Citrrus Blog

Mobile Matters

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Siri crashing when you ask it about Apple Stock

I don't know if anyone else has noticed, but if you ask Siri on your iPhone 5, iPad 3, or iPhone 4s about the price of Apple stock today (we've been using the phrase "What's the price of Apple Stock today") your iDevice will crash and restart.

We're hoping that Yahoo's feed is crashing them, mostly because that would be funny.

Let us know if it's happening for you too.

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This is an awesome article that speaks to the things you need to do to become an excellent programmer. 

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Just landed? Great, I'll meet you at baggage claim.

How many times have you left your out-of-town guests waiting with their luggage on the airport curb because you were stuck in traffic? I've done it more times than I'd like to admit (sorry, mom!) and it's about time I stopped making excuses and took measures to make sure I'm there on time to greet my guests properly.

If you're like us, here at Citrrus, (i.e., obsessed with gadgets and technology) you'd go on a research rampage to find the perfect app that will make you a better person solve your everyday problems. I came across this little gem called Just Landed on one of our creative team's favorite inspirational UI sites and threw it into our Creative Throwdown ring for some hearty debate.

As you will see from our grades below, this app crushed our critique and passed our tests with flying colors.  Yep,  these guys thought hard about the use-case and didn't skimp on the details—both from a performance and UX standpoint—making it hard to find areas for improvement. Here's the highlight reel of the throw down:

We adore:

Dynamic Call-to-Action Button: Just Landed shows clutter who's boss by intelligently serving up a happy little "track flight" button only when the user has input a minimum number of characters to define a flight. Clever little way to get onto the users' good side. 

Subtle Animation: There is a serious lack of purposeful animation in apps these days—unless, of course, you're a gaming app. Just Landed took the initiative to add little nuggets of awesomeness—like gently moving clouds, a tiny jet that soars across the sky, and a charming in-flight aerial animation loop—that exist to enhance your in-app experience. Bravo!!!

Familiar Sounds: If you're playing with this app (which you should be by now) and haven't turned on your sound—you're seriously missing out. Just Landed incorporates some of the most familiar (and high-quality) sounds anyone who's ever flown will recognize <ding!> and tastefully applied them to trigger on apropos events (like when it's time to leave for the airport). Way to set the bar high for other app makers like us...we're up to the challenge!

Beautiful on the Inside: It goes without saying that this UI is dripping with beauty, but what we really want to call out is the developer's attention to performance. They managed to make a beautiful app that has useful features and functions like a dream—all without draining your battery. They inventively found performance workarounds to the device's native tendencies to drain battery doing GPS queries. From one developer to another, we give you a friendly fist bump for taking the high road to innovate with the user in mind.

Suggested Improvements:

Countdown to Go-Time: While beautiful, the orange "counter" letting you know when to leave for the airport doesn't deliver a lot of information to the user. In fact, it's downright confusing. I mean, is it filling up or counting down? Who knows. Also, it barely moves as each minute counts down—isn't this supposed to help create urgency so I stop dilly-dallying and get my butt out the door in time? We'd suggest making it more clear that this thing is counting down (direction change, animation, ticker, SOMETHING) and blast an air horn flash it when I'm at (or well past) the time when I should leave.

Handle more than one flight: I'm willing to bet there are families like mine scattered across the globe and who try to coordinate landing times so that the local host doesn't have to make multiple trips to the airport. Until I found Just Landed, I used another flight tracker app that allowed me to simultaneously track the status of my family's various flights—dear Just Landed developer reading this blog, can you make that happen in a future update?

Keep it in the Family: It's really unfortunate that I have to leave this beautiful app to get driving directions to the airport. What if the flight gets delayed or something happens while I'm on my way? Hey Just Landed: Did you know that the iOS map is one of a handful of native iOS APIs that you can actually open within your own app? Missed that tutorial, did you? Consider this our formal request to add that in to the next update.

So, the next time you plan a visit I promise never to be late picking you up at the airport—unless, of course, I have trouble finding my keys. I wonder if there's an app for that?

