 where we have Hon Ching and JJ with us. So those of you who do not know, they have won the first Apple design awards for Singapore as well as for the whole of Southeast Asia. This is the first time ever we have Apple design awards. Now, those of you who haven't heard about Apple design awards, I'm not sure if there will be anyone among you. So this is basically, how do I say? This is an award of highest level for app developers and designers, especially people who are working on Apple platform. I was actually lucky to be with Hon Ching this year when he got the award. And this was my second time with him at WWC. I went to WWC in 2015. But I could see all the excitement that he had when he got the award. We had a Facebook chat group where a bunch of us from Singapore, from Singapore, and even from Carousel, there were a bunch of engineers who traveled together. We had a Facebook chat, and he kind of announced there that, hey, I got the Apple design award. We were like, wow. Then we were also very excited. So this session is going to be about their story, how they built apps, about their particular app elk that got them the Apple design award. So this is going to be the agenda for today. I have a few questions I get to ask first because I arranged this session. So I have a few questions that I'm going to ask. Again, this is just to kickstart the series of questions that you guys might have. Now, if you can look into the bottom part of the slide, this is urlslider.com. You can visit that url on your browser if you want. And put iOS Dev Scout as the has key. And you can ask your questions. And if you think there is a better question, somebody else has asked, and you probably have the same question, then you can kind of like it. And we'll pick the top questions, and we'll go through those as well. So that's about slide.com. So this was a photo I think they took after they gave the cube. Where is the cube? We'll see that later. And a bunch of us who were there, we took this opportunity to take a photo with him. He was like, because this time they did not have, like every year they have a special event on the first day where they announce the winners of Apple design awards. But this year they tried different things. They had a press, so we kind of got to know from the badges, from anyone who is holding the cube. So the moment we see somebody holding the cube is basically he's a celebrity there at WWC. So Hunching was one of them. But before I can start the questions, I would like Hunching and JJ to kind of quickly introduce themselves, what they currently do, and maybe a few things about themselves. So I've been doing iOS work since the first version of iOS. That was the Apple OS. One of my first company was Nexbus and Book. And then we started CleanShare One Apps about five years ago. Yep, can you hear me? Yep. Hi everybody. Thanks to Soop for having us here. I'm a late starter, unlike him. He started even before the App Store was out. I only started around iOS 4, that would be 2010. So that's also the year we met. And then after that, we just happened to, we started playing badminton and then having bubble tea and don't know why we started a company and that's where we are today. Okay. Those of you who don't know me, my name is Soop. I'll just end it here. So let's talk about Elk. What is Elk? I think it all started during one of my trip to Hong Kong last year, I think, yeah. Basically, I was buying a weighing machine for my coffee. But at the same time, I decided to buy coffee as well. So I just ordered this filter black coffee and this is $78 Hong Kong dollar. My weighing skill I knew was very cheap because I searched online. It was all like $40, $50. But I remember that place was selling weighing machine for like about 20 bucks. So it was $98 Hong Kong dollar. So when I paid for the coffee at $78 Hong Kong dollar, I was, I started thinking, this is not right. How come the coffee is about the same price as the weighing machine? So after I calculated, oh my God, it's about $14 Singh dollar for a cup of black coffee. And I was just really shocked. But at the same time, there wasn't any good way for me to quickly convert currencies on the go. I mean, I had my Apple Watch then, I had an iPhone, but it was just too much trouble to take it out and do conversion. And besides, you know, very pricey to like, they say, hey, you want $78 coffee, I take out my iPhone and start calculating. So when I came back, I started mocking up this idea to, the initial idea was on the watch because when you raise your risk, right, you always have that app with you. So we would use the crown to start converting money. And yeah, later on we added the iPhone app. And yeah, so it's a currency converter that works very quickly, discreetly. Yeah. So those of you who do not know, they own the Apple Design Award for the WatchOS app. I was initially thinking that it's for the iOS app or the iPhone app, which is actually pretty cool as well, the animations and the user experience. But they own it for the WatchOS app. And JJ has a very nice blog about how they went about designing this whole app where many people start building an iPhone app and build a companion app or watch. And they later kill it because usually this particular companion app doesn't add any value. Whereas they did the other way around, they built a watch app first and then they started building the iOS app as the companion app. So this is a question for you, Honching, because you have been avoiding the mic. How did it feel to win the first Apple designer was for the whole of South Asia, especially when JJ was not there with you? So it's definitely great to get your work recognized by a company that is famous for design. Yeah, so going to WWDC, we were hoping that we will win the ADA. I mean, every year I go, I hope that I win it. So this year I was particularly hopeful. I was telling him that if we win the ADA, I'll FaceTime him while I go up to the stage to get the award. But that didn't happen. So looking at the schedule, oh, there was no ADA this year. So maybe