iCabbi launches off the Starting Line

Published on January 9, 2012 in Our Work. 12 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

We are delighted to announce the release of the brand new iCabbi smartphone application into the Apple and Android stores. iCabbi,  Ireland’s first virtual taxi dispatch company, asked Mercury Girl as well as a chance to get under the hood and fine tune the existing app to develop  iCabbi. version 2.0.  Mercury Girl inc. constructed a clean, sharp contemporary user interface design, which was then adopted by iCabbi as the new look for all of their marketing material and the new look of the company. iCabbi iphone and android application

 

iCabbi allows you to intuitively,

  • book a taxi and even puts the user in the driving seat by allowing them to place a bid.
  • Once yo’ve secured your Taxi you can track its distance from you in realtime as iCabbi provides you with your incoming taxis current location and eta.
  • Store travel information to easily book regular destinations

We are delighted to say that the application has had an excellent reception and currently has a 5 star rating in the iTunes store. There are also very happy comments beginning to stream in, User Januaryxxx says iCabbi is “Excellent!!” and that “This is a super service! Safe, efficient and cheaper than other taxis!” User Stephen O’Shaughnessy says “This app is great. Order a taxi at the push of a button, cashless travel and 20% discount. What more do you need. Brilliant service!”

If you haven’t downloaded this excellent little hassle saving app yet, try the hassle free  Its Free!

 

Download it today at

iCabbi iTunes App Store

iCabbi Android Market

 

Future of the SDK (Software Development Kit) and peripheral development tools

Published on November 18, 2011 in Our Work. 29 Comments Tags: , , , .

Ok so my brief report on the future of platforms and sdks it looks from the talk that there will be a move towards web applications in a noticeable way in the future.

•            Google Engineering vice president Vic Gundotra predicts that the Web would prevail as the dominant mobile application development platform.

•            He thinks this will happen despite the huge success of Apple’s App Store. And their own investment into an app store (which is said to soon be the dominate force) •            He says its down to the harsh economics of maintaining multiple platform-specific copies of applications is pushing development to the Web. which makes sense because smaller companies are seeking entry into the app sphere

•            according to a source i found the price of multi-platform apps is a top concern for businesses

•            Security/privacy and the cost of developing for multiple mobile platforms are cited as the top mobile adoption concerns (53% and 52% respectively). (http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/79181

•            To quote Gundotra “We believe the web has won and over the next several years, the browser, for economic reasons almost, will become the platform that matters and certainly thats where Google is investing.” (although google would say that if everything is made from web application google will be the ones who get the advertising revenue)

•            Backing up his claim was another panelist from nokia (although he would say that given the thrashing their app market received)

As with any commercial decision, there is no absolute right or wrong answers – just strategies that are better suited to some situations rather than others. As an agency, we will be using a mix of approaches – native, PhoneGap, and other frameworks as well (such as Corona for Game App development). However, broadly speaking the advantages split out as:

 

Web Cross Platform

More cost effective for cross platform development Faster to market Easier to repurpose (e.g. for co-branding or white-labelling but this could easily change when iCloud comes in) Relies on less-costly less-specialist skills for implementation, (especially when using app builders such as phone gap and other drag and drop app builders which will i see as getting bigger)

 

Native Development

If you have the right budget, you get exactly what you want (if the OS permits it) Users will naturally see the kind of interface they expect Performance is likely to be better

The next few years we will continue to see Android and iOS dominating, but with Microsoft/Nokia becoming a major smartphone player, and Blackberry retaining a significant market share.

It is hard to say yet whether Web OS will really take off. Especially once apps start to interact with iCloud in more meaningful and integrated ways. But conversely HTML5 and the emergence of more powerful apps will allow web apps to make more use of tools currently used by native apps such as accelerometer and geo-location.

Most likely then we will be looking at a market with four or five major mobile OS platforms. With so many platforms in existence, I would say for any business or initiative that doesn’t have access to major budgets, but which requires reach across diverse audiences, cross-platform frameworks such as PhoneGap will prove an attractive development strategy.