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User Interface: A+ User Experience: A- Usability: A 

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Apple vs Samsung convinced me that patents are GOOD for innovation

The verdict in Apple vs Samsung has become a pretty big deal over the weekend. I can't say I'm disappointed since Citrrus is an iOS shop. That said, I was definitely feeling a tiny bit of sympathy for Samsung. I mean can you really copyright look and feel to the degree Apple's patents were upheld? THEN I saw a video for BB10. I gotta say the features it highlights are pretty AWESOME.  It looks nothing like iOS, is innovative, oozes cool (check out the way they do autocomplete).  All my sympathy for Samsung (and Google for that matter) evaporated. After seeing what RIM has done and thinking a little more about Windows Phone,  Android and Samsung's touchwiz UI enhancements feel even more like iOS. 

The RIM video was so jarring to me because I realized that I was probably thinking in the same narrow way as Samsung and Google... that there's only one right way to do a smartphone/OS.

I hadn't really considered it before, but maybe copyright law drives innovation by taking options off the table. From a consumer perspective choice isn't having multiple copies of the same thing, choice is having diverse options. You know, choices.

I have a hard time seeing a diverse market as a bad thing. It just seems too easy to give up and say there's only one way to design something.  Even the design of simple things like refrigerators have been greatly innovated. Freezer on top, Freezer on bottom, Freezer side-by-side with fridge. I won't even start with ice makers :).  Lot's of great options to suit the right person/situation. No one seems to have the lock on a particular refrigerator design (maybe in the past they did), but I bet there was a fair amount of R&D required to iterate these designs so maybe they should have. It really hurts (emotionally and on the balance sheet) for someone to come along and copy your innovative solutions to tough problems. It makes investing in R&D a bad investment for business and makes waiting, copying, and playing it safe the smart thing to do.

I wonder if an absence of copyright wouldn't lead to ZERO innovation. Instead of winning by solving new problems or building a better mousetrap the company with the biggest advertising budget would probably be the one that came out on top. To me, that sounds like the fastest way for consumers to lose.

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The big issue Apple needs to address with App Store approvals

iOS is still the platform nearly everyone deploys to first. It took Instagram over a year before porting their app to Android, and just last week Facebook relaunched a much improved native version of their mobile app for iOS. Facebook's Android users are still stuck with the slower HTML5-based app.

I'm not going to go into why Apple continues to be the overwhelming platform of choice for initially launching new apps. Instead, let's talk about the evolution Apple needs to incorporate to keep it that way. It's actually dead simple: let me pay you to make the app review process more business friendly.

A lot of people complain about the strictness of the app review process and lament the number of rules they must follow. Not me. I think the rules are great. The rules have kept the bar higher than Android and resulted in an ecosystem with overall better quality of apps and little to no malware. I'd actually cheer Apple if they enforced all the existing rules even more aggressively.

My problem with the review process is predictability. A mobile apps consulting company, like Citrrus, must be able to give clients timelines around which they can plan. We tell clients how long it will take to design, develop, and test their app, but we cannot reliably predict how long app store approval will take. Planning timing for launch parties and media events is essentially a roll of the dice.

Approval wait times for basic apps are starting to average close to 2 weeks and apps with complexities like 3rd party trademark licensing and other legal hurdles to clear can take even longer. And that's the best case scenario. An app rejected for reasons that require changes to code to remedy must start over at the beginning of the process. It has been our experience (we had a couple back-to-back rejections releasing our first Newsstand app) that some reviewers stop reviewing after they encounter a single "reject worthy" issue. This can lead to a maddening cycle of fixing one small issue only to wait through the entire review process again to be told there was another pre-existing problem. Building the app store approval process into a project timeline can quickly become un manageable. 

So here is what I'm asking/suggesting/begging for, and I really think it's in everyone's best interest. 

1. Let me pay more than the $99 yearly developer license for access to an app review queue with a 5-7 day service level agreement. We'd gladly pay thousands for the predictability and call it a bargain. 

2. Please don't make me start from square one if there is a problem with the app. Most rejections (in our experience) are small oversights (on our part) or misunderstandings around interpretation of the review guidelines. These issues take us all of an hour or two to fix. Give us 24 hours to correct problems with a new binary before we're rejected and forced to go through the entire process again. I have to think there is also some throughput efficiency to be gained on Apple's side with this approach. 