there's no ADA, there's no award for Apple not giving award this year. So it was definitely a surprise Monday evening when they told us about it. And we were supposed to keep quiet for another two days until the press comes and then they make the big announcement. JJ, how did you feel when you heard about the award and as because like you were not there? Yeah, actually I was, I would put slap, I slapped in because I was watching the keynote and then he was trying to call me. So it was a bit anticlimactic for me because I just walked up and then it was like, hey, we won. There was like really, oh, okay. Yeah, then, and then it took me a while to let it set in. But yeah, I guess it's, I mean, we've been doing quite a number of apps but this is really the first time that Apple has recognized it. So I think we are both very excited about it. Thank you. So this is an interesting question. And we spent a lot of time thinking about these questions like all of us organized this. What is the story of your collaboration when you build apps and what are some of the previous apps that you've built? Especially, can you tell about some of the apps that you worked on but never released? So I'll talk about the collaboration part. So we first met, like you just said, we first met in 2015. We were both giving a talk at Apple office, I think I was four. So there were three speakers, he was, I was the first speaker, he was the third speaker. So that was the day we met. And after that we hang out and then, and got to know, I got to know his app better. We decided to start a company together. So the first app, actually the first app was the one that never got released, right? Yeah, we were going to do a location reminder app. We were looking for the screenshots today and we forgot why we didn't release it, but we didn't release it. So the first public app was an app called Dispatch, basically the t-shirt I'm wearing now. It started in Japan, we went on a trip and then being an independent developer, my own app has, I need to handle support email. So back on the Mac, what I would do is I would use a text expander. So it's something like you can store commonly used responses. So I just type something and then you just expand out. So I can handle support email quite quickly like that, but on the iPhone it was pretty difficult. So I started, I brought up the idea how about we make an email app on the iPhone. Wait, let me show you when I posted the idea, you are... Say something. Say something. Hello. Is it working? Hello. Is it working? Yes. Just going closer. No, I'm rather doing it myself. So, yeah, but it was a bit unrealistic, I think because it's a two man team and we don't know anything about, you know, all those email protocol, POP, iMap, what not. But somehow, I don't know, we managed to find some open source library and we really started working on an email app, two of us. I think it was a bit crazy idea because we really spent one whole year making our first app. So I think, I think most people will consider a bad decision, like, I mean, you devote so much time and energy into making an app that you don't even know whether it will work out financially, but I think that's what we did. So, but mainly because it was just to scratch my personal each line, I wanted to, I wanted something to reply emails quickly on the go. So, yeah, that was our first app. This patch, and I'm... Anything else you want to add? The automation, the writing, how you collaborate with other people? How do we work? So we are both developers and designers, but JJ works more on the design and user interaction. I like to play with animation and transition. And we don't really divide how we work. It's just whoever have time, they just work on it. We kind of know our strength and weaknesses very well. So certain things I know I should be working on it, certain things he know he'll work on it. Certain decisions I know, okay, when it comes to UX, if we have certain conflict, I'll trust him, we'll go with his decision. Yeah, that's how we work. Now this is going to be hard for me to follow. You want to see over here? No, I should. So at this point, I'm going to look through some of the questions that the other participants have asked, and I'm going to pick one of the questions. So make sure you keep liking the questions that you think is interesting. Okay. Did Apple secretly tell you before you went to WWDC that you were the ADA winner, so that they could make sure you were there to collect it? No, we were told that they are doing a website for developer profiling. So they wanted some images from us profile of our company and description of the apps we make. And that's all we were told. And yeah, I don't know what will happen if we don't go, but they already know that I'm attending. So yeah, but they are other ADA winners that were not attending at WWDC, but they have a special visitor pass to come in for a few hours, but not to attend sessions. I guess that's what they do. But for them in US it's easy, for Singapore it's hard. Yeah, we can't just fly them. I think we did secretly guess whether, because they keep asking us for a lot of things, it was very irritating. Can you send us photos? Then we have to get my wife to take photos, get his wife to come and take photos of us working together, I mean, a lot of things like write-ups and all. So at one point I was just, I asked the local Apple evangelist, is this still? Oh yeah, I asked him, is the ADA decided yet? I mean, is this like related to the ADA? He told me, oh no, it's not. So we just assume it's not. And especially because we saw the schedule, there's no ADA. So we thought that initially we guessed it might be, but later on we thought it is not. And then, yeah, things happened. I'm going to ask one more question from the list of questions on Slido, and then we are going to go through the questions that I have on Slido. So this is a question for you, Hun Cheng. Are you still involved with SGNEXT Buzz? And if yes, what would you do differently if you have to redo the app or rethink about it? Yes, I