Debugging mobile web is also seeing the emergence of tools based on existing web debugging tools such as socket bug https://github.com/manifestinteractive/socketbug/wiki which is based upon firebug. heres there own blurb about themselves “The technology behind Mobile Web Applications has been growing at a tremendous rate. Mobile Application Developers, while able to produce amazing applications, are limited by the native browsers own limited functionality. Basic features available on desktop browsers are completely absent from mobile browsers. The ability to view source code, debug javascript, or even execute a javascript command from a console are all tools developers have come to expect while developing websites. So why are these features lacking for mobile web application developers?

This is where Socketbug fills the gap! Socketbug is a Remote Debugging Utility built using Socket.IO. This means you can now use modern browsers ( both mobile and desktop ) to work together to allow you to remotely debug you mobile web applications.”

You can download our full report here

Native Apps or Web Apps?

Published on November 15, 2011 in The Blog. 12 Comments

Native Apps or Web Apps, this is the question. The debate is on for which is more important for businesses to use. There is of course no ‘right answer’, only differences that may be beneficial depending on what you require.

Let’s be clear from the start what native applications and web applications are. A native app is downloaded by a user to their smartphone, iCabbi [iCabbi is currently in closed group testing, prior to release in App Store] and Entertainment.ie both have native apps for iPhone, and iCabbi also has an Android app.

These are designed and built for specific platforms and function seamlessly on that platform.  Web apps are available across every web enabled device, and are formatted as such. They are not platform specific and cannot take advantage of the hardware functionalities of mobile devices such as the camera and contacts.

As Francisco Inchauste of http://www.getfinch.com puts it;
“Native applications offer (arguably) a superior experience, because they are designed for that device, specifically. Delivering the same web app to every device is a usability nightmare. Interactions on various devices deserve their own considerations.”

Native apps have a great response time, you download them to your smartphone, and BAM they’re ready and waiting for you to use as you please. Generally speaking native apps are more responsive, with less waiting around for content to load. However, technology advances constantly and web apps are improving with these changes. The new buzz phrase flying around now is ‘Responsive Web Design’. The design of web apps that work seamlessly on every device, be that iPad, iPhone, Android, Symbian, Windows PC or an iMac.
“Responsive Web design is the approach that suggests that design and development should respond to the user’s behavior and environment based on screen size, platform and orientation. The practice consists of a mix of flexible grids and layouts, images and an intelligent use of CSS media queries. As the user switches from their laptop to iPad, the website should automatically switch to accommodate for resolution, image size and scripting abilities. In other words, the website should have the technology to automatically respond to the user’s preferences. This would eliminate the need for a different design and development phase for each new gadget on the market.” – Kayla Knight [http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2011/01/12/guidelines-for-responsive-web-design/#more-75660]
The key to responsive web design is flexibility. The responsive nature of various elements are the key to a website working successfully across various platforms. Flexible grids &  images are key.

We can see some great examples of websites that have been designed to be responsive for every platform and mobile web device here.

There are clear arguments for both sides, but ultimately it depends in your business, what you are trying to achieve with your app, and how your users will interact with your products or services.

Take Note: Apps for note-taking

Published on November 14, 2011 in The Blog. 11 Comments

After much searching and a little testing of online note-taking apps. We have discovered, to few peoples surprise that Evernote is actually very useful.
Discussing in the office how useful it would be to have an online app, that would sync between your phone, desktop, tablet and online account which you could use as a notebook for researching projects, keeping notes about interesting things or collaborating with colleagues or friends, I went on a hunt for the perfect app. I came across a number of different applications, but they were either premium apps that required payment or they had a very unintuitive interface which put me off straight away.

It turns out I had Evernote on my iPhone. I had used it before, but to no real extent, I didn’t find it that great to be honest, but I then decided to give the desktop version a go. I was pleasantly surprised. It works well, sync’s quickly with my iPhone, allows you to drag and drop images to your ‘notebooks’, save URL’s, write notes etc. It’s early days but I’m liking it.

On another Note(ooh pardon the pun), in this office we are big fans of Moleskine notebooks, and so I went to see if they happen to have a nice app to accompany their lovely notebooks. They do have an app as it turns out but would it have the same beautifully classic quality of the Moleskine notebooks themselves? The answer in short is no. It is as you may assume, nice to look at, but unfortunately there are quite a few glitches along the way. It does have very nice little icons that you can add to your notes, and you can write in many different colours, choose the style of paper you work on and more nice little features like that but it lacks the streamline flow that you would hope to see. It is only their first version however so we will wait in the hope that the next version does them justice.