 That's about it. As a professional app developer, I hope someone over at Apple sees the need to support us (and our clients) with a little more business friendly approach to app approval.  If not, I guess I'll move to plan B and start sending care packages to the App Review team. What kind of candy bars do you guys like? 

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Focusing on People is the Key to Success

Recent news that Marissa Mayer is moving Yahoo! to a more “people-centric” company shows that she can turn around this aging technology firm gone astray. 

Mayer’s decisions to supply employees with iPhones to encourage new ideas and to make Yahoo! products shine on it – as well as her decision to provide free meals to thousands of Yahoo! employees – is a real-world example of finding ways to keep people happy, while encouraging productivity.  The recent revelations about her tough stances and drive to get things done, are accompanied by an understanding that life can’t be all work and no play.  

People-centric companies focus on the things that help make their people great:  appreciation, autonomy, purpose, challenge and the ability to master their profession.  In these organizations, people have a voice - it’s not just a feeling, it’s a reality.  Disagreement and passionate debate are encouraged, and those who fail to participate are shown the door.

When analyzing the similarities of large companies that have lost their way, the one thing they all have in common is their inability to keep great people happy and productive.  As they grow, these companies often change their focus from people to raising capital, acquisitions and marketing.  This, in turn, creates internal battles, destroys teamwork and crushes the spirit of the original firm that brought the company to greatness. 

How can management tell when a company is on its way down? Observe the conversations in the office.  It is a bad if the conversations among team members lack interest or passionate debate and digress to short, meaningless small-talk.  Effective leadership and effective business thrives on the internal discussions of a team; and, in their absence, a company will die a slow and painful death. 

Top-down, beat-down, companies expect that they can crack the whip on employees when the company slows down.  They don’t want to hear what’s wrong, they just want the people to shut up and keep working.  The tongue-in-cheek line of ‘we don’t pay you to think,’ comes to mind. However, to restore fresh air to an ailing company and revive employee productivity, a focus on people is vivifying. The companies that fail to see this truth will be left behind. 

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Thunderstorms Abound for the Weather Channel App

Knowing whether to prepare for rain, cold, or extreme heat is essential to our every day lives—making weather apps a staple utility for anyone on the go.

If you're tired of Apple's default weather app and looking for an upgrade, you'll quickly find that there are a lot to choose from in the App Store (we count over 240).  So why wouldn't you turn to one of the biggest names in Weather (with a capital 'W') for reliable forecasts and a delightful interface? Fact: The Weather Channel dominates the weather market.  But in our opinion, their app fails in ranking high among most other weather apps.  

Don't let the full-screen photo background and subtile animation transitions on the main weather screen fool you. Behind the veil of UI polish is a bi-polar, overly complicated, buggy app. Think we're being too harsh? Maybe. Read on...it's about to get stormy.

Our main contentions with the app center around poor UX. Things like:

not being able to remove locations from the search list (scrolling main screen)

locations that exist in the search list but not in favorites (what is the difference between the search list and favorites list anyway?)

overly broad and unfiltered keyword search terms in the social feed (we had a tweet in our feed that read "@willferrell I'm no weatherman, but you can expect more than a few inches tonight." <gasp!>)

frequent app crashes when using the camera

too many features...I'm just here to check the weather, not socialize about it 

And while the transitional animations on the weather tab's '+' disclosure, background swiping, and iWitness video queue were a nice touch, there are many missed opportunities in the UI. If we were to improve a few things, we'd change the following:

add depth (either gradient, beveled edge, or drop shadow) near the iAds to make them recede and the app space come forward 

make a bigger visual difference between partly cloudy and mostly cloudy graphics

give more clear signals to things that are tapable or scrollable (i.e., on the 'Seasonal' tab we didn't know to scroll to the charts below the fold. Solution: throw a gradient fade overlay at the bottom and top of the screen (like on the social tab) so you can see content disappearing instead of a hard edge.

use pre-set scenery themes for customizable background options instead of your camera roll. We'd much rather be able to change scenery between beach, forest, or mountains to know whether it's sunny, rainy, cloudy than using photos of our dog, cat, or child. With the default weather overlay turned on it looks like they're getting high when it's cloudy outside (see screenshot).

enlarge the radar maps to fill the width of the screen, they are super tiny and some are not tappable to make bigger

And so the hunt for a perfect weather app continues. Until we find one, if you're looking for a new weather app some of our team members recommend these:

"MattyBoh" recommends: Accuweather

Terumi recommends: Weatherº

"My Bryan" recommends: Fahrenheit

We'd like to know: what's your favorite go-to weather app? Tell us in the comments.

