Nokia has been continuously recognizing the contribution of developer community where ever possible. This time in Karachi, Nokia has organized the two-day developer workshop and we had a chance to learn a lot of new stuff.
I have already covered the day one for this workshop in detail and I promised that I would ask Tony Torp for the material he gave us during the training to provide it to you guys as well. So fortunately, he has allowed us to circulate it to our readership (see the end of post).
Day 2 kicked off with an awesome presentation on User Experience / User Interface by Rumaisa Mughal, Creative Lead at Pi-Labs. She said the user experience revolves around clarity, legibility, comprehensibility, detectability, consistency, discriminability and conciseness. Developers must have the proper know-how of these essentials in order to build a great app.
Furthermore, she has also suggested that your fundamentals should be focused. You should know what you are developing. The developer should also know both the users who are hunters or gatherers. Hunters are those who usually just open up your app and grab the information they want and just close it away whereas Gatherers are those users who generally play around with your app. Good developers always obsess over customers, not over competitors.
You should also know for which platform, device or gadget you’re going to develop the app because different devices possess screen resolutions, operating systems and other relevant features. Graphics should be clear, large just like Metro UI (Windows 8, Windows Phone or other Microsoft products). You should keep your app simple, don’t fill it with the unnecessary elements. The app with a consistent look always attracts users therefore you should also use styling in a smart way without altering underlying functions. Always go through with the best practices and standards. One must use a visual hierarchy from top to down (in normal cases). Colors and font size really signify the importance of content.
Generally, users are keep on switching the apps from one to another, therefore developers should handle the proper state management so that users must have the same experience as earlier. You must provide ways for users to undo any step. Be error tolerant in time. Last but not the least from Rumaisa, she said that your app should have an easy access and as a developer you should keep evolving!
Later on, Tony Torp, the best trainer Nokia Pakistan has arranged for us briefed on Mobility APIs with C++ along with the parsing of XML (Weather Services, RSS Feed etc) in Qt.
Later on, he also explained about NFC Technology and shared tons of ideas of apps which can easily be integrated with NFC. There are currently 11 devices from Nokia that support NFC.
Later on, he described the Delegate pattern with Model View and the importance of design patterns in app development. Afterwards, he showed us how easy is to port the app from iOS, Windows Phone, Android to Qt and make it for Nokia devices.
In last he also gave us the demo of publishing the app developed by the attendee to Nokia Store.
So here’s the material we followed throughout the training and we would like to share it with you guys to develop the best apps around the globe.
