The Online Magazine Focused on App Design, Branding & Marketing

The Apps: Flashlight, Calculator, Teeter, Mail and Internet

The Device: HTC Incredible

The Price: Free (They’re already on the phone when you buy it!)

The Basics: Normally, App Spotlight seeks out the latest and greatest in the world of app, selecting a mobile application of interest from the app store or Google Play. Today, I’m doing something a little different. I’m taking a closer look at a few of the apps that came equipped on my HTC Incredible straight out of the box, apps that many people don’t even think twice about in their rush to download Angry Birds and Instagram. That’s right…I’m talking about the Flashight app. The Calculator app. The generic Mail app. The standard web browser with the ominously simple name of “Internet.” How do these pre-packaged apps function alongside what’s available for download?

The Examination: Let’s take this on an app-by-app basis, shall we?

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Sometimes, the process of design is hard to describe or put into words. How exactly do you write an article explaining how you created something cool? You don’t. Instead, you capture the process and share it with the world in video form! We here at Rocksauce Studios have been hard at work on a new group chat app called Trotter (don’t worry, we’ll let you in on all of the cool details soon enough) and I wanted to give you a taste of what it took to create the app’s icon. The entire process took a great deal of hard work in Adobe Illustrator, but you can watch the entire process in less than two minutes after the jump

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(Every Monday, Rocksauce Studios CEO Q Manning will answer your questions about app design, app development and the mobile industry. Submit your questions here!)

What is a whiteboarding session? What happens during one?

A whiteboarding session rarely includes a white board here at Rocksauce, although it certainly used to! It’s a meeting we have two times a week where we get the team together and the sales people bring in all of the ideas that we’ve gotten from clients and present them to the marketing, design and UI/UX guys, as well as our development engineer and our project manager. We look over these potential projects, discuss any other potential ideas that come to us, talk about if we’ve seen this idea in the store and how much competition is out there, whether the client’s approach is the best approach and whether there’s a clever way to help them succeed in the market.
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I have a lot of ideas, but most of them are meat-related. If you like any of these, you can make the billion-dollar check out to Rocksauce Studios. Or just buy us a billion dollars worth of meat. That’ll be fine.

One day, we were approached by someone with a connection to Filipino boxing legend Manny Pacquaio who was interested in creating a simple boxing game with the notion that Pacquiao was actively looking to enter the mobile space. The idea here was to sell Pacquaio on the idea with just an image and a pitch. Now. I’m not the most skilled artist ever, but I do work fast. We decided to spend a few hours of our time on a concept piece, with the hope that it would open a dialogue with Pacquaio’s camp to choose us as their app design company.

We were told the game needed to be gritty, with more of an underground feel than an HBO or EA Fight Night feel, but still respectful of the sport. With a time crunch hanging over my head, I got to work.

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The most common joke yesterday, in the wake of Facebook’s $1 billion purchase of Instagram, was that the social network had paid an extraordinary amount of money for people’s sepia-toned photos of their dinner. First of all, Instagram doesn’t even have a straight-up sepia filter, and, secondly, anybody who’s serious about using an app to take a picture of their dinner is using something better than Instagram for that purpose. Try Picdish, Evernote Food, and my personal favorite, Foodspotting, and you’ll see that there are apps specifically designed to capture memorable meals.

I tend to use Evernote Food for meals cooked at home and Foodspotting for restaurant outings. Evernote Food has limited social aspects, but seems well-designed for creating your own library of recipes and attaching those to photos of the finished product. Foodspotting, on the other hand, is a social network designed around food and sharing great meals from restaurants with others. You can attach a photo of your meal to the location, so that others can use the app to see what kind of food is being served up. You can mark food from user photos as “tried,” “loved,” or “want” so that you can offer recommendations, or earmark a beautiful plate of chicken and waffles that you want to remember for later.

The only real downside to an app like Foodspotting is the crowd-sourced photographic content. I realize not everyone is a professional food photographer — I’m not either — but a poorly photographed meal, no matter how delicious it may have actually been, can look unappetizing as a cluster of out-of-focus blobs, washed out with the white light of the flash. You want to capture an image that makes the mouth water, if you’re posting the pic as a selling point for that restaurant.

Here are some quick tips that can help you get the best from your food photos.

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Our new travel app, iGoToo, hasn’t launched just yet, but I still thought I’d provide a little “behind the scenes” on some of the process that goes on with our creative team, especially in regards to marketing. The clients were very interested in creating a commercial with us. Now, that may sound beyond the capability of most app companies, but our CEO, Q Manning, also happens to be an experienced feature film maker, and several members of our staff have a background in film production as well (and if you’re wondering how filmmaking translates to the world of app design — it’s all about production coordination and clarity of “storytelling” — things we use in our app-making every day).

We pitched three storylines for a one-minute commercial, and you can see the pitches and the finished product after the jump.

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The Game: Jetpack Joyride

The Device: iPad

The Price: Free for for iOS

The Basics: You steal a jetpack and go on a joyride. You’ll ride it for a while and then are killed, horribly.

That’s it.

The Review: Since I’ve been playing games on a borrowed iPad, I’ve been making my way through what’s considered the best of the bunch, and Jetpack Joyride might be the most addictive one yet. I simply can’t stop playing this game.

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The Game: Grand Theft Auto 3: Ten Year Anniversary Edition

The Device: iPad

The Price: $4.99 for iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad and Android.

The Basics: This is it, the one that started it all. There are very few games that can be legitimately called trendsetters, but Grand Theft Auto 3 is certainly one of them. A massive open sandbox world the likes of which had never been seen before, with all the guns, car chases and adult themes one could hope for. It’s sold well over 15 million copies, became this generation’s Doom to both overly concerned parents and senators looking for votes, and defined a genre that developers are still trying to emulate it to this day.

Despite all the controversy over the adult themes and the multitudes of easily murdered hookers (hey, they took your money!), people fell in love with Grand Theft Auto due to its irreverent sense of humor, fun missions and over-the-top characters, and now, ten years later, the full experience is available to be downloaded straight to your phone.

The only question is- should it be?

The Review: Sometimes memories are best left alone.

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I don’t know about you guys, but I know a whole bunch of people who got tablets and smartphones as holiday gifts. Brothers. Sisters. Mothers. Fathers. Grandmothers. Not me, but don’t worry, I’ll live. Do you hear that friends and/or family? I’m getting by somehow, even though I don’t have a new iPad and/or iPhone. Hmph.

Anyway, there were nearly seven million new Android phones and iPhones activated on Christmas, which, when written out, looks like 7,000,000. That’s a lot of new smartphones and you can be guaranteed that many of them were gifts for new adopters. After all, what is the holiday season but an excuse to update your mobile technology on your mother’s dime? Naturally, with all of those sexy new devices comes a bunch of app downloads. How many app downloads are we talking about?

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