am still involved. I'm redoing the app now. What would I do differently? A lot of feedback is about using, so the app is about bookmarking your frequently used buses. So the idea is you launch the app, you see the arrival time, and you close the app within seconds. You don't need to navigate much within the app. But one feedback is that for users who are in a place they're not familiar with, when they launch the app, they use nearby. And the nearby buses may not be from the nearest bus stop. So the next update, I will try to tackle that problem. So the part where you take the same bus every day, that's what I was trying to solve in the previous version of the app. So now I'm going to try to solve problem when you figure out where your nearby stops. Also the navigation is quite fancy, but it's not very user friendly. So I'll try to fix the navigation as well. So this is a little bit about both of you again. What is normally your app making process and what really goes into the ideation process when you have an idea, like how do you conceptualize it and what actually goes into the ideation process? Who do you go to and how basically collect feedbacks or do you even care those details or you just fill the apps and see where it goes? JJ, you first. I think we, Hontra and I talked about this earlier today. I think we broke it down to two kinds of ways we get ideas. The first one is where it's basically, we are upset about something that we can't do on our phone. So we decide to do something about it. So scratching a person at each. The other one is where we try to think of ideas based on technologies that Apple introduced, like, I mean for this year you'll be AR kid, right? So largely our apps are, they are born either because we need the app or because we're trying to adopt some new technology that Apple has introduced. So while we were looking through the apps that we have made so far and how well or how badly they have done, it seems like those apps that we make because we need them, they still continue to fare quite well. And those apps that we make because we think we are adopting this technology and maybe Apple will be excited to feature us. Those apps that are made that way, they don't seem to fare that well. And yeah, so I think even for us personally, I mean, Hon Ching makes Nick's vases and buses, I make my Reminders app do. So those are apps that we use every day. We have this vested interest to keep making it work well. And whereas if we're just adopting a technology to make an app, I guess when the novelty wears off, it becomes a chore to keep it going. Whereas for him, I mean, he's excited thinking about his bus app, like how to make it better. I'm always excited thinking about how to make my own apps better as well. So yeah, I guess two ways to get ideas, but I think thinking back, we should really make apps that we need, we want to use rather than because Apple introduced this technology. Actually, even for apps that use, we make because Apple introduced the technology, it's kind of apps that we need. It's just maybe the clips you wanted a Clipboard Manager to. It's just maybe the use case is not that strong that after some time our interest just dropped. You want to show me? Yeah, so we made about five, five apps. So Clips, Timers, Alive, Peak Code, those are the four apps that we made because Apple introduced a new technology in the new SDK. So Clips, it was today extension and custom keyboard. Alive was because the Live Photo API and Peak Code was because the iMessage apps. And then Timers, Timers because of WashOS. Timers is actually our first WashOS app. It's actually doing quite well. It's just that over the years, we kind of lost the interest to use the app and it's not that, I guess. Yeah, so I think what I'm trying to say is, how well an app does, I think depends a lot on whether we are interested to keep maintaining the app and improving the app. So if you don't do something that you have a lot of interest in, it's very difficult to make a good app. Yeah. So JJ is trying to showcase something on the Apple TV. You don't know my Wi-Fi password. So I think one part of the question was about, who do you go for feedback? I think most of the time, until the app is almost ready, it's kind of quite close between us. So far, we haven't had an app made because we asked someone for feedback, what kind of app do you need? But it's always like, yeah, I need this thing, he needs this thing. So the ideas are usually quite internal. And ideas are also fragile in that, you know, before it's fully developed, when you share with someone, if you're not too sure, someone may bring up too many questions and you start, okay, maybe this idea doesn't work, so you end up abandoning the idea. So I guess for us, most of the time, we, by the time someone other than both of us has seen the app, it's really working, the design is really somewhat out, but of course we go through stages of user testing and very major changes could happen. So this is just one of the testing that we have done. This is for dispatch, the email app, right? So we took one whole year to do it, but this is a, I don't know when it was this, how many months down development, but this is the first usability test that we did. On-chain is also very interested in like wacky UI stuff. So he likes to write these controllers that help you do fancy full navigation. So this is one of the examples. So initially both of us thought it was a really great idea. Wow, we've got these sliding panels all going around switching accounts. So during the testing itself, we realized how bad an idea it was. So just to give you an idea, this is basically one of our friend. What we do is just, we come up with a list of tasks. Can you create a new sniper? Can you try to reply to this email? Can you archive this email and see how he responds to it? So we just record it down and we ask him to verbalize his thoughts. So you'll hear a bit of what he's talking about. I can use this, right? I think we need to say it. So yeah, what actually is supposed to happen