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Summary: In this the fourth session of the Short, Bald & Lanky podcast we'll chat about a few of the different languages and platforms that you have to look at when deciding how to build an app. This is a key question when you begin to formalise an idea for a mobile app. Which platform will you support? Will it be an Apple iPhone? Will it be Android? What about Windows? The list can go on as there are already more platforms than this. More platforms will arrive and more smartphones will be created. On top of this you have to make a decision over whether your app will be developed for a smart phone only or whether you’ll also add a version for a tablet to? It really does change on a case to case basis. So give it some thought, have a look at the prototype of your app and try and picture it being used on phones and tablets. Think about the functionality and how users will engage with the app. Talk to colleagues and friends about the app and then hopefully you’ll come to a conclusion over which device to support. Links: Huayu Messenger

Summary: In this the third session of the Short, Bald & Lanky podcast we'll chat about another key phase at the start of app development and that is knowing your audience. When you are about to embark on building an app it’s a good idea to know exactly the type of person who you are creating the app for. You could ask yourself questions such as: What is their age group? Which region of the World do they live in? What other apps do they buy? You can really go down to many levels with this, but the idea is to have a clear idea of the kind of person you are building your app for. If you have this it helps you refine your idea to suit this particular person. If you don’t have this person in mind you’ll end up to trying to build an app to suit a wide range of people and that can at times prove difficult. In this podcast we will discuss how to know your audience and also give a couple of examples of apps we've made and how we began to understand our audience early on in the app building process. Links: Huayu Messenger

Summary: In this the second session of the Short, Bald & Lanky podcast we'll chat about a key phase at the start of app development and that is prototyping an app. When you have your idea for your app we've found how important it is to transfer this idea onto a prototyping tool so you can see a representation of your app at such an early stage of the app development process. The prototyping tools we'll discuss enable you to create pages of your app to give you a good representation of how your app will look once it's been developed. Then once you can see how the different pages of your app fit together many other questions may arise about your app that you can decide upon before you even begin to write a line of code which can clearly help you plan for the development of your app. As part of this podcast we'll review three different prototyping products. Links: Huayu Messenger

Summary: In this the first session of the Short, Bald & Lanky we discuss the starting point of all mobile apps which is the ideas phase and how to make mobile app ideas happen. So where do we begin? The starting place of every app that is made is the ideas phase. There are hundreds of thousands if not millions of great ideas out there some of these app ideas have already been turned into mobile apps some haven't so what we want to look at is how you make these ideas into mobile apps? So how do you choose an idea for an app? An idea may come from anywhere for example an app idea may come from a solution to a customers problem? It could well be that your customers have technical problems with a particular app or web product and your app idea could help to solve this? Or it could be that you create an app from one of your hobbies or from time spent with family and friends. Ideas can come from anywhere. We'll also explain about how the idea for our messaging app Huayu Messenger came to fruition as a good example of an idea for a mobile app. So in this very first Short, Bald & Lanky podcast we will look into different ways to think about making mobile app ideas happen. Links: Huayu Messenger