________________________

User Interface: B- User Experience: D Usability: C 

[citrrus]

How Do I Love Thee, Nike Training Club App

Let me count the ways...

You're confident and focused. You're not worried about being everything to everybody. No. You know your narrow audience well and you cater directly to us. This app is for women! Current athletes, former athletes, wanna-be athletes -- it doesn't matter to you. As long as we are here to sweat, you'll provide the guidance we need, at our level, for our specific goal. Thank you for not confusing our relationship with Twitter feeds, in-app messaging, friend requests, or a new fangled calendaring system. We're here to do one thing. And that's ok by you.

You speak to me. GET LEAN, you say? Yes. But let's start slow, I'm a beginner. A modified burpee? I'm not even sure what a... Oh you have a video? And you'll pause my timer for me while I watch and learn? That's so thoughtful... 15 more seconds in plank? Ok. I can do that. For you.

Your beauty isn't overworked. Oh, that UI. You minx. I love your clean lines and minimal color palette. That font. Nice choice. It's bold without being aggressive. It's tall and thin without being fragile. Just like my future self. I don't mind that your tab bar is native, you spent your time enhancing more important features. 

You know exactly how to encourage me. The bonus workouts. The healthy recipes. The badges of honor. I'll be a Rebel in another 97 minutes. And I. Can't. Wait. Yes, go ahead and schedule that Friday morning workout for me. I'll see you at 8.

You keep your promises. You, my love, are an app of substance. I couldn't walk for two days after our first meeting. I was sore in all the right places. You provide the workouts you advertise and you never get in my way. You let me access my favorites right from the home screen, view all my previous workouts, and preview the ones I'm just not sure about yet. 

Thank you Nike Training Club App. 

Let's (Just) Do It.

Hugs + Kisses, Terumi A Very Happy UX Lead 

________________________

User Interface: A User Experience: A+

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Form Follows Function: A Hard Lesson in App Design

Here at Citrrus, our Creative team is hard at work taking inventory of the latest apps to hit the streets so our clients can benefit from cutting edge techniques to make their app a smashing succcess. Like a moth to a flame, we can't help but dissect, sneer, and swoon over other designer's work and find ourselves pinning up UI and UX elements to our Pinterest boards at an alarming rate.  We chat a lot about good and bad examples that come across our desks and it would be selfish for us to keep that feedback to our whiteboards and wiki's, so we're officially kicking off #ThursdayThrowdown: where one app enters the ring and battles it out with the Citrrus creative team.

This month, we took on  Columbia's GPS Pal. If first impressions are anything to go by, this app made us swoon. With hand crafted details like unique typography, beveled table dividers, and custom tab navigation carried all the way down to the very last pixel—not to mention the dreamy splash screen—this app had us at "launch". Take a look and you'll see why:

But then we started to use the app.  And that's where our love-fest started to fizzle.

We discovered that it wasn't very intuitive—the first few frantic taps left us hungry for a 'get started' guide and on tap #2 we reached an empty journal. The HELP section wasn't very pleasing either. The texture was not as crisp as it is in the rest of the app, the fonts have weird bevels, and the FAQs are laid out in a boring table view that does not seem to have a logical order or keyword search capability. Since we are problem solvers, here's a solution for the kind folks over at Columbia: try using stylized empty data screens or maybe tool tip hints to guide your users through their first few steps of creating content.  

In the Journal screen (assuming you had a few entries stacked in there), the placement of the detail disclosure icon ignores Apple's Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) of consistency and conditioned behavior in table usage. We rarely see tables where the detail disclosure button is not centered vertically in the cell and try to emplore this in most table apps we build for clients. 

