Tag Archives: Device

Shaken Not Stirred: Apple Watch’s Anticipated Impact on Wearable Platform

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Last year was huge for Apple products. The company announced and released a number of very important advancements, including iPhone 6, iOS 8, OS Yosemite, and Swift. The one product Apple announced but didn’t release could prove to have the most significant impact: Apple Watch.

Wearables are the next big platform for app development. While they’ve already caught on in Toronto, wearables aren’t predicted to receive mass adoption in the US until Apple Watch begins shipping in April. The function of wearables in the user’s daily life isn’t widely understood by the public. As with tablets, until consumers have the opportunity to use the devices and experience first-hand what the fuss is about, they will remain skeptical and the technological and market potential of wearables will remain untapped.

With the release and impact of Apple Watch looming, a surge in relevancy for wearable devices is imminent. As an app developer, wearables present a major opportunity upon which to capitalize: a brand new platform with new rules and plenty of room for innovation.

While the iPad acted as a bridge between the laptop and the smartphone, Apple Watch will have the smallest screen, functional for receiving information and sending out responses via voice memo and dictated text. The screen-size and lack of keyboard mean the controls are extremely simple. One would imagine very few practical applications which would work, however, this summary of the Apple Watch announcement shows how much app developers can do within the simple control scheme: The Verge Apple Watch Announcement in 6 minutes

The Honeywell application allows you to control the temperature of your home. Lutron allows you to control the lighting. Keep up to date on the latest sports scores, check text messages on the go without losing your train of thought. One of the cliche jokes about smartphones revolves around how we use them to avoid eye-contact. They disintegrate our social interactions because we’re constantly getting pulled away from conversations and sucked into the digital world. Apple Watch represents an intermediary device which will allows us to complete the bare essentials of digital communication without losing a step. The user can subtly process information sent to them without appearing rude for pulling out his/her phone.

The simplicity of Apple Watch weeds out overly-complicated unproductive applications to emphasize ways in which technology can aid the user in their day-to-day. The purpose of a watch is to help its owner have a better sense of time and time management. Apple Watch will no doubt see a host of new productivity apps released exclusive to the platform. The ability to set reminders with subtle notifications will allow professionals with busy schedules to stay focused on the task at hand without missing a beat.

Apple Watch presents a potential breakthrough for healthcare apps. Fitness tracks your daily movements and Workout allows users the ability to set goals for themselves and change their habits. Apple Watch will track glucose levels for diabetics. The ability to track heart-rate and movement also offers a host of uses for clinical applications detailed in this report.

About 35 million people reportedly want to buy an Apple Watch within a year of its release, according to Business Insider. It’s expected to be the biggest Apple release of the year and will likely initiate the widespread adoption of wearable devices. With its release looming, we can only speculate and await anxiously the future of wearable devices.

Mystic Media is an app development, web design, and strategic marketing firm located in Salt Lake City, Utah. Contact us today by clicking here or by phone at 801.994.6815

Android Lollipop Vs. iOS 8: The Battle of the Operating Systems

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It’s been a good year for operating systems.

Back in June, Google announced their new operating system “Android L,” which has since been dubbed Android Lollipop. In our post  Android L Beta Preview: First Impressions of the Latest OS, we covered what we knew about the OS based on the announcement at the Google I/O 2014.

On the iOS side of the equation, this year saw Apple release iOS 8, which Apple hailed as the biggest iOS release ever. iOS 8 didn’t reinvent iOS aesthetics, rather it pushed forth the flat design introduced with iOS 7 and added a host of new features, including Apple Pay, Touch ID, and Device Continuity.

Both platforms represent dramatic technological advancements. The question now becomes: iOS 8 or Lollipop?

