK5.
>>Reto Meier: BRK5.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Hey there Brooke 5.
>>Reto Meier: It does not rotate. Okay, so that's, I think that sums this up pretty nicely.
We're gonna do a really quick stop at the Ultimate Stopwatch and Timer by team member
Richard Hyndman. So we,
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Isn't it Hindsman?
>>Reto Meier: I don't know.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: I finally said Hyndman and then I sort of laugh, I snicker a bit.
>>Reto Meier: That's why I kind of don't-
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Alright, Rich, let's see your app.
>>Reto Meier: We've only known him for like three years, God forbid we know his name.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Sure Reto.
>>Reto Meier: Ian, nice to meet you. [Laughter]
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: You don't know what you've uncorked.
[Laughter]
>>Reto Meier: You've got the teeth to be an Ian.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Wow.
>>Reto Meier: Awkward.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Okay, let's go.
>>Reto Meier: Ultimate Stopwatch and Timer by geekyouup. So this is truly skeuomorphic.
So this looks like a picture of a stopwatch and if you press it the little stopwatch thing
releases.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Ah, that is cute.
>>Reto Meier: It's pretty nice, right?
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: I have to say, though, I liked the last one better because when it's actually
a picture it's a little less obvious what's active and what's not.
>>Reto Meier: Yeah, this is true. You know, everything kind of works the way we want.
You hit save time and it does lap times. He's using a toast to tell us that which is a little
unfortunate.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Why are you using a toast Rich?
>>Reto Meier: Rich, come on man. Each time, so we can start and stop and do all this sort
of stuff which is nice, display the lap times, he's got an action bar going, you can switch
to timer mode which actually changes the color which is kind of interesting. And yeah, again,
works the way you would. Doesn't use notifications at all, unfortunate.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Yeah, it'd be nice to see a rich notification there.
>>Reto Meier: A rich notification from Rich. [Laughter]
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Alright then. Let's-
>>Reto Meier: We're too much, too much.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Absolutely. In the last five minutes let's cover the last 30 minutes of
our show.
>>Reto Meier: Indeed.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: So.
>>Reto Meier: So we're gonna try, I wonder what was going on with the transitions at
the beginning. Just enough to try and screw me over.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Right?
>>Reto Meier: and keep me nervous for the rest of it. So these are things that we think
are, really are required to make a great stopwatch or timer app. So it's, don't contradict the
design guide which is a little bit different to what we've said in the past which is be
consistent with it and here we're thinking, well, we've looked at these and there's a
bunch of different ways of showing the time so don't feel like you have to stick to a,
sort of, standard list view action bar sort of paradigm, go outside the box just don't
contradict anything which we said that you should be doing and, you know, make sure that
it's intuitive. Include the functionality for timer and stopwatch cause I don't want
two separate apps if I have one app which does one really well and one app which does
both almost as well, I'm gonna install the single app. Notifications, foreground services
we talked about and keeping it simple, you know, really easy to use as you step through.
So we're gonna look at, uh-
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Now I have to say, Reto, you know I didn't say anything before because
when you put this together I was still in Vegas coming down from a really bad acid trip,
but the one thing that I noticed on this list that is missing is widgets.
>>Reto Meier: Widgets. Yeah, that's true. That's true. I did not even think to check
if they had widgets. So let's have a look. Let's see, Analog clock, Beyondpod, we have
a lot of things installed from previous weeks, I'm not seeing any for-
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: It's sort of seems like a natural.
>>Reto Meier: I think one of the problems that you have, I guess you could use it to
start things cause you just don't wanna have a widget which is getting updated as a timer
app.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis:Okay.
>>Reto Meier: Because that, you know, you only really wanna be updating your widgets
every, I think, 20 minutes or something like that.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: I see.
>>Reto Meier: But as a quick way to start it and then have it within your notifications
would actually be pretty neat. So that's cool.
>>Ian NiI-Lewis: That's a good point. So this is one of the reasons you didn't put widgets
on is because updating widgets are expensive, you don't wanna have that just going on all
the time.
>>Reto Meier: Exactly. But having the ability to just have a set timer on my home screen
or be able to kick off the stopwatch as a timer and then it, you know, automatically
starts displaying things here. See now Ultimate Stopwatch does tell us when it's complete
just not while its ongoing.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Right.
>>Reto Meier: Interesting.
>>Ian NiI-Lewis: Yeah, I think what I loved was that the one that actually counted down
but the one thing that I would have done differently, but tell me if this is possible, because I'm
not too familiar with the notification code, would it be possible to actually animate that
a little more because if you've got a long timer it's just gonna crawl forward, right?
And I noticed that what basically all of the operating systems we work with have moved
towards is this paradigm where if your progress bar isn't making much progress at least it'll
be animating, you know, like I think Mac does a barber pole effect and Windows, kind of,
has a shimmer and I don't know what Linux does because I am not geeky enough but-
>>Reto Meier: Too much time in Vegas, not enough time in a shell.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Exactly and you'll notice I don't have a beard which means I may or
may not be able to program.