Interactivity and its future

Published on November 11, 2011 in The Blog. 10 Comments

With mobile technologies advancing at a phenomenal rate, it is worth pausing for a moment to think about what we are developing, how we will interact with them and what they will bring to our lives. This is a short post on some incredible advances in interactive technologies and ways in which they are being used.

Bret Victor in his article A brief rant on the future of interaction design, notes that with such incredible features as hands, we should make more use of their skills rather than relying on only a single digit to navigate our world. He made these comments after seeing the following video.

Victor points out that this is not such a problem at the moment, but that if a vision of the future is solely based on making skinnier tablets, with less areas to hold onto, and making grander desktops for us office workers, then we are forgetting about a whole range of instances that we could transform.

While wandering around wiki, after following a link from Bret Victor, I found an incredible amount of technologies that blew my mind. Organic user interface, Haptic technology, Tangible user interface and much much more sounded incredible. These articles are all well worth a read.

Pattie Maes unveils her and Pranav Mistry’s Sixth Sense project in this TED talk in 2009. Truly interactive features, using any available surface as a screen. This reads like a sci-fi movie. Wherever you go you can tell who people are, what their background is, what friends you have in common and where they work (well almost).

On a scary level this interactive Facebook app http://www.takethislollipop.com/ is pretty terrifying. Having been released shortly before Halloween, it has almost 10million ‘likes’ already.

Samsung – The Latest

Published on November 4, 2011 in The Blog. 26 Comments

Samsung – The Latest

Samsung are gaining huge popularity and now have some of the best smartphones on the market. They have really surpassed themselves in the release of their new smartphone and tablet.

What everyone is dying to see…

Samsung Galaxy Nexus

The Galaxy Nexus smartphone is the latest cutting edge revelation from Samsung designed to compete against the iPhone 4S.

After Apple’s dismal announcement of the iPhone 4S which left many customers who were expecting an iPhone 5 very disappointed, Samsung will be hoping to take even more of the smartphone market from Apple. During the third quarter of 2011 statistics show that Samsung shipped more handsets than Apple, by a huge margin. While Apple managed to sell approximately 17 million smartphones, Samsung sold nearly 28 million!

The Nexus handset which will be released in November, is predicted to be the first device to launch the new Android – Ice Cream Sandwich OS.

Okay now for some impressive new features that it is rumored to have: Curved glass front making it easier and more comfortable to hold against your ear and will also mean more privacy for the user. Two cameras (front and back), 4.65 inch display, 1GB of RAM, 32GB hard drive, and a dual-core processor.

Samsung Galaxy Nexus

 

Is it a smartphone? Is it a tablet?

Galaxy Note

The Galaxy Note, an equally awesome device, also expected to be released in November is a hybrid, across between a smartphone and a tablet – now being called a “phablet” by some. At 5.3 inches in size it will allegedly fit comfortably in one hand or in your pocket but has the added benefit of a massive screen and a stylus making it easy to take notes and messages on the fly. Samsung are hoping to tap into both the tablet and smartphone market with this incredibly slick looking device. The Note will sport a massive 8 megapixel camera with flash, 16GB of expandable storage and a spectacular battery life but may not be ideal if you have very small hands.

Samsung Galaxy Note

We have test driven both new devices and have come to the conclusion that we like them both, particularly the Note which feels like a 4thdevice in the way that the iPad was the 3rd. It’s between the size of a phone and a tablet, not too big or too small, it feels just right.

Stay Hungry, Stay foolish

Published on October 6, 2011 in The Blog. 23 Comments Tags: .

Today is a sad day for the tech industry and for technophobes worldwide. We have lost a true genius who not only created officially the worlds current largest company in Apple corp, but who it seems, was also a nice and great man.

We could go on and on like so many other blogs and news sources this morning that remind us about the great devices and great innovation the Steve Jobs and Apple brought and will continue to bring to the world, however us Mercury people will leave that up to the experts. iPhones, iPad, iMac, the forth comming iCloud, enhanced desktop publishing and media editing, the list is extensive.