is, it's supposed to be like this when you have multiple accounts. Yeah, so this one never seen the light of the day. And it's like, I guess it's important because when we work, we're so deep into the project, we can't see where the pit falls. So it's great that we have people who have never seen the app before. So when we show it to them for the first time, we really see it from a new user's perspective. Yeah, the rest is not so interesting. I'm going to try this one, one for time. I'll be sure if we can do that. Bangles and engines, it needs electricity. Yeah, for the app, we actually had to scrap two different navigations. That was the first one. And then we made a completely new navigation and we tested on a different friend. And then we have to show everything again. And the final one, we just went with something more conventional. Okay, this is going a little bit off the screen. I'll just read it out. So... Sorry about that. Some apps don't do well initially. And this is kind of true for a lot of indie developers. If you are doing it full-time and it's even harder, right? You need some kind of encouragement to keep going. But this is not really about the financial part. I'll come to that later. But you still need to continuously put effort to update your apps when a new iOS comes up and when you have new APIs, you need to make sure nothing breaks, nothing crashes. At what point of time you decide, okay, we are not going to support this app anymore. I'm done with this one. I'm going to pull the plug. We are very bad at this. We have not put down any of our apps yet. But we know there are some apps that we should. From time to time, we talk about it. We can't spend the effort on this app, not on that app. Maybe we want to make a new app, or should we look back at an existing app? Should we be doing more for it? And so far, we are very bad at it. So... Do you have any comments? No comments. Yeah, we do have some really old apps at the moment like Clips, which is still iOS 8. If you look at it, today's extension doesn't look right in iOS 10. Yeah. And a lot of the decision on whether we want to continue to support the app, it also depends on whether the app is doing well in the app store and deserve us to put more attention to it. Kind of a similar question on that line. So this one is from the participants. How did you both sustain yourselves financially, especially when you were doing your first app? Did you have a job that was giving you a salary that was enough for you? But it's a question for both of you, so not just for one, so... Actually, app development... I mean, I'm an accidental app developer. When... One year before I graduated, I started a photography school with a friend. So that was my first job. I mean, yeah, my first business. And when the business took off, I mean, it's not like very, very well, but sustainable. I had some free time, so I said... I mean, I always liked making things. So I decided to take three months off to explore iOS programming. And I learned best by making things. So I decided to embark on a project. So that project happened to be due to the first app that I made and still going on in the app store now. So definitely, without that income from the first business, without the time that is afforded to me, I don't think I would have been able to sustain because initially it was really just a hobby. It was... I didn't even imagine that one day I would be making a career out of it. So it's good to not quit your job first and work on it at the side. I mean, you can always... You will know when the time comes that you know that it's sustainable enough. You can... Then you can explore going full-time into it, I think. But there are a lot of spikes in the app store. So maybe one day you get featured by someone and then you make a lot of money in one day. Maybe your friends need a few months to make a lot of money. But I think these spikes will go away very quickly. So you really have to be very sure that you have a sustainable income from your apps before you decide to jump into it full-time, I think. I was with Bookright when we started. So I started Book with John and Mohan when I was doing my studies. That was when I made my first bus app. And through that, I got to know John and Mohan and we started a company called Book. So that's kind of the business that sustained me while I work on this. We usually meet once a week on a Thursday to work on our apps and discuss and try to realign our focus. Yeah. So I'm going to read a question from the participants. What advice you would give to beginner iOS developers which are the areas they really need to focus on and be strong at when they are beginning iOS development and what kind of distractions they should ignore? What kind of distractions they should ignore if at all there is any? I think for what we learn, always start with a project that you are very interested to solve. That's a big motivation to learn something new. And when you learn something new, there's always initial hurdle you have to cross and it always feels very difficult initially. Once you cross that, everything just flows smoothly. But to get to that stage, you need a big, good enough motivation and that's a good project to start with. And for distraction, I think a lot of developers get distracted with technical details. It's not that it's bad, I think it's good. But there needs to be priority. If your interest is you want to make a business that is sustainable, you need to release your app. So if you get distracted by technical details to the point that you're not releasing your app, that's bad. Yeah, I think related to that point, there's a saying that goes perfect is the enemy of good. So a lot of times we... If you try to get too caught up in shipping the best possible thing, then your product may never ship. So I guess it's about... I mean, if you're starting out your first project, I think go for something really minimally viable. When I started out my first app deal, it was totally... I mean, the first version was totally nothing like what it is