A lesson in cross-selling

I recently took the family to Alton Towers and though I needed to practically re-mortgage the house by the time we returned, I was quite impressed with the way the management at Alton Towers seemed to ensure you open your wallet at every turn. Firstly there is the inevitable kids pester power which I’m certain would be there if they tried or not, but I’m talking about the more subtle ways in which you’re spending money all along the route. Take for example the Water rides (Rapids, Flume etc). Whilst waiting in the queue, all along the route there are places where you can buy the water-proof ponchos to ensure you dont get too wet. As you’re waiting there you notice other riders leaving, completey drenched in water, A stark reminder to get those ponchos!. I could remember from previous visits that it’s a 50-50 chance of staying dry, so i’ll take those odds and proceed without the poncho, but oh no not now. Now the odds are in their favour and there’s a 100% chance you’ll get wet. Right towards the end of the flume ride there is litterally a shower head floating above your head which if you’re still dry up till that point will certainly get you soaked. But thankfully the generous people at Alton Towers had placed some large stand in dryers at the exit to the ride. Oh you have to pay to get dry? Nice.

I wasn't scared...what??

You’ll also notice how most of the thrill rides will make you walk through their souvenir store to exit. There is no other way out. I dont know whether being pumped full of adrenaline makes you buy more or what, I’m no expert, but I’m certain it must do??
There is no way I’d be spending money on useless junk on my way out though. WOHOO! this T-shirt looks awesome….and I do want the world to know I went on the Oblivion!!! Ahhh damn it.

For those of you running your own businesses, I’m sure there’s a lesson or two in there.

All in all though it was an excellent day and I’d highly recommend it

The jQuery hoverIntent plugin

While working on the Web UI for Taskeedo, we noticed an inconsistent behaviour with triggering of animations in response to hover events. The problem was that if the mouse cursor went past the target area multiple times at a fast speed, the hover event would get triggered multiple times in succession and queue up, giving the effect that the resulting animation stays stuck — while in actuality, the animation would be appearing and disappearing too quickly for the human eye to observe. The result was a bad UI experience.

I looked around and found some half-baked solutions to the problem that involved triggering the event only when the cursor moved slowly over the target area. But, those didn’t feel satisfying. It was then when I bumped into the jQuery hoverIntent plugin. It not only solves the problem in question eloquently, but also provides a great deal of flexibility through providing configuration settings. It has definitely solved the problem for us.

Don’t you just love jQuery?

Tags: jquery, jquery hoverIntent, taskeedo, web ui

A Rounded Update!

Things have certainly been hectic at Rounded Labs for the past few months hence the lack of blog posts (even though we’d promised we would blog more, sorry).  So I have decided to take some time and give you an update on whats been going on with the team here, what we’ve been working on and whats coming soon.

Toggle Widgets for Android

As many of you know we released a suite of very useful Widgets for the Android platform and the response has been been far more popular than we’d have expected with over 133,000 downloads so far and counting. We do get a lot of you email in to say how much you love them and we certainly enjoy receiving and replying to every single one of you. An excellent morale booster for the team

Mobank iPhone Application

We’ve been working with Dominic and the guys from Mobank for over a year now to develop and perfect their mobile application. It was recently released onto the iPhone App Store and very quickly made its way to the Number 1 spot in the Finance section beating out Paypal and Bloomberg. We’re feeling pretty pleased about that

“MoBank is a brand new mobile banking and payment service that works with your existing bank account. By simply registering a debit or credit card with MoBank you can now book, pay and shop for things or manage your money securely from your iPhone, iPod touch or mobile, any time, any place all within a few clicks.“
The Application incorporates an awesome UI and has been developed with an amazingly sleek Read more…

Tags: android widgets, cognition, mobank, taskeedo, update

Cupcakes and Widgets

Its been a while since Google started rolling out the 1.5 update and along with it came quite a few nifty new features, one of which was the ability to support homescreen widgets.  Though a sizeable chunk of Europe now seems to have update 1.5, in the US its still only a handfull of people that seem to have it yet. Widgets just seemed like such a brilliant idea we decided to create some of our own that would greatly improve the experience of using your brilliant G1.

Initially the plan was to create a 4 x 1 widget that would include the most common widgets. But after some careful discussions (namely getting everyone in the office to do a quick vote) it was unanimously decided that it would be far better to have individual widgets so users can pick and choose which ones they wanted. You’re not lumped with a widget taking up space that you would never use. You also have the ability to arrange the widgets onto the screen however you wish.

Ringer Toggle Widget

Wifi Toggle widget

Brightness Toggle Widget

Bluetooth Toggle Widget

GPS Toggle Widget

Google’s Restrictions
A few things which will really bug a lot of developers is the restrictions that Google has placed on some previously open API’s. For us this meant not having direct access to the GPS API directly to Toggle On/Off in the same way that we have for Wifi or Sound. GPS was the only one which didn’t have 1 click toggle and meant on click we launch the settings panel, thus giving the user an extra (uneccessary) step. Oh well, GPS Toggle was something a lot of you out there had asked for and after getting feedback that “2 clicks is still better than 4″ we decided it was still worth developing it. The feedback from you all seems to be that you love it and so we’re glad we did release it now

Tags: android widgets, marketplace

Thanks to all you droids

A few days ago we released our first set of Android Homescreen Widgets and as of writing there are ~6000 users who have downloaded them. We’ve had many of you email in to say how much you’ve enjoyed them and how you cant wait for the next widget, Thank you all for writing in and commenting, it really means a lot to the team here.