AESTHETICS

Steve Jobs majored in calligraphy at Reed College before dropping out. Jobs always held aesthetic design to be among the top priorities in his vision of Apple products, and Apple has always held a strong edge over Android in the aesthetic department.

iOS 7 saw Apple straying from Jobs’ skeuomorphic ideology in favor of Flat Design: a more stylized, minimal, bright look. iOS 8 refines Flat Design with more consistent iconography and UI. It also makes better use of gestures including swiping left to go back and double tapping the home screen to slide the screen down, allowing for better reachability on the large screens of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.

While Apple refined their current look, Android elected to enact a complete aesthetic overhaul. They may have shaken up the OS aesthetic game with Material Design.

Material Design is not an easy concept to grasp and can better be explored in practice. The idea is that the digital world should have its own intuitive physical rules. Buttons must react specifically to the touch, there must be multiple easily decipherable UI layers, animations must trigger and unfold in a specific, consistent manner. All Material Design aesthetics are in favor of creating the most intuitive, easily understood experience for the user.

Material Design is much more intricate than Flat Design. It’s both showier and more practical. It’s a more evolved, complex version of Flat Design. Thus, Android has taken the crown with regard to aesthetics. It’s likely Apple will follow suit and copy Material Design aesthetics for their next iOS overhaul.

Check out this video demonstrating the ideas of Material Design posted by Google Developers Youtube account.

FEATURES

Both Lollipop and iOS 8 offer new features, in addition to minor UI tweaks, for their devices. Most of these features either mirror their competitor’s counterpart, or replicate a past feature of their competitor.

Lollipop and iOS 8 both push to integrate with cars with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. Both offer integrated navigation systems, hands-free calling and texting, and control of entertainment; however, neither will have a major impact until they are adopted by a greater number of cars.

Lollipop and iOS 8 both feature health apps (Google Fit and Health respectively). Both function similarly with certain apps offering exclusive partnerships. The big factor could be whether/which major health apps make the commitment to either Lollipop or iOS 8. The anticipated forthcoming popularity surge in wearables could be a game-changing variable in health apps. At the moment, neither app has a major edge over the other.

iOS 8 now offers Apple Pay combined with Touch ID, a replication of Google Wallet which was introduced in 2011. While Google Wallet is the older system, Apple Pay currently has the momentum. Both offer touch payments via Near Field Communications, but Apple Pay refuses to store physical credit card details, making it the safer system. The popularity of Pay could cause a resurgence of Google Wallet, but at the moment, Apple Pay has a definite edge.

Aside from the aesthetics, perhaps the biggest differentiator between iOS 8 and Lollipop is Apple’s push for the concept of device continuity embodied in Handoff. We covered device continuity in both Climbing Yosemite and Bite the Apple: Maximize iOS 8 to Vanquish Your Competition. Handoff allows the user to easily complete tasks while transitioning  between Apple devices seamlessly. Instant Hotspot, one of the coolest features of iOS 8, allows users to connect to their iPhone’s cellular network when no other Wi-Fi networks are available. Lollipop comes up empty in this department and Android will surely be playing catch-up when they release their next OS.

BATTERY

iOS bolsters a reputation for retaining a more efficient battery than Android. With Project Volta, Android has made a strong attempt to optimize their OS to defeat this notion.

Lollipop features a built-in task manager designed to prevent unnecessary operations from waking the phone up, running app house-cleaning necessities in batches when plugged in, and preventing network requests from Android and third party apps in spots without network connectivity. Lollipop also has “Battery Historian,” an analytics tool designed to track and tweak battery consumption.

iOS 8 did not make any dramatic attempts to improve it’s battery life, but still competes with Android with an extremely efficient standby mode: leaving an iPhone 6 or 6 plus unplugged overnight will only lose 1-2% charge.

Overall, the OS battery competition is fairly neck-and-neck, which is a big improvement for Android considering in the past they have gotten smoked in this department.

Check out this video Introduction to Project Volta from Google I/O 2014 for more information.

AVAILABILITY

One of the major factors which elevates iOS 8 over Lollipop is the limited availability of the OS due to device fragmentation.