today. But it did solve a problem that I wanted to solve. So just having that singular focus on solving that problem. So although it couldn't do a lot of things, but I guess enough people have the same problem and they find the app useful enough. Eventually, if it kicks off, you have more time to add on to it. But if you spend like us one whole year working on a project and you realize that nobody has the same problem as you... I mean, there's one year of time that you have thrown down the drain. So I guess start small, give yourself a few months, launch something, see how it works out. And if the response is good, encouraging, then you can decide later on to work further on it. Yeah. So the next question is, is there any new feature in iOS 11 that you are particularly interested in and you want to explore? Drag and drop in iPad, yeah, because I think we make a lot of productivity apps. So that's something we want to see how we can integrate in our existing app. ARKit seems to be something very interesting. Honestly, I haven't checked it out myself, but we do have some ideas. But we, yeah. We don't usually, it's like... Never mind. I think ARKit... Actually, when he was at WWDC, I asked him, yeah, I think we should make a measuring tape app out of it and then suddenly everyone is making measuring tape apps. But I think it's going to be very useful because he was shopping for his baby when he was in US, right? So he's buying like bulky stuff and he needed to measure like, how big are those boxes, will the airline charge him extra for it? And then he used his iPhone to measure, but a number of iPhones around the box. So I think, yeah, I think ARKit will solve the problem. I mean, as of now, we are not sure whether we're going to continue with the idea because it seems like many people are going for it. But on my own project deal, I thought two features were quite interesting, like, of course, SiriKit because, you know, we have to wait for Apple to support this particular class of apps. And even for Hong Cheng, he was not able to get it integrated for buses because there's just no class of projects for bus arrival time. So that's something I think definitely I'm going to explore. And then something about notifications, you can have some custom input for your notification. So I think that means you can do more things without going to the app. I think that's good for apps in general. Was it, what is the next app you are working on currently? Any hint that you would like to give? What do you have on this? We don't usually even tell our users what new features we're going to implement. So I don't think it's right to mention what app we're going to make because sometimes apps that we make, we don't even release. Because when it's done, we have two apps that is complete and then we realize they're not good enough or we can't really market them. And yeah. I think we do have some direction about where we want to go. Mainly it's about keeping clean, silvernebs financially sustainable for both of us to continue making apps full time. So so far, I mean, our approach towards app making has been very, I guess, amateurish, right? Like, I need this app, let's make it. There's no market research. None of those homework done. So, I mean, Elk is a classic example where one week before we launched, I suddenly told Honcheng, hey, I think we shouldn't expect much from the app because I just realized that it's a currency converter even though I may tell you about it today, you are not traveling, you may not be excited to download it, but even if you download it, you may not want to spend money to buy it now. And then when you finally travel, you may eventually forget about it. So, financially, I think apps like this they can't bring us enough income to sustain. So, we are thinking of, we're trying to, now we're trying to be more business minded, like each time we think about app, can this sustain us? I mean, as much as it's fun to make things that we like one to do, but hopefully it combines like income with it so we can continue doing it, without thinking of, oh no, this is not doing well or when do we still continue supporting the app? When should we sunset it, things like that? Yeah. Okay, so I would like to give you guys a few minutes rest. Why don't we go through the demonstration of Elk and that will give you a breather also. I'm not sure how you want to do it. I have Elk here, but this, no, I don't not have. I was trying to install, oh, okay. I do have an Elk as my wallpaper though, so if you didn't notice. Was that intentional? It was. Yeah, I was downloading today, so. Do you want to say something from your laptop and see whether that's going to work or do you want to? Then I need to connect your phone to. So how do we, we're going to show the watch first. Okay. I think I can use my iPad because it's projected. I can use the camera of this iPad. No, he's already connected, right? How about you do the watch? I do the phone now. Yeah. But you're already there, so. Yeah, I can sort. I can sort it. More natural. I think maybe you can speak about it. I'll hold it. He's speaking a lot. Can you see? Yeah, I can see. Okay, so. He's just concentrating on you. Okay, so this is the app. You use the gesture. You swipe left to increase number of digits. Slide right to decrease. And then you just tap and you use this crown to change the value. We try to keep everything in one page. For something like changing currency, it's not something that user will be doing often. So it's kept inside settings. So you can change the currency here. When you're traveling, the app will use your time zone to decide what's the currency to change to. So it will change to that automatically. So usually iPhone is quite good at that. Once you land, usually when you turn on your iPhone, it will change to the right time zone. And usually that time zone will be able to get the currency from there. Yeah, that's it. So the iPhone app actually looks... I think you need to... I can't really see my phone. Come, take a seat. So the iPhone app actually looks very