How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Blog » beeme

ITP Thesis Ideas – Application Prototyping

cameron — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 18:39:59 +0000

I’ve been considering ITP thesis ideas (see also “Social Tech Under the Radar“), and I keep coming back to the idea of prototyping. Based on my work with BeeMe and at Etsy, I’ve seen the value of using prototypes for product discovery and refinement. I’d like to experiment with and improve upon existing approaches: agile development, rapid prototyping techniques, development frameworks like Ruby on Rails, third-party customer support/feedback tools like getsatisfaction and uservoice, and remote user testing services like usertesting.com. I may use a mobile application like BeeMe or EtsyLocal as a case study.

Right now the goal is to narrow the scope of my ideas into something I can accomplish over the next few months. Not a lot of time!

Native vs Web mobile apps

cameron — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 00:13:50 +0000

Lately I’ve been questioning the advantages of native mobile app development over web apps. I’m impressed with the possibilities for web apps, especially now that Javascript includes an API for geolocation (code sample). iPhone 3.0 supports the feature out of the box, and Android phones can access it via Google Gears.

The major advantages I can identify for native apps are speed and visibility (in app stores). These are strong arguments for native development. Also, access to the phone hardware, e.g. bluetooth and accelerometer, is possible only in native apps.

We’re creating a prototype for BeeMe using a Ruby on Rails web app, mostly because I’m better and faster with web development than obj-c or Java. In the long run it probably makes sense to create a native version for iphone and android, but perhaps over time we will see a departure from proprietary app stores to web apps, which would bode well for cross platform availability and development.

BeeMe: “Best Product Concept” at Microsoft Design Expo ’09

cameron — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 21:07:27 +0000

BeeMe was awarded Best Product Concept at Microsoft Design Expo ’09, with excellent feedback and interest from the judges, participants, and audience. Thanks to everyone at Microsoft Research for making it happen, to Nancy Hechinger and the Design Expo class, an the other schools: Dundee IMD from Scotland, CMU, Art Center, CAFA from Beijing, UI from Mexico City, and University of Washington.

BeeMe Demo video from liesjeh on Vimeo.