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DevCorner: Outside the Eye – Where App Innovation and Creativity Meet

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iOS7IconAt TechSmith, we are passionate about creating great software and keeping up with the latest technology. That passion does not stop when we leave the office. Many of us have side projects that help us hone our skills and expand our horizons.

Side projects allow you to play roles you otherwise won’t. You get to be the project manager, designer, QA, developer, marketer, and customer support. It gives you a new appreciation for the trials and tribulations of your co-workers. They also allow you to explore new technology before it might be ready to be integrated into our TechSmith apps.

My fellow Coach’s Eye team members chipped in and here are some of the things we work on in our free time:

Christopher “C-Bow” Bowron, Android Developer

Android_phoneJam Session is an Android app for recording a guitar, or other instrument, practice session. It allows you to open a web page or document with chords and lyrics on your phone and record yourself with the camera or microphone as you play through the song. It also makes it easy to review or share your session.

Jukey is an Android music player, designed to mimic a Jukebox. It was inspired by the Windows program SK Jukebox. It is a big hit at parties. It allows guest to easily browse through a music collection and enqueue songs.

I have been writing programs since High School. In college, my largest project was a chess engine. I continued that working on side projects in my professional career. As I transitioned to a mobile developer, I started some Android projects. I enjoy the freedom that it gives me. I enjoy being able to make all of the design decisions and plan the roadmap.

Alan “Swamp Beard” Dennis, Designer

Quick_Time

Grilling Time is a simple grilling timer, designed for speed and ease of use. Specifically structured to leave one hand free for grilling (or drinking) while you setup your timers, Grilling Time stays out of your way so that you can focus on what’s important.

As a designer, I spend a lot of my “side project” time pitching in on the projects that my developer friends are working on. I use such projects as an opportunity to explore different markets, experiment with different interaction models and to play with new visual styles and approaches to design. While I love working on Coach’s Eye during the day, I have a lot of fun helping to create smaller apps with my colleagues and friends as a way to extend my skills and try new things. I greatly enjoy the freedom that I experience while working on such side projects and frequently bring the lessons I’ve learned there back to my day job.

Rory “Big R” Hool, Android and Windows Developer

Video Info Viewer is an Android app to view the atom/box structure of mp4 files. It providers similar functionality to Apple’s “Atom Inspector”, “Media Info”, and other desktop applications that parse and display video files. It is useful for discovering issues / abnormalities with particular video files.

I partially developed “Video Info Viewer” because I wanted to use it. While working on Coach’s Eye there have been times when I was constantly copying videos from my device to my laptop to inspect video metadata, and being able to do it right on the device will be useful. I also developed it for the experience of getting an app of my own into the Google Play Store. It’s open source and available on GitHub.

Adam “Wheels” Jensen, iOS and Android Developer

OpenCast is an open source Mac/iOS framework for controlling Google Cast devices, such as the popular Chromecast. The official Google Cast SDK does not have support for the Mac platform, but With OpenCast, developers can build apps for the Mac that act as rich remote controls for nearby Cast devices. It also aims to be API-compatible with the official Cast SDK, so developers can add Mac support to their existing Cast-enabled apps without learning yet another framework.

Latin Phrasebook is a lightweight Android app that provides a rich collection of Latin phrases, their English translations, and many literary references. It makes a good companion for students of Latin, attorneys, and casual appreciators of the language of Rome.

Building a handful of side projects each year is helpful for keeping your skills sharp, learning new tools and languages, and relieving stress. I highly recommend it. I started developing mobile apps in 2003 on the Windows Mobile platform and PalmOS (such as they were). I was fascinated by the power of location-based apps and services, and before long I was trying to build apps that exchanged rich media with web services. That work was often painful, but it set the stage for my later work on Android and iOS. It also showed me that mobile devices would eventually make it possible to build small, focused apps that are easy and fun to prototype. If you don’t have a side project underway, go start one!

Otto “Grizzled Viking” Schnurr, iOS Developer

iPhoneShort List is a priority wrangler that can run a tournament inside each one of your lists. It picks match-ups. You decide which items win. The app keeps score which lets it automatically order the items in a list as you go.

Comparing list items against each other and keeping score is something I had been doing on paper for years. I found it helpful in cutting through the paradox of choice when trying to prioritize things. I started developing Short List as a small portfolio piece in 2009 so I could move this process off paper and into iOS.

Rick “Bad Man” Silva, iOS Developer

Textly is an iOS text editor app available for the iPhone and iPad. It uses iCloud to sync documents across your devices. Unlike the stock Notes app, Textly allows you to customize the font and the sort order of your documents. It also has support for Markdown, TextExpander and sharing to various third party apps.

jukey_screenshot

Jukey is an iOS music player, designed to mimic a Jukebox. It was inspired by the Android app. It allows you to browse through your music and create a playlist of songs. Jukey also has a custom screensaver that displays while your music plays.

I started working on Textly after attending the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in 2011. iCloud had just been announced and I was excited to play around with it. I spent a few months learning about iCloud and experimenting with ideas, having no intention to submit the app to the App Store. After realizing how much work I put into it and how much I was using the app myself, I decided to submit it to the App Store. I created Jukey after using Chris’ Android version. I initially released Jukey as a paid app, however I plan to use it to experiment with the freemium model.

All Together Now

If you think our side projects are impressive, get Coach’s Eye and see what we can do when we work together as a team.

App Store

Google Play

Windows Store

 

The post DevCorner: Outside the Eye – Where App Innovation and Creativity Meet appeared first on TechSmith Blogs.


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