different from the watch app. But in general, I think it's quite different from currency converter apps that you see on the app store. Many of them try to show you, like, convert many currencies at one go. But for our purpose, right, for my purpose is just to make sure I find out how much this thing costs when I'm traveling. So it's really about the currency of the country you are in, back to your home currency. And on the iPhone, there's no way for you to key in any numbers. There's pretty much unlike currency converters out there also. It started from this idea that before I made this Elk on the iPhone, it started from this wallpaper that I used to make for my iPhone when I travel. So, I mean, it's my kit. What I would do is I do one to ten, and then, you know, since it's a wallpaper, I don't need to unlock my phone. I just bring out my phone and then I can see quickly, okay, this thing is maybe 500K dong. So that's probably $30. So a very quick way to reference something like a cheat sheet. So we carried this idea forward to the phone app, but we made it better such that, you know, I can swipe, and now interact with it. So it's just, it's not a static list anymore. And if I need to know something like how much is $550 Hong Kong dollar, I tap on it and, you know, I get the value. So all this just by gestures without any numeric pad input. So, yeah. So this is a question for Hong Cheng. So you're part of book and you're actively involved in the normal work that you kind of do at book, whether it's app making or being involved in different processes. How do you find time to work on these apps? So, I meet Gigi once a week on Thursday at this place to work on clean shaven apps. The rest of the week I'll be at book. I'm less involved now in the client projects, focusing more on internal projects or quick prototyping. So my timing is more flexible. Yeah, clean shaven apps and my next pass app. I work on them when I have time. Yeah. Now this is a question for Gigi. I'm not sure whether he mentioned while he was introducing himself. So JJ is a photographer. How much of your photography skills do you think goes into the app design process? Is there any similarity at all? Yes, you know, what would you highlight? I think in terms of technical skills, no, because, you know, you don't need to know things like ISO, shutter speed aperture, but in terms of composition, I think that's helpful for the design. You know, my first business was a photography school. So back in when I was teaching composition, we always teach our participants about why is your subject, how are you going to frame it, why is your background. So everything is about how do you make your subject stand out. So I guess it's the same in similar to app development when you want to highlight something in your app. How do you make everything, how do you employ everything that you can to make that thing stand out, to make everything simple enough, like, you know, in photography, we say shoot tighter, don't crop tighter. Just show what you need to get a message across. So in the same way, how do you simplify your app design such that, you know, it's simple enough, such that, but not so simple, I mean, striking the right balance to convey the message that you want. So name one personal favorite Singapore based app. You both can choose one each and give a reason why you like it. I'll be very brief about it. So there's an app called Service Hero. It's not a particularly nice app, but it's a developer here. But it's useful because I moved house, moved in about a year ago and then needed a lot of services, plumbing and electrician. It does what it advertised, so it's good. I think my choice will be quite surprising. Anyone works for make bank apps here? Apps for banks? No? Okay, good. Because I think most of them, I don't like most of them, but there's one bank app that's quite good, I think, OCBC, but I mean, when it launched, it was really quite nice, but I don't know why they still haven't updated it to support the larger iPhone, so it's still scaled up. But I think looking back, I mean, I was looking at the app again today, some of the design choices seem quite forward-thinking. They have the menu at the bottom, where it actually works very well on the larger phone. And then when you want to transfer money to people, there's this cute slider where you key in the money, then you slide to confirm the sending. So I think, nice touches, but I think they need to add the larger phone support. So when you make apps, how much you focus on making it accessible for all type of users? And most importantly, how do you test it? I think most of our accessibility focus is on language now. So almost all of our apps are at least localized for five, six languages. In terms of voice-over accessibility, not so much, except for Elk, which the recent update really made it very accessible. We have got users who visually handicap, but the feedback that it's working out very well. So, yeah, so mainly right now is localization, then followed by voice-over. Testing-wise, I mean, the usability test, that's one of those important tests that we do. Then the standard beta testing, you get bugs that you never run into. Yeah. Okay, so I'm going to go through some of the other questions that participants have. I have kind of went through a lot, but let me see. Okay, one, the top one on the list is, do you write tests for your apps? No. No. Should I ask why? I know. Let's move on. Any suggestions for those developers who are not good in user interface design or user experience? There are a lot of indie developers. How can they improve the usability of their applications? What are the things they should look into? What are the tutorials or blogs you would recommend? Where should basically they look for inspiration? I think in terms of user interaction, user interaction is a lot about testing your ideas, your prototypes out in the real world, like what we do with our apps. I mean, we frequently think that, hey, this is a great idea, but once you see your user using an action, you're