Google allows third-party developers to build hardware for the Android OS. This causes device fragmentation, in which the variety of hardware makes it harder to optimize software for each device. As a result, different devices will have access to Lollipop at different times. Lollipop is currently available on Google’s Nexus 6 and Nexus 9 phones with a staggered launch planned for other Android phones.

Device fragmentation is also troublesome for app developers as it means there’s no way to optimize directly for all the hardware considering the diversity.

iOS’s iPhone exclusivity means it runs well across devices and updates are immediately accessible on Apple hardware. The user is guaranteed at least three years of upgrades. App developers can optimize for each platform which remains relevant.

BOTTOM LINE

Overall, iOS 8 is the more practical operating system. While Material Design represents an exciting leap forward in software aesthetics, iOS 8’s device continuity features trump all of Lollipop’s functional additions. The widespread availability of iOS 8 and lack of device fragmentation makes it the better optimized package.

While iOS 8 wins this battle, it will be exciting to see how the platforms influence one another in the next round of OS updates. Expect Apple to adopt Material Design aesthetics and Android to begin a push for their own version of device continuity.

At Mystic Media, we’re constantly engaged in various app design projects. Our expertise reaches across all facets of the industry, be it iOS design, Android design, web design, strategic marketing and beyond. Contact us today by clicking here or by phone at 801.994.6815

Android L Beta Preview: First Impressions of the Latest OS

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As the year winds down, the developer community can look forward to new operating systems from Apple, Android, and Microsoft. We’ve covered the forthcoming IOS 8 upgrade and Windows has taken a different approach, updating their Windows 8.1 consistently without renaming the OS. This leaves the upcoming Android L. Android recently released the Android L Developer preview, a sneak peak at the latest version of the OS, available for the Nexus 5 and the 2013 Wi-Fi Nexus 7. We took a look to assess the ins and outs of the platform.

The biggest development in the Android L is an aesthetic: the shift from the recommended Holo visual theme to Material Design. Like flat design, Material Design involves a simple, vibrant, non-skeuomorphic visual scheme. Unlike flat design, Material Design is about creating a realistic cyber universe. Material is a metaphor. The idea of space within the user interface which is “inspired by the study of paper and ink yet technology advanced and open to imagination and magic.” (via Google) In other words, it’s an interface which is realistic and has intuitive rules within its own world, but still makes things easier when it can with creative gestures and transitions. The key to creating a realistic digital-space is to have consistent, fundamental rules of light, surface and movement. For more on Material Design, check out Google’s introduction to the concept.

The notification tray received a major renovation. Rather than keeping two trays for alerts and quick settings, the two are now presented in one unified notification tray. Dragging down from the top of the screen pulls out notifications, then dragging down on the notifications screen reveals a layer of quick settings.

The lock screen also received an update, displaying notifications front and center, allowing easy access directly from the lock screen. The updated lock screen also makes access to functions easier through gesture:  a swipe up unlocks the device, a swipe left opens the camera, a swipe right (on phones) opens the dialer.

Android’s Project Volta was designed to optimize the OS’s performance on smartphones to improve battery life. Project Volta follows a pattern of projects run by Google focused on addressing weaknesses of the previous platform, such as Project Butter, which aimed to make Android’s UI animations run at 60 fps, and Project Svelte, an effort to get the OS to run on 512MB of RAM. In previous versions, when the OS is engaged in a process for one second, it burns two minutes of standby time. To address this, Project Volta includes the development of a “JobScheduler” API which allows the OS to batch unimportant app requests, and gives developers the option to delay housekeeping functions on their apps until the device is plugged in. ArsTechnica did a study of the Android L Preview battery life versus Android 4.4 KitKat and found that Android L Preview had 36% more battery life.

 androidL

Via Ars Technica

Another major move in the Android L Preview is the transition of the default run-time from Dalvik to ART, which aims to save battery life and yield a faster, more efficient performance. Animations and scrolling felt both faster and smoother, but there were some bugs with the multitasking view and notification tray which one can imagine will be fixed in the final version of the OS.