Its clear that Apple are following the release cycle they followed with the 3g and 3gs, then 4g. This is how we will see the iPhone 5 come out, but will Apple continue now without Steve Jobs to lend a guiding hand? Will there emerge a new game changing innovator within Apple, or will the recede back as they did in the 90′s without Steve? Who knows, but for the biggest company in the world, they should be able to solve any problems.

So it might be better to put something more interesting and fitting out there about the beginnings of apple, rather than go into stats, details and speculation about the business of it all. How did the logo come about?

Som say it was because of the way Mr Turing the famous godfather of computers {inventor of the enigma machine and inventory of modern encryption} killed himself after begin convicted of homosexuality after the second world war. He injected cyanide into an apple and then took a bite, leaving the rest of the apple. Mr Turing would have played some part in Steve Jobs learning when it came to computers. More here.

But the real story of how the logo came about is from the actual guy Rob Janoff who actually designed it in an agency in California those 30 years ago. Making sure that the apple featured in the logo capturing a reference to Sir Issac Newton and then adding character with the bite. The early colors embodying the abilities of the early machine to edit and pain in color. The entire interview is here  So t round off this post with the signoff note from Steve Jobs speech to stanfords graduation class, Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.

RIP Steve Jobs, 1955 – 2011

 

Stanford Graduation speech

 

Apple Launch Video 1984 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2B-XwPjn9YY&feature=player_embedded#!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two clients going global

Published on September 16, 2011 in The Blog. 496 Comments

As a tech start-up you engage in building projects for other people. Developing content management systems, Facebook applications and our core focus of Mobile applications. In this goldrush time for mobile programmers, we have being experiencing some great work and project flows.

With this, we have had 2 clients who are both Irish that have been going from strength to strength.

Golfersden owned by sportcels has been accepted to an innovation Ireland programme that has them jetting off to Silicon Valley to take the business to the next finance level. We have some exciting developments coming here, which we will talk about when we are allowed.

This proves to us that while we built a beta version of the site, it has proved to be a compelling business and piece of tech to our peers in the west coast of the states.

iCabbi is another great project that we developed the mobile end of. We were engaged to rebuild an existing mobile platform and bring a new design theme to the mobile platforms which was then quickly adopted for the website platform and brand wide.

Developing this mobile software for iPhone and Android was a nice job working with a complex backend system and in unison with a Drivers side mobile application.

Icabbi are now part of the IDA smart start-ups programme and are going from strength to strength.

We are very of our clients and where they are now after working with us and hope to be part of their futures also continuing our tech and mobile advisor and develop relationship.

 

If you would like to talk to us about how we can help you develop your tech start-up online and on mobile, we would be happy to meet up. If we cant help you we can quickly point you in the right direction of someone who can.

 

 

 

 

Updated Portfolio

Published on August 10, 2011 in The Blog. 10 Comments

Some of our new work is now up on the site, check it out here.

Next iPhone

Published on August 2, 2011 in The Blog. 16 Comments

The iPhone has been around for 4 years, with a never version released every summer, so we are dude an upgrade to the iPhone4 (released last June) soon. At the moment it looks like the new iPhone will be released sometime in mid September.

However, it is not clear yet if it will be an iPhone 5, or an iPhone 4GS, but there are hints in iOS5, which is still in beta, that the next iphone may be a a new design. Listed under the Accessibility settings in the device’s setup area, the new “Assistive Touch” option places a floating button on the screen which allows users to use touch gestures to complete a variety of commands, including returning to the home screen, multitasking, changing the device’s volume and more. While it appears that Assistive Touch is targeted at those who have difficulty with hardware buttons, the feature appearing in this way has signaled to many that Apple is considering dropping hardware buttons in future devices.

The iPhone 4’s flat glass back looks like it will be replaced with a flat metal back, and there is also talk the new device incorporating a curved glass display like the iPod Nano.

However, it’s what is inside the phone that would interest developers, it’s also been claimed (by Bloomberg that the iPhone 5 will feature a 8-megapixel camera, which is a sizable upgrade over the iPhone 4’s 5-megapixel offering, and a faster A5 processer possible the same as that found in the current iPad meaning that more demanding apps could be designed.

There’s been some debate about near-field communications technology debuting in the next iPhone, to enable wireless payments with the device at stores. However, this would require merchants to be on board with NFC readers.

It also looks like there is a new iPad on they way (iPad 3), which will include a retina display.