Handheld Media Revolution: Insights on Tablet Development

Speakers: Evan Doll – Co-founder, Flipboard, William “Whurley” Hurley – Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer, Chaotic Moon Studios, Oren Jacob – CTO at Pixar, Executive Producer for Ready, Set, Bag., Moderator: Jason Preston

I was extremely impressed with the panel, which included the founder of Flipboard, a hot iPad app for aggregating social info, the CTO of Pixar and producer for the movie Ready, Set, Bag, and the CTO of an app development company. They discussed the challenges and insights they’ve gained in developing for tablet, including the iPad.

The most important, and unanimous, point made was considering the user experience when developing. Mobile/handhelds/tables are all about context – how are you using it? How are they going to access it? What situation is it in? People are frantic with their phones, you don’t see that with tablets, it’s a more deliberate use.

There’s a growing number of places to put this content, but the predominant feeling of the panel was that Apple may be the best choice to develop for. The feeling was that Apple has a large user base, they support their platform – ensuring quality, and help you monetize it. When it comes to monetization, the feeling was that the mobile environment is easier to monetize than the web because with mobile, you’re in the moment – more than likely, you’re at the point of purchase. At least the context is often much better than the web.

One frustration of the panelists was the common belief that you could design apps once and then port them over to different devices.  You need ton consider the context of each device, as well as the capabilities/advantages/disadvantages of each.  In fact, the one panelist – the Chief Technology Officer of Pixar had hired Chaotic Moon Studios to do his iPad app.  Despite his great knowledge of technology and design, he knew that he didn’t know best practices for the iPad.  So that’s why he hired these developers to do it for him.

Finally, if you’re going to enter into developing apps, know that it’s not a once and done thing.  Despite the fact that most apps aren’t very successful, if it is successful, you had better prepare to support it and change it as devices change and evolve.  One panelist compared it to Flash – when it came out, it was cool and everyone wanted it.  After a while, you had a bunch of old flash websites that never changed because they invested a lot of money initially into something that was cool.