App compatibility with the new OS fluctuates, some work fine in the Android L Beta, while others don’t work at all, including Twitter, Dropbox, and Google Docs. Of course, we expect much of this to be ironed out in the final version of the OS. The bottom line for Android developers is that Android L represents a major improvement in battery life, aesthetics and performance, which is good for business.

At Mystic Media, we’re highly experienced in the Android app development field, with a thorough and continually evolving perspective on the ins and outs of the platform. Contact us today by clicking here or by phone at 801.994.6815

Stay Connected: Best Mobile Phones of 2014

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Since our post on the top tablets of 2014 was so popular with our readership, we’ve decided to follow-up with an article on the top smartphones of 2014.

The term “mobile” in our industry does not refer to cellular phone, it refers to wherever you are, wherever you want to be.  We live in a world of mobility, where an individual is expected to check his/her email throughout the day, whether they are near a computer or not. Mobile internet access puts a seemingly limitless amount of information and general knowledge at one’s command at any time.  The smartphone has become such an integral part of our daily lives, it’s vital to be equipped with a device capable of boosting one’s general ability to work, post, and consume information on-the-go.  When one understands the device, he/she can make best use of the applications and design.  Here are the leading smartphones on the market right now.

We have dubbed iPhones as the “gourmet” smartphone because of their price and popularity in the US.  One of the major advantages of the iOS operating system with regard to smartphones is the autonomy.  Whereas the Android OS is used for a plethora of devices, Apple limits iOS smartphones to iPhones, assuring all iOS apps will run smoothly on the only device.  The Apple iPhone 5s continues Apple’s reign of dominance in the smartphone field.  While the iPhone 5s has a comparatively slow processor speed (1.3 GHz), screen size (4 inches), and battery life (9 hours, 59 minutes), it is the exclusivity of the iTunes App Store, the intuitive simplicity of the UX design, and the potential of the A7 Processor chip with 64-bit architecture which makes the iPhone 5s THE smartphone to own.

Android is the most popular OS platform and also has the largest variety of devices.  As a result, any given Android app may perform differently on different platforms, unless the app features expert design.  Recently, the Samsung Galaxy S5 has made waves with its ultra-fast 2.5 GHz processor speed, 1920-by-1080 pixel screen resolution and 5.1 inch screen size.  The Galaxy S5 is revered as the most powerful smartphone on the market at the moment.  Alternatively, Samsung also offers the Galaxy Note 3, a “phablet” or phone-tablet hybrid.  The Galaxy Note 3 has a 5.9 inch screen size, 2.3 GHz processor, 1920×1080 display, 18 hour battery life, and uses an S Pen active stylus for handwriting and easy touch screen navigation.

The hottest, newest phone on the market is the Amazon Fire. First launched in Seattle on June 18th, the Amazon Fire phone is currently available for pre-order with expected shipping date of July 25th.  The internet has been buzzing about it, and honestly, it’s not all good.  While the five camera “Dynamic Perspective” tracks your head and to produce 3D-like graphics, many are claiming the phone does more good for Amazon than it does for its user with one of its central features “Firefly” allowing you to scan objects and media and buy them instantly (on Amazon).  Although the consumers have yet to weigh in on the Amazon Fire phone as it has not hit shelves, it’s safe to say it’s not worth the wait.

As we mentioned in our post on top tablets, the Windows OS is best suited for professional use as it seamlessly integrates with Microsoft Office.  At the moment, Nokia has a bit of a monopoly on the Windows OS smartphone market, although HTC has developed a couple phones for the OS.  While HTC’s Windows Phone 8x was the signature device in Microsoft’s roll out of Windows 8.1, the Nokia Lumia Icon is not only the premier Windows phone, it’s also a good value starting from $49.99.  With full 1080p HD video and four high performance microphones, the Nokia Lumia Icon offers an exceptional video and audio recording package. The Lumia Icon also features a 2.26 GHz processor 5 inch screen display, and nearly 15 hour battery life. Of the many Lumia models Nokia has put out, there’s no question the Icon is the way to go.