We really do enjoy you providing us your valuable feedback, letting us know what works, what doesn’t, what you’d like to see in the next widget…..or any ideas for awesome apps you’d like us to develop.

I’ll let zahid do a more in-depth Blog post on the four Toggle widgets and our reasons for choosing those, the various technical and UI considerations and more in his next post.

I thought I would just say a quick thank you

Tags: android widgets, marketplace, widgets

Changing language of Symbian Emulator

The biggest hurdle in writing mobile applications for Asian markets, in particular, is providing multi-lingual support. From hunting down people for translations to acquiring phones that actually support a big, diverse set of languages in common use in Asian countries, it is an all-round big challenge for mobile application developers. It is almost frustrating to the point of throwing in the towel, but if you want to tap into the markets, making headway, especially since Asian markets tend to be more competitive than any others, you have to persist and expend serious effort. There is also no question of demonstrating your product in English to potential customers in Asian markets — they would always want the product translated into whichever language they speak and read, and if you do give a demo of the English version of your product, by the time you have a localised version ready to market and sell, some smart aleck would already have bootlegged your idea, developed a localised version and sold it. That alone is a troublesome drawback when marketing your products to Asian markets. Therefore, as a rule of thumb when diving into Asian markets: Have a localised version of your product ready and fully tested before going in.

I am falling off on a tangent. I wanted to talk about multi-lingual support on the Symbian emulator. The symbian emulator by default is in English. For testing and debugging a multi-lingual application, you would naturally want the emulator to be converted into whichever language you are testing your application on. Once inside the emulator, you will find that there is support to change the writing language to any from a large set of languages available. However, if you do that, you would notice that the emulator crashes with a panic. This happened when I tried to switch writing language to Chinese. I cannot say if the panic is reproducible for other languages as well.

Even if you can change the writing language to any language that works well on the emulator, it isn’t sufficient. In order to test multi-lingual applications, you have to convert the emulator to look and work exactly how a mobile phone would for someone who can only understand, say, Chinese. How do you do that? If you look under Program Files > S60 Developer Tools > 3rd Edition SDK > 1.1 MR > Languages, you will see few links to languages to which you can switch the emulator. Unfortunately, clicking on any does nothing. It is possible the options are fixed in recent releases of the SDK. But if they are broken on yours, here is a way to change the language of the emulator.

You must have javaw.exe in your system PATH. If not, you will have to explicitly give out the complete absolute path to the javaw.exe binary. On the windows command shell, jump to the \Epoch32\tools\ecmt\ directory (which can be found inside where ever you’ve installed the SDK on your system), and run the following command:


C:\Symbian\9.1\S60_3rd_MR\Epoc32\tools\ecmt>javaw -classpath unzip.jar;plugins/general.jar;lib/log4j-1.2.8.jar -Dsource=language -Ddestination=..\..\.. -Dlanguage=en_us -Dplatform=winscw com.nokia.epdt.zip.ZipManager


C:\Symbian\91.\S60_3rd_MR\ is where I have the Symbian SDK installed on my system. I also have javaw in my PATH, thus eliminating the need to put down the absolute path to the binary.

Pay close attention to the -Dlanguage=en_us argument. This is the value you have to change to suit your requirement. If, for example, you have to switch the emulator to Chinese language, you will have to change “en_us” to “zh_cn“.

Look inside the \Epoch32\tools\ecmt\language for information on which language packs come with the SDK by default.

Always remember to change the language back to English after you are done with testing your localised application.

Before I close this off, I would like to give credit to this post on Nokia Developer Forums from where I picked this solution.

Tags: internationalisation, symbian, symbian emulator

iPhone tips that may come in handy!

I have been happily using my iPhone for some time now, and every once in a while i’ll find a quicker way of doing things or a new feature of the phone I didn’t realise existed. Below I have decided to share a few of these with you. We’ll try and make this a semi-regular feature on the blog for the various devices out there.

TIP 1: Taking a screenshot

By now you’ve probably seen lots of blog posts out there where people have posted a screenshot of their app and wondered which software did they use to do that. Well you dont need to actually install anything. Just press the only 2 buttons on the iPhone together as shown below until you hear the camera click sound. The screenshot is stored in your photos section.

screenshot

TIP 2: Viewing the address bar in the browser

When you’re browsing away on the iPhone and you’ve scrolled quite far down a webpage, it can be really annoying having to scroll all the way back up to type in a web address into the address bar. I’ll let you in to a little secret. Double-tap the grey bar at the top and the browser very quickly scrolls all the way up showing the address bar in place. It would be good if the page didn’t scroll and just the address bar showed up, but hey its better than scrolling pages and pages isn’t it.

Address Bar

Tags: iphone, Tips

a.k.a. Rounded Labs

Call it rebranding, strategic re-alignment, corporate restructuring or brand refinement. In anycase we’ve changed our company name to Rounded Labs as we think it makes us sound a lot cooler

Tags: brand, company-name

Happy Birthday Socoto :)

Its been over a year and we’ve been so busy we totally forgot its our first birthday, so happy belated birthday Socoto.

happy birthday socoto

Wow what a year it’s been:

• 12 new projects
• 3 new team members
• 1 office move
• 5 all nighters
• ….and copious amounts of Tea/coffee & Red Bull

A quick thankyou to all our clients and partners for putting their trust in us, and to our families for putting up with our hectic hours.

Tags: happy-birthday