The Online Magazine Focused on App Design, Branding & Marketing

(Guthrie Bunn is a business strategist and something of a genius. We decided to let him tell you why Rocksauce Studios is the app developer for you. One, because we love our parent company and two, because no one can pitch us quite like Guthrie! -Ed.)

At Rocksauce Studios, we build market-based apps.  Factory-produced generic apps don’t excite people, and they won’t excite your target market.  That’s why each app we make is built with top-level thought, designed to impress and engage.  We bring you expert talent from Austin, the city we share with Google, Apple, facebook, Dell, Intel, AMD, IBM, National Instruments, Motorola, Samsung, Texas Instruments, and 3M.

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The latest app from Rocksauce Studios is here! TickTalk is “the talker’s metronome,” an app designed to help you control your own voice! Do you want to talk more slowly? Do you need to speed up? Just pick your speed from the (seriously gorgeous) interface, put your phone is your pocket and start talking!

With his permission, I’ve posted a message about the app written by our CEO Q Manning, who personally designed TickTalk.

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What exactly is the TickTalk app? 

TickTalk is the talker’s metronome iPhone app, which is just about ready to hit the app store.. It’s there to help people who talk too fast or talk too slow or maybe somebody who just wants to change the cadence of their speech for a certain situation, like for an interview or a speech. Your phone sits in your pocket and the app causes it to vibrate at the rhythm of your choice. It goes from fast to slow (from “auctioneer” to “southerner”). It can buzz silently in your pocket or you can turn on audible cues for that extra tick-tick-tick.

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(Talksauce is a weekly editorial that represents the opinions of Tapsauce editor-in-chief Jacob Hall, not Rocksauce Studios. If he says something stupid, blame him and him alone.)

Here’s the honest truth about how people (myself included) use apps: once we’ve downloaded and opened a new app, it’s got about five minutes before we decide whether or not it’s staying on our smartphone. I’m especially vicious when it comes to choosing what gets to live on on my iPhone and what gets sent sailing into the deletion abyss. When the very nature of your job has you around apps every day, you get picky.

Unfortunately, this means that the occasional good app ends up as collateral damage.

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As a designer, I consider myself pretty laid back. I’m willing to roll with whatever punches are thrown at me. However, there are a handful of things that just plain bug me. Here are my top five, presented in a helpful list format for your education.

1. “Make It Pop!”

You have no idea how many times I’ve been on a project and I’ve been asked to “make it pop.” It’s an ambiguous term. There’s nothing descriptive about it, unfortunately. It’s a word that people may have heard and they’ve found a way to work into their vocabulary, but it means nothing to me. I rarely ask for an explanation for it, because I know what they mean. Saying “make it pop” is typically another way of saying “make it look fantastic.” Luckily, that was our plan in the first place!

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The App: Songify

The Device: iPhone

The Price: Free

The Basics: Considering the rise of autotune and the amount of really crappy music it has inspired, an app like Songify was inevitable. Now, you too can have your limited talents transformed into music! In all fairness, Songify isn’t meant to be used to create crummy pop music, but rather to let you humorously modify anything you say/sing into a song. The app’s creators have already used to great effect, “songifying” popular YouTube videos and news reports to the tune of millions of hits. But how is the app itself?

The Review: Songify is a solid, well-designed, nice looking app that performs as advertised. However, for what’s ultimately a pretty slight service, it sure does ask for a lot of monetary commitment in the long run.

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Plague Inc.: Have you ever wanted to wipe out the entire planet in about a half hour of gameplay? Then Plague Inc. is for you! The game puts you in control of a deadly disease, which you must carefully manipulate to infect the entire world. You don’t have direct control of your disease, but you do select where the plague starts and use your carefully earned points to modify infectivity, lethality and symptoms. You have to take note of how the rest of the world is reacting to your disease and mutate accordingly, trying to find a way to overcome any safety measures being put against you. It’s pretty grim subject matter, but it’s incredibly addicting and requires some surprisingly intense and thoughtful strategy. Destroying the world on your iPhone has never been this much fun.

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

iPhone vs Android. Pick a side!

I’ll approach this from the perspective of a designer. The iPhone is much easier to design simply because the standards have remained consistent. There have been a few additions and modifications to the iOS over the years but they’ve been very small and incremental and have felt very evolutionary. The Android operating system has been the exact opposite. They changed up their user interface guidelines, they’ve changed the ways they handle graphics. In their most recent version of their software, they’ve put a “Back” button on the upper left corner, which, up until this version of the operating system, was a cardinal sin since all Android phones had a hardware back button. We didn’t put Back buttons in the actual software. Now, they’ve completely changed that and Android apps look more like iOS apps than they ever have before.

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There is no shortage of apps that let you review products, services and restaurants, but considering how much human beings enjoy being judgmental and critical toward the fellow members of their species, there has been a strange lack of apps that let you review people. That changes now, thanks to a new iPhone app called We&Co, which lets you rate employees of you favorite shops and bars and such.

Businesses have to first register their employees, but from there on out, it’s up to you — yes, you — to jump on the app to rate and review the people who brought you your food, cut your hair, made that fantastic martini or helped you load all of those groceries into your car. The app seems to emphasize positive feedback, so writing that an employee is “a total goon with no respect but plenty of body odor” will probably be out of line but “was helpful, quick and looked happy to be there” would be right at home.

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