>>Reto Meier: That's true.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: If you can code there's no reason to shave.
[Laughter] >>Ian Ni-Lewis: Here's a thing, though, if
your progress bar is not going fast, having some animation at least lets the user know
that something is happening and I was wondering, well, could we put in, you know, like a little
shimmer or something?
>>Reto Meier: I think you probably could, I mean, as we've got the outer edge going,
having something in the middle just happening to show that its ongoing I think would be
an interesting effect. I don't know that there is, I don't know what overhead is associated
with updating notifications in that frequency.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Now that I think about it, it can't be that bad because we do that in
the download manager.
>>Reto Meier: That's true. We have the little, you know, it's downloading, it's downloading.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: I think it's actually just an animated image.
>>Reto Meier: Yeah.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: So, you know what I would do is an animated image and then just overlay
that arc on top of it.
>>Reto Meier: That could work.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Yeah, absolutely.
>>Reto Meier: That'd be interesting.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Okay, cool.
>>Reto Meier: So let's have a really quick look through. We've only got a couple of minutes,
literally, so we were gonna spend a little bit more time contrasting and comparing but,
again, in terms of the design guide, I think really the Hybrid Stopwatch is kind of one
of the most interesting deviations from the design guide which still looked good and I
do, have been given a preview as to what the guys will be looking at on Tuesday during
Android Design and Action and I know that they have and interesting take on this app
so that's definitely something to tune in for. And the other one that I think is sort
of close to being there but not quite is this, which is, I think this is a really nice effect,
looks really consistent, nice coloring, nice theming, I think just needs a little bit of
tweaking to get it really spot on. So these are kind of the two alternatives.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Well now wait a second, Yoga Timer.
>>Reto Meier: There is Yoga Timer, that's true.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: I would say Yoga Timer nailed it except for the icon.
>>Reto Meier: Except for the icon, yeah. That's the thing about Yoga Timer, it's a great app,
they've done a great job with theming it they just aren't presenting it as well as they
should be ahead of time. So, yeah. Other things, multifunctional we talked about, so again
this is where the Time Control really does win hands down. It does everything that you'd
wanna do consistent with time all in one app so that's kind of nice. Rich notifications,
we saw a couple of apps was it, I can't even remember, was it-
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Yeah, I think this one had it. No?
>>Reto Meier: Possibly not. Maybe it was just something, countdown, yeah.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: There we go.
>>Reto Meier: Countdown but not stopwatch which kind of makes sense kind of doesn't.
I'd like to have it on stopwatch as well. So this is really nice. And there was another
app, as well, which allowed me to, which had rich notifications. I can't remember which
one it was. Was it Impetus, perhaps? No.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: No, it certainly wasn't that one. Well, in any case.
>>Reto Meier: Yeah.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: I think it was Yoga Timer, actually.
>>Reto Meier: I think it was, yeah, it probably was Yoga Timer. That's right, it was Yoga
Timer.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Look at you, it's like you've forgotten about Yoga Timer.
>>Reto Meier: It's a good app, I just don't do yoga, that's my problem.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Right.
>>Reto Meier: There we go. The perfect rich notification.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Yeah, that's great. Having a notification is there for information and
it's a called action and this combines that perfectly.
>>Reto Meier: If they steal a trick from time control here and actually include a time,
a countdown within the notification itself, you've pretty much hit the perfect notification.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Absolutely.
>>Reto Meier: Time is over. That's, yes. [Laughter]
>>Reto Meier: That's very true. Again, foreground service or anything like this, anytime, in
order to have a foreground service which is a service that isn't gonna get killed by the
system at run time when there's memory pressure means that you have to have a notification
displayed. So any of these apps which don't have a notification displayed, this is true
for most of them in stopwatch mode, which means they could theoretically get killed
by the system. So that's something I wouldn't really want to have happen and something to
keep in mind.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Yeah.
>>Reto Meier: And keep it simple, I guess that's the real trick. The ones that I enjoyed
the most, and this is why I guess I keep forgetting about Yoga Timer, is cause I have to do so
much work before I can use it.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: That's true, yeah. You had to, there was a lot before you could just
jump in.
>>Reto Meier: Yeah.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: You know, they, where if you contrast that with I think it was Impetus,
for instance, just had some presets that were there already. They have a very, very complex
system.
>>Reto Meier: They do.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: But they have five or six different things that you could just choose
from to get started. Time Control was just all, Hybrid Stopwatch was just right there.
>>Reto Meier: Exactly.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: where you get what's on the tin, right?
>>Reto Meier: These apps when you press the button and boom, you start; you understand
exactly how it works. That's kind of the ultimate, and even something like Time Control which
has quite a lot of functionality but it's all pretty easy to find.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Yeah and then, you know, Rich's Ultimate Stopwatch, I would say is a close
second behind Hybrid Stopwatch but, for me, the addition of the sort of photo realism
added elements that didn't seem germane to the application, I was a little confused by
it, I wasn't sure what to touch and what not to. Maybe that's just me but I think it took
skeuomorphism one step too far.