A smartphone is a tool which strengthens you as an individual, an intellect, and a worker. Those not equipped with the latest technology are at a disadvantage. Rather than be parsimonious, consider a smartphone an investment in a lifestyle and an extension of one’s personal brand.

At Mystic Media, we keep our ear to the ground on the latest hardware and stay up to date on the benefits of each device to ensure we make the most of every application web design.  Contact us today by clicking here or give us a call at 801.994.6815

Making the Most of Your Tablet Design Part 2: Custom Device Design

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In Part One of our two part series on tablets, we explored the top tablets on the market in 2014 and what they offer to both consumers and developers. This article, explores the perks & advantages of custom device application design and optimization.

Companies design applications to connect with their consumers–to attract eyes to their company or product. As developers, we don’t focus on what device the consumer uses, the goal is to hold the user’s attention and potentially engrain our client’s brand in the consumer’s day. When developing an application, one must remember that each device has its advantages and disadvantages, and one cross-device layout doesn’t always get the job done. By optimizing a mobile application separately for phones and tablets, it portrays your company in the best light and engages the end user with the best possible user experience.

As discussed in the previous article, tablets vary in numerous factors, most notably operating system, processing power and screen size. When optimizing a mobile application, there are a few options. Developing an application optimized for smartphones creates an app which can be used to its fullest potential on any smartphone, but the app’s functionality could suffer on a tablet. Developing a tablet-only application optimizes the app for tablets, but again, it will not work nearly as well on a smartphone.

The third and best option is to optimize the app separately for both phones and tablets. Although creating a phone or tablet-only optimized application is cheaper, when the design is optimized for each screen size and device type, your app always looks great, sacrificing neither functionality nor usability on any given platform and ultimately providing the best possible user experience. At Mystic Media, we recommend investing in both phone and tablet versions of your application to maximize the quality of the app, and vicariously the perception of your company.

Phone only applications can be fixed to have multiple viewing options. We all have seen and experienced the 1x & 2x buttons on iPads, which allow you to adjust the size of the application based on what device you are using. While this seems a reasonable solution in theory, in practice, it appears shoddy and cheap. When one application attempts to optimize only for a phone and utilizes the same general framework for tablets, it often ends up mediocre on the tablet. For big companies, it’s not up for debate–they recognize the importance of appearing on the cutting edge so they invest in multiple device applications

Take a look at the Youtube mobile app. Their iPhone & Android apps limit the app to display vertical orientation on phones, but on tablets they optimize the design to display both vertical and horizontal orientations based on the angle at which one holds the device. By optimizing the design of the app to change based upon the screen size and device orientation, Youtube allows for a customized feel and content placement on all devices, ensuring the end user will spend more time on their app increasing the quality of the user experience.

Device optimization is worth the time and money because it allows the mobile application to live up to its fullest potential functionally and is aesthetically pleasing on every screen. In addition, marketing your app in both the phone and tablet categories within the app store gives your app a major boost in visibility.

When developing an application, the number one goal is to avoid looking amateur. If the application looks amateur, it turns off the user, consequently causing less downloads, uses, and of course,money. In the spirit of app store optimization and attracting downloads, it is critical to maximize the exposure to your mobile application. Having a bad application is worse than having no application—it can degrade the business in the eyes of your customers and potential users. Rather than squander your time and money on a cheap app, satisfy and impress your customers by developing a multiple device optimized application.

At Mystic Media, our team is equipped with all the tools to develop your app, optimize it to devices, and even develop market strategies. We have the knowledge, the work force, and the work ethic to design your mobile app to its fullest potential. Contact us today by clicking here or give us a call at 801.994.6815