Another nit picky thing that goes along with Apple's HIG recommendations of consistency is that this app chose to use a custom styled action sheet for socially sharing entries instead of Apple's standard action sheet overlay. Most apps use the standard action sheet for sharing functionality—so much so in fact that we're willing to bet most users could share on their preferred platform with their eyes closed. Recommendation: don't ignore familiar behaviors; it will only trip up your users.

Like a bad joke that needs explaining, we were still waiting to get the punchline. As we started to track activities and load up a few journal entries we hit a major snag: how do you delete journal entries?! [insert broken record sound here] Took us a while to figure it out, but supposedly the only way to do this is through their Web interface. Tsk tsk, Columbia. Don't you know that users expect to have the power to easily create and remove data? If you take away their power and make it harder for them to complete basic tasks, they probably won't revisit your app much again. 

All in all, we give this app a 'Citrrus' grade of:

User Interface: B+ User Experience: C- Moral of the story: don't put all your efforts into the lovely UI of an app at the expense of UX. 

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NSLog() - Avoiding performance problems

Most developers make liberal use of the NSLog() function when developing and/or testing their code. You'd be crazy not to. Unfortunately we seldom remember to pick up after ourselves. And while you might think that it's not a big deal, you'd be wrong. Leaving calls to NSLog() in your 'Release' code could significantly affect the performance of your iOS app.

Suppose that you're developing an app with a UIScrollView or UITableView. And within the scrollview's delegate you place an NSLog statement in the 'scrollViewDidScroll' method. This means that for every frame you have additional and unnecessary function calls which in turn consume CPU cycles.

Of course, no one likes cleaning up after themselves. So a quick and easy way to disable the NSLog calls in the 'Release' code is to define a wrapper macro for logging. What I do is define the following in my project's .pch file

#ifdef DEBUG

#define DebugLog(...) NSLog(@"%s (%d) %@", __PRETTY_FUNCTION__, __LINE__, [NSString stringWithFormat:__VA_ARGS__])

#else

#define DebugLog(...) 

#endif

source: The iOS5 Developer's Cookbook

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Our Citrrus creative team is always on the hunt for design tools to make us more efficient and our client's apps look their best. After all, first impressions and time-to-market are everything!

While swapping out our homepage banner and creating marketing collateral for BetterPress—our homegrown iPad publishing platform—we came across this pearl-of-a-resource: Pix Eden. It is a designer's utopia chalk full of yummy PSDs that will instantly spice up your app's marketing collateral with statuesque displays of iPads, iPhones, and other Apple-related products. All of Pix Eden's downloads are free for use in personal and commercial projects and saved our creative team a ton of time and money—and heck, even make us look good! 

So let this stand as our public proclamation of design-love for the folks over at Pix Eden. On behalf of our creative team, thanks for the graphic goodness you're pumping into the world!

Caveat: if you read the fine print of Apple's Marketing Guidelines (like we do) you'll notice they have some specific preferences for how to display their product images—like only using front-facing images that do not overlap. We are big fans of rules and standards, but sometimes being professionals means knowing when to break the rules. This is one of those times. With premium-quality graphics like these, can you blame us?

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BetterPress & Citrrus Featured in BRINK Magazine

BetterPress, Citrrus' iPad publishing platform, was highlighted as a mover and shaker in the latest issue of BRINK magazine.

"this exciting group of entrepreneurs had brilliant insight and advice to share with our readers." - BRINK magazine

The team at Citrrus would like to thank BRINK magazine for featuring our company in their latest issue.

Please read more about our company and our product in the latest issue!

[citrrus]

LinkedIn Nailed It

I wouldn’t normally write about social media, mostly because it has been so sensationalized that there is little more to cover. However, I think the one thing that hasn’t received nearly enough publicity is the LinkedIn Today emails that receive periodically.

There is not a single publication or media source that has been able to capture my full attention like this email. While there are tons of excellent business and technology writers, remembering to browse through all of my favorite websites on a regular basis is too much effort for the off-chance of encountering a really intriguing article.

