Wow new (Blogger) look. Hope things don't get screwed up.
Its the start of a new week after driving ourselves nuts over the past three weeks with the Facebook app and the seminar.
Having read some comments about PDF Expert, the app that my team presented, I agree with them. In all honesty, I myself will not fork out $9.99 for an app when many free apps can do roughly what PDF Expert alone can do (Although now that I have it *ahem* in my iPad, I like it for the convenience of being able to retrieve documents from Sugarsync and opening them, all under one roof).
I guess from developers' point of view, sometimes we want to create apps that have as many features as possible, in order to distinguish ourselves from the competition. I mean, if we create apps that do the exact same things as other apps, why create them in the first place? Unfortunately in the process, developers tend to scale the cost up proportionally to justify what they have done, forgetting that from the consumers' point of view, all we want are just stable apps that do what we want correctly, at the lowest cost possible (suddenly the $99 HP Touchpad came into my mind).
Oh yes, today I just realised that PDF Expert can unzip zipped files too, into a nice neat folder for you to browse the documents inside. But I digress.
Therefore, as developers, sometimes we need to answer difficult questions like how far we should go in adding value to our apps, potentially locking out a majority of customers, or keeping costs low but struggle from slim profit margins. Thinking back, I should have mentioned during the presentation that they can increase their commercial potential by selling a scaled down version of PDF Expert at a lower price. Might earn them more money, I don't know.
On a sidenote, I have always preferred reading hard copies; reading off screens for too long tire my eyes. Ironically, the ease of access of reading material through the iPad has resulted in me reading more these days. My guess is that tablets are not going to replace books anytime soon, but as technology continues to improve, the day will come where screens can reproduce text better than printers. Books might just die out then.
Finally our Facebook app assignment is done. This part of the journey had not been easy; we were constantly changing everything that can be changed; coding, schema, UI, game mechanics. Overall, I think our entire team was quite new and inexperienced in terms of the tasks we had to do; software engineering for ZW and MT, design for YH and project management for me. That is, on top of the new stuff that we have never handled before, like the Facebook platform, jQuery, AJAX etc.
Lack of experience aside, the team was a joy to work with. We worked hard, but amidst the heavy workload, we found time to joke and make fun of each other, which I have always personally maintained to be very important as it keeps team morale high. To finally be able to put up something to show, even though it wasn't well polished, was an accomplishment for all of us I guess. Hopefully everyone have picked up some lessons through our assignment (MT mentioned he learnt alot from my code. I don't think I write very good code; hope he doesn't pick up the wrong stuff :/)
Having hung around with some of the brilliant minds for a long time, there is the lingering pressure for me to at least not be too far from them. Because of this I think I have become a little critical of myself over time, constantly questioning and rejecting ideas that I think will not match up to their standards of 'good'. As a couple of my friends gave approving comments for FrenFactory, I heave a sigh of relief.
Hope they were not smoking me. Haha.
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