not going to think so anymore. And such feedback that you gain from your testing, your usability testing, is going to be worth a lot more than someone telling you, hey, this is not friendly. You may not believe him, but you have to see with your own eyes that you really know that this sucks. You need to get rid of it. I think in terms of UI, iOS 7 kind of made it easier for... I mean, I'm not a designer. I cannot design nice graphics. So before iOS 7, everything is very heavily designed. You need a lot of texture and all. I mean, I can't do things like that. So I think Johnny made our lives very easy right now. I mean, you just need to go simple. Something that's not gaudy looking. I mean, I think before iOS 7, a lot of apps, they tried to go overboard on those texture things. So they end up looking quite gaudy. But if you stick with even the very plain background, you just choose some nice colors. It will still work out in iOS. I mean, in the flatter look aesthetics of today's iOS. But I think if you really need like... If you want to go further, you should definitely think of hiring a proper UI designer. Because there's only so much I can do. But yeah, so if you really need that kind of help, then I think hiring someone to do it is better. Frankly, I think I'm quite bad at usability. I think it's important to use a lot of apps. I think once you figure out that certain apps does things better, certain apps, you just need more steps to do it. So just going through apps, I think it helps. Also, I've done a lot of apps. So just based on experience and feedback, this doesn't work, this doesn't work. So that kind of helps too. I think you kind of answered it earlier. Each Elk app alone can support you financially. No, I think yeah, like what JJ said, it's the kind of app that users will not think about buying the in-app purchase unless they're traveling. And when they're traveling, they may have already forgotten about the app. So even though winning the award, we get featured in the international media, featured in the app store, we get downloads. But the conversion rate may not be high. Users may download because they heard about the app, but not because they need the app now. Why is the name Elk? I think partly we were trying to get away from having currency in the name because there's so many of them out there in the app store. And if your name is something currency, people are not going to find your app. So we started to look at inspiration. People are saying we look at strategies for naming apps. So one of those is how do you... Maybe you could use things that kind of have the same characteristics of your product. So I always see Elk as a travel currency converter. So not just a currency converter because a lot of people ask, why can't I just use XE.com? I mean, it is a currency converter, but it is not optimized for traveling. So we started to look at, can we name it after animals? People like to name their products after animals. There's this bear that won the ADA also. Before that, there was sparrow, what else? Basically, animals are quite nice. So since it's about travel, can we look for migratory animals? Then we just look through a list of animals. This sounds a catchy, short name. And then one added bonus is that when you look at the Elk straight on, it's got these two horns that are very symmetrical which resembles our iPhone app design. So we decided to use that name. I actually decided not to ask this question but since this is going on top. Jiji, are you in NS? No, I'm not that young. This is the biggest hurdle you have faced while developing apps. Maybe we come back to this. Do you prefer paid app or in-app purchase or free app with advertisement? I think as a developer, this was more targeted as a developer question. If it's preference, I will go for paid app because it's a simple, it's a small though but it doesn't really work for us. So we want to try out subscription if possible, auto-renewable subscription because for paid app you make the app. You have to continuously support the app and users just paid for once but subscription you get charged at interval. So there's regular income but at the moment I think the mindset for the users they may not be able to accept that they are paying subscription for a productivity app or for a currency converter. So that's quite hard. As a developer, definitely paid app is much more straightforward. There's no additional code. No need to check receipt. But actually I quite like the model that we've been trying out for our new apps that means free to download but free to download and try but in-app purchase to unlock everything because the app store doesn't offer trial. So I think this is a good balance where users can still try out your app and decide whether it's suitable for them before they actually plunge into even though it may just be a few dollars but I guess the mindset is that apps should be free. So I guess for users definitely something free is better but for developers paid is more straightforward. I mean don't need to think of any other ways to monetize it like that. Just now the question was the biggest hurdle for developers? Yeah, I think the biggest hurdle for us is not something technical but it's business. It's getting financially sustainable marketing our app. That's the biggest problem we have. Let me ask this question slightly differently but let me read out the question as it is any tips for anyone who wants to send an app to foreign for the first of all let me clarify nobody sends an app for the award they choose the apps randomly based on design and categories they look for a lot of things but I would ask this question slightly differently. Any tips you would like to give to any developers who may have a better chance to win the award if they look into certain specific things? Actually I think there are things that you can do to help yourself get noticed. In every area there is an Apple evangelist that means someone from working at Apple who reaches out to developers so from time to time he organizes like technical seminars