Exactly a week after the event, I finally have some time to cover the One More Thing 2012 conference that I was lucky enough to check out down in Melbourne last Saturday. Unfortunately, I could only catch the main conference on Saturday (May 26) therefore missing the mini-conferences on Friday, but oh well. Jump past the break for the full story.
The morning of Saturday, May 26 started pretty early for me, when I had to get up and drive to the airport to catch my 7:30AM flight to Melbourne. A short flight and a surprisingly long cab ride to the Melbourne Convention Centre later, the QR-code on my ticket was being scanned and I was being handed the badge (pictured above).
As I sat there in front of the closed doors of the auditorium thinking what to write in the “what you’re famous for” field of my badge munching on a cookie, the flow of the evenly geeky crowd kept increasing before filling up the foyer almost entirely. This is when the conference was ready to start with a warm welcome from Anthony Agius and an introduction of our MC for the day — Peter Wells. So here are the brief summaries of what I remembered from each presentation (subject to my taste and attention span).
Igor Pušenjak, founder at Lima Sky (Doodle Jump), Miami, FL
Made a good point about apps being addictive digital bite-sized snacks — simple and exciting for the user. This is why frequent updates help keep the excitement and user satisfaction higher for longer. Also, Igor shared the best App Store review from a group of friends who like to play his game Eat, Bunny, Eat! drunk at their local pub while yelling out the title of the game. Nice visuals.
Winter Wong, founder at Quoord Systems (Tapatalk), Shanghai, China
Good summary of the App Store approvals when it comes to apps able to browse the web and all of the exciting rejections that result from that claiming nudity, violence and other things you didn’t know you had in your app.
Lee Armstrong, founder at Pinkfroot (Plane Finder), London, UK
Interesting and simple story about how the Ship Finder started: living in Portsmouth and seeing ships go by raised the geek inside of Lee to wonder what those ships are and where they are going. Some good points about the difference in perspectives versus developers’ functionality and designers’ visual perfectionism and how neither of those things should be allowed to impact the release dates. Finally, interesting download statistics were shown highlighting two points: any publicity is good publicity (the downloads go up after any sign of controversy in the air) and Apple user statistics are more human than other platforms (downloads jump on weekends and public holidays, while Android and Windows Phone downloads are more or less level). Bet you didn’t know that!
Adam Kirk, founder at Mysterios Trousers (Calvetica), Salt Lake City, UT
Best way to learn is by tinkering and copying things you like from other apps.
Kepa Auwae, founder at RocketCat Games (Hook Champ), Seattle, WA
$0.99 price is for general audience games, if you have a niche audience however, then $5 is a sign of quality and updates to existing games are a waste of time better spent on developing new games.
Shaun Inman, independent designer and developer (The Last Rocket), Chattanooga, TN
All-round entertaining presentation for a geek from an 8-bit graphics genius!
Dave Howell, founder at Avatron (Air Display), Portland, OR
Best presentation of the conference from a man who developed for Apple products back when most other speakers went to elementary school. Great insights into the battles with Apple over app approvals, which by the way Dave advised to avoid at all cost (because you will never win) and focus on new functions and new apps. Great point about not trying to make “Swiss army knife” apps and attempt to single out and solve one problem with your app.
Julian Lepinski, founder at Debacle Software (Pano), Toronto, ON
Five years on, there still aren’t that many good apps in the App Store, so plenty of opportunity remains.
Raphael Schaad, developer at Flipboard (Flipboard), San Francisco, CA
Maybe I am missing something but the only thing I took out of that presentation was “ship it!”. I found the presentation too generic and little to do with app development and Flipboard.
Matt Rix, founder at Magicule (Trainyard), Toronto, ON
Inspiring for independent app developers to see how a person with a full-time job and family commitments can create a successful app in their spare time.
Justin Williams, founder at Second Gear (Elements), San Francisco, CA
Justin humorously confessed to being a screw-up, who still managed to put together a lot of products and a company. The problem of going last is finding everything you wanted to say has already been said in one way or another by someone else, so… That’s kind of what happened here.
Traditionally, at the end was a Q&A session with all of the speakers assembling back on stage to answer the questions and queries from the audience. To be honest, this has got to be the only part of the conference that I did not enjoy. There were barely any interesting questions asked and most were either repeats of the points raised by the speakers on how to promote apps, which left most respondents with nothing more to say, or very generic ideas about what Apple should (or shouldn’t) be doing as though there were any Apple employees on the panel.
What really dropped the tone of that part of the event in my opinion was the flaming of Android that started with an audience member asking the panel whether it is worthwhile going cross-platform and finished up with Adam Kirk’s quote “we don’t care about people who don’t have taste” (referring to Android users). Ever wonder what fuels the negative “Apple fanboy” stereotype even now that so many people own Apple products? Well… basically, that. At least there were positive comments about Windows Phone, so it wasn’t all discriminating.
Either way, I didn’t mean to close with a negative because even though I was never a fan of not-so-technical conferences, this one was very good! As it is obvious from my summaries of the presentations above, my favourites were Dave Howell, Igor Pušenjak and Lee Armstrong, all of whom did a fantastic job and kept me interested all the way from “hello” to “that’s me”.
That’s me for the coverage and videos will be available soon on onemorething.com.au so watch that space to see the presentations for yourself.
Thanks to Anthony Agius and Lauren Watson for organising the event and the good folks at Neon Stingray for sending me to the conference.