Now, I have found the “holy grail” of reddit/digg/stumble/del.icio.us (choose your preferred social sharing method) for people interested in technology, business and inspirational articles. LinkedIn Today provides excellent ‘must-read’ material, in a time when you could go on a journey through the articles produced each day and never be able to make it back home.

Congratulations, LinkedIn Today, you nailed it.

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The Pitfall of Jobsian Management

In the wake of the release of Steve Jobs' biography, I have heard a lot of people say that they now will aspire to create perfection in the things that they do. Steve Jobs was maniacally driven to perfect every product that his company released, and, as a result of that drive, the products that Apple delivered to the market have been pretty incredible.

Having said that, I am a bit concerned about what the future may hold for people in organizations where their boss has decided to take a Jobsian approach to management. Not because it's a bad idea to have great products, or because throwing out a sub-par product after a long development cycle is a waste, but because only doing those few things will not make your company into an Apple.

Apple wasn't great merely because Steve wouldn't let crappy products roll out the door, but rather because of their culture and their values. People weren't constrained by the parameters of how something should look or operate, they were inspired to think about things without preconceived notions. Steve wouldn't let a product go to market if it didn't meet his high bar for quality. He would challenge his employees on every decision, and shout them down in a bout of rage. Even though he did this, his employees and his company still thrived. For some reason this treatment didn't phase them, or cause all of them to seek jobs at other companies.

The reason was simple: Steve had earned their trust, and they knew he believed what they believed. They knew no matter what happened, they were both on the same page about what it meant to be an employee at Apple. He wasn't perfect, and for most people it would be a mistake to try and emulate his harsh leadership style. However, we can learn a lot from what he was able to accomplish in the short amount of time he was in charge of Apple.

People respond to values-driven management. They thrive in organizations that believe what they believe. They want to work in environments where they are challenged, and there is a high level of parity between their peers. They will rally around their leader when he or she has earned their trust and made their mission clear.

If you are hoping to create the same type of culture that was at Apple, start by changing your company's values. Aspire to your highest virtues, seek to sell products that aren't just 'good enough', but, instead, are better than anything else out there. Keep your profits honest. Provide high levels of transparency throughout your organization. Find people who agree with your mission, and push out the doubters. Seek to improve your core products, and don't let quality slip in favor of growing your bottom line.

These are simple concepts, but they will change your company. They will inspire your people to do great things, and create an incredible feeling of hope that will be a beacon to your team, driving them to pull in the same direction.

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Citrrus is proud to announce the launch of The University of Virginia Magazine's brand new iPad app! UVA is the first magazine to launch using our iPad publishing platform, BetterPress. We're super excited to be helping content owners, like UVA, access the iPad through the simplest and most affordable solution on the market today. Check out our beloved BetterPress at http://www.betterpress.net.

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Citrrus Founder Jason LaFollette Weighs in on the Privacy Debate

Jason tries to bring the boiling controversy over mobile data privacy back down to a low simmer in Security News Daily, saying: 

"It is my feeling that privacy issues have not fundamentally changed. Wireless phones have always allowed carriers and government agencies to track users and computers connected to the Internet have always allowed users to publish private information if they aren't careful," he added. "Smartphones may have made it possible for people to get themselves in trouble anytime, anywhere, but their manufacturers have also explicitly recognized the problem and taken steps to put users in control."

Check out the full discussion here.

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Citrrus Partner Ben McGinnis Leads Hackathon Team to Victory in Challenge.gov Competition

A few weeks ago I went to the Digital Capital Week Hackathon and met some pretty cool folks.  We coalesced around an idea for an app that would solve the problem of finding grants and competitions you might be interested in by using some smart filtering and push notifications.  The idea became Small Business Alert, an app that uses the SBA's API to pull information on upcoming SBIR proposals and Challenges, and alert users to updates.

I'm excited to announce that we've taken 3rd Prize in the challenge, which saw over 20 submissions. I'm very proud of the work we were able to do in such a short time. So a big shout out to Paul Murphy, David Curry, Simon Engelhardt, Herve Vu Roussel, Danny Kleinman, and Aaron Huttner for their awesome work on the project!

Follow Ben on Twitter