technical talks so it's important to go for these events make yourself known that hey I'm writing apps like this I mean his job is to help help developers and his focus is on let's say based in Singapore his focus will be on Singapore developers so every area like if you are in Malaysia, Malaysia has its own so get to know your evangelist communicate with him show him what you have been doing so I mean because there are so many apps out there you need Apple is not going to know about every single one of them just because you submit them to the App Store so getting them to notice your app and bring it up to their peers in Apple is a good start I think so that's my advice I think I think there is an official channel for this it will refer to the WWDC session from I think last year or the year before on App Store they met there was an email address so you can try to that email and tell them you made this app, what's the app about and just try and sell it to them another thing is localization is big for them you want to get featured you have to localize in some of the popular languages in the big markets I am going to pick only two more questions then we will move to the other part of the session let me see this is interesting do you use storyboard or do you create your UI programmatically you are going to start an war here actually Hon Ching is the one who likes to do things programmatically I started using storyboard about a year or so ago and I tried to get him on board he is very frustrated with it but he is getting there he is getting there I think I think there is there are benefits to storyboard but sometimes when you run into some herders you know you can code it in like a few minutes and solve the problem so yeah anything about that I was completely into writing everything programmatically until early this year I tried to do everything in storyboard unless it is a fancy UI that requires a lot of animation questions is there anything that has changed after getting the award and this is my last question for today any other questions that you might have you can ask after the session but I have few more things that I want to code after this so any changes that has happened for you guys after you got the ADA no changes let me put it differently haven't anyone from like we were jokingly telling to David who is the evangelist that they should put a photo of both of you in the watcher apple store holding the cube which tells me that where is the cube where you would like to say it can you bring the cube you want to talk about your experience with this cube so I asked them to ship it over to Singapore because I was quite worried it's very heavy I'm not sure whether I can tell the custom it's just a trophy I'm afraid that they'll confiscate it so I asked Apple and they said that for the past few years they ship it to Venus overseas so I asked them to do that it came a month late and they initially I thought the whole thing is a fully battery because it's very heavy but it's actually just 4 AAA batteries because then they ship it they remove the battery so they include the allen key for me when they got here I just put the battery in are you sure they ship the original onto you I'm just joking we will go through some of the photos that JJ has but before that I have two announcements that I would like to make first of all I wanted to announce about the conference before the event today but there is some logistical issues and we haven't announced it yet but you can purchase super early board tickets starting from this weekend the conference is on 19th and 20th of October at the same venue as last year that's the name Polly we have a really interesting list of speakers for this year and again we will just check our website when we announce the second thing is so this is finally happening realm Singapore world tour so realm actually they travel around the world hosting these events one of the realm engineer he came to IOS con last year and he spoke at the conference I happened to meet him the day before WTC on Sunday and then I was asking him jokingly why don't you do an event in Singapore why don't you guys come to Singapore and they said oh I don't know who to contact and I was like dude you are talking to me and then he said you did not know who to contact so finally it's happening and it's a free event and it is going to be at this venue because it's easier for me to host here the date is 21st of August and it's an evening event you can just go to realm.io world tour anybody who hasn't used realm before just for the sake of information realm is very popular mobile data you can use it for IOS, android and all sort of other platforms it is actually more popular than core data and escalate as of today and but they are not really known for their the database is really cool they are actually known for the videos that they put on their site as the tutorial videos to a point that people joke about realm is actually a video tutorial site but they also have a database but yeah jokes apart they are coming to Singapore they will say a lot about mobile platform and it's going to be exciting I think that's all from me and now we will like to see some photos that J.J. would like to say do you have anything so it's not really photo but J.J. would like to give away his WWDC pins that they got from Apple they were quite popular at WWDC and to a point that people were hunting these pins like Pokemon Go so if you haven't got a chance to get one of these pins then come forward and take your pin that's the end of the event folks is there any other announcement anyone would like to make any final words from you guys if not then thanks Honcheng and J.J. for coming and speaking to us the reason we had this event and I kind of conducted this is because this is an inspiring story for all of us as an app developer that like somebody from Singapore has won this award and then it basically makes us feel proud and kind of we wanted to learn something from you guys thank you for sharing so that's the end of the event you can still