>>Reto Meier: One step too far. So, sum up, so these are the, these are each of the prescriptions
we've just gone through and we've talked about each of those apps and so here they are, summarized
for your pleasure. We won't go through these in much detail but can keep track of how many
of the green dots exist and it's really, it's timer, alarm, stopwatch and clock which does
the best here, kind of does everything we ask for. It could do a little bit more with
the rich notifications in terms of the stopwatch doesn't use them but that's kind of nit picking
at this point.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: And everybody should learn from Yoga Timer about rich notifications.
>>Reto Meier: Yes, Yoga Timer is the go to there. That really demonstrated the right
way to do these things.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: If I could just, if I could just combine Yoga Timer and Time Control that
would be perfect.
>>Reto Meier: It'd be pretty good. Yeah, Oh look, Rich, you've got some work to do, Rich.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Rich! [Laughter]
>>Reto Meier: So that's pretty much all we've got. We're totally out of time.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Right. Did you put green dots, by the way, on the things that weren't good?
>>Reto Meier: I did cause I'm that stupid. [Laughter]
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: So the dots that appear transparent, that meant good.
[Laughter]
>>Reto Meier: That's exactly what they meant. Red meant bad, transparent meant good.
[Laughter]
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Exactly.
>>Reto Meier: Here's a tip for those of you at home wanting to use chroma keys and green
screens for your overlays.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: You're also discriminating against millions of color blind people.
[Laughter]
>>Reto Meier: That's true. Next week it'll be all green backgrounds with small red text.
Good luck with that. So let's have a reminder of what's coming up. So, Android Design in
Action is on on Tuesday. It was their first episode last week; they had a huge audience
so that's fantastic. Hopefully you guys will tune in again on Tuesday, that's 10:30 New
York time and what's that, 3:30 in London? And they're gonna be taking a look at these
two apps which is Impetus and Hybrid Stopwatch so I think those are the two that they're
definitely gonna check out on Tuesday. We've also asked the developers, all the developers
that we talked about today got in touch with us over Google Plus and I think it's something
we talked about it a little bit but I didn't run this past you ahead of time so hopefully
you're free next Thursday but I thought it might be fun to spend half an hour after we've
ripped these apps apart and the app design guys have given them ideas of what they should
be doing instead, to get some feedback for them once they've had a chance to digest what
we tell them.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Absolutely, that's a wonderful idea. I'm excited to be a part of it.
>>Reto Meier: Awesome. So we will, we will see the guys from each of these developers
next Thursday at 11:30, that's Pacific Time. You can get all of the schedules and stuff
at-
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Are we gonna run that live as well?
>>Reto Meier: Why not?
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: because who knows what these developers are, they might say something.
>>Reto Meier: That's true.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: They might say something naughty.
>>Reto Meier: That's the fun thing that none of them are native English speakers. We've
got Austria, Sweden and Spain, I think, all represented.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Nice.
>>Reto Meier: Or at least those languages. So it should be fun.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: The first thing you learn in English is swear words.
>>Reto Meier: Excellent.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Any foreign language, that's the first thing.
>>Reto Meier: We're gonna have to have a big red button just in case.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Sounds good.
>>Reto Meier: It's not a family friendly-
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Well we are completely out of time. .
>>Reto Meier: Next week we're gonna look at photography apps.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Excellent.
>>Reto Meier: So anything which messes with a photo, so, things like your Instagrams,
like your Paper Cameras, anything like that, if you've written an app, if you want us to
look at your favorite version of that and, you know, let the developers know what they
could be doing differently or the right way to inplement those sorts of apps.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: You know what; don't just nominate those hipster apps, okay? If I have
to look at one more 70's style photo my eyes are gonna bleed. Let's talk about some really
cool apps that you can do photography with.
>>Alex Lucas: Instagram.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Shut up hipster! I throw it on the ground! Alright.
>>Reto Meier: You know his glasses aren't prescription?
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: No, of course they're not. And his Fixie actually has gears, they're
just hidden in the hub. So what we're gonna do, though, is take a look at photography
apps. We're really super excited about it, let's, hopefully we get some actual photographers
on here. I know Dan Pham is quite a photographer.
>>Reto Meier: He really is, yeah.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: We're gonna look at how these apps can make photography easier and more
fun.
>>Reto Meier: So that should be good. So I think that's all that we have for today. We
have about three minutes before Dan and, I think you are filling in today.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: I believe, yes I am filling in for the Game's Review which is completely
at odds with my new haircut and my stylish hoodie.
>>Reto Meier: Yeah, that's kind of grey scale there.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Yeah it’s a, well it's a boss but see there's, the brand is called
Boss but it's by a guy named Hugo Boss.
>>Reto Meier: Interesting. Wow, nice. We have a Boss Hugo.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: That's true, we do.
>>Reto Meier: Yeah nice. So we'll be joining Dan, his headwear and Hugo Boss clad Ian Ni-Lewis
in just a few minutes for the Friday Game Review. We'll be back again next week at 1pm
looking at photography apps. So, until then, thank you for joining us and see you next
week.
>>Ian Ni-Lewis: Bye. [Music plays]