 Kia ora. You can either take the title as a Wizard of Oz reference or a George Takai reference, whichever way you want to take that. So I'm Simon. I'm currently the technical lead for the Field Guides for Australia project with Museum Victoria. Museum Victoria, this is Melbourne Museum, but Museum Victoria is Australia's largest museum organization. We're responsible for the state of Victoria's cultural and scientific collections. So just to give you a view of what I'm going to talk about today is our experience with developing native apps, specifically more focused on the Field Guide, although the museum does have a number of other native apps. And I'm not just going to talk about what we did, but I'm going to focus on what we're doing and what we've learnt in the process. So the sort of mistakes we've made. Part of the purpose of this talk, I think, is to give you some ammunition if you need to talk about apps in your own institution. So there's a reason why they're called bullet points. So if you cast your mind back to the Halcyon Spring days of 2010, the iPad was a new product that was, you know, reasonably new. It really wasn't that long ago that these things were a new device for us. We were in the position of just having completed a project where we had a whole lot of species descriptions and images from another project that we were doing as part of a school's project. So as a side project we decided to put the two together and see what would happen. So the result was the Field Guide to Victorian Fauna, which we released in March 2001 as an iOS app. So it was available on iPad and iPhone, containing just over 700 Victorian species that's native and introduced. So we released it for free and as part of the project we decided to release the source code for the project under an MIT style license. The project was very well received. To date we've had about just over 70,000 downloads and we continue to have a long tail of downloads. So at the moment we're just over 70 downloads a day on average, sort of almost two and a half, well two and three quarters of a year later. Initially we were getting five star ratings. It's now four and a half in the Australian App Store. Actually it's 4.74. Apple just round down. So post that we actually worked with some external partners. We worked with us Watercatchment Management Authority to produce the iSpy Frogs app. So it's with gold and broken catchment. We also got some funding from Parks Victoria who were responsible for National Parks in Victoria to produce a field guide to the Bunarong Marine National Park down on the coast. In 2012, and this is the project I'm working on currently, we received funding from the federal government, the Australian federal government obviously, to work with all of the other state-based natural history museums and the Northern Territory Museum to produce field guides for every state in Australia. So we're working in partnership with them to they're producing species profiles and they'll all be releasing individual apps. The first one should come out in January of next year. Then along with this, in May of this year, we released an Android version. So as part of the Inspiring Australia project was to produce an Android version. We also updated the content for the field guide, added a few more species, moved turtles from invertebrates actually into frogs and turtles. That was, yeah, oops. They're invertebrates if you de-bone them properly. So the sort of question that was happening with us, we put the code out there that the app was well received, people liked the idea, but where was the take up? What was happening? So as well as talking about the lessons, we've got a bit of an idea of what happened, so I'll hopefully lead you through this. It actually had happened that the first guide that used the code did come out in April of this year, but no one, that was the field guide to the pest animals of Australia. No one, we only found out about it later by accident, because in part of releasing the code, we released it under a very permissive license. You can take the code and do whatever you like with it. You don't actually have to credit us, you don't have to tell us about it, so we actually found out about that one later. But between then and now, we've had a total of five apps released. We have the wonderful New Zealand marine life that was produced by Auckland Museum. So we also had the field guides produced for the Grand Canyon by a park ranger, produced that guide from his own photographs and his own experience. And then the flowering plants of Tasmania by a keen, I was going to say wildlife, but he's a floral photographer. He's currently living in Scotland, but he has spent a lot of time in Tasmania and had a huge bank of photos, so he produced the flowering plants of Tasmania. And just recently, he's come out just before I left for New Zealand, he just released orchids of Tasmania. So we now have five apps that we know of that have been built on the field guide code. Now, before I go into sort of our learnings, I just want to take a slight detour, because if I'm going to give you ammunition, I want to make sure you're pointing in the right direction. Is anyone considering as an institution who's building an app or considering building an app? Yeah, cool. Do you really need an app? This is my, and this is an absolutely serious question. You know, is what you're doing, or will your users actually be spatter-served by a website that's responsive? Or even, you know, if you don't want a responsive website, a mobile specific website to suit their needs. The biggest reason the field guide works as an app is because when you're out in the field and you don't have an internet connection, you want to have all that content. So when you actually download the field guide app, all of the content is there. It's a big download. It's 230 megabytes, I think, at the moment. It could be a bit higher. So you want all that code there. If you're dealing with something that, say, in your institution as a guide, you know, I would actually almost suggest that if you don't have Wi-Fi available, you compare the cost of developing an app to a website plus putting in a Wi-Fi modem. And then if you decide yes, yeah, we do want to have an app. Or the director wants an app. Are you sure? Are you really sure? Because app development is definitely more expensive than a web development. And if you remember, if the web developers amongst you remember the days of having to deal with IE6 and multiple platforms, that's the situation with apps these days if you want to reach the broader audience. The other option is if you don't necessarily have to develop an house, there's actually, we don't develop all of the apps that we've done and released in a house. We've just released a heritage trail tour, which we worked with my tours, a New Zealand company, to produce. So, you know, we don't develop apps, all our apps in house. So with that note of caution and warning, go on to talk about the experience we've had and what we've learned. So the first thing was price. We released this app for free. So we've got 70 and we had to argue a little bit. It wasn't too hard for us to argue that free was a good thing simply because we're already being paid by the government to produce the content that we had. So it would be a bit cheeky to then go and say, actually, we're going to put it out there and charge again for it. But we also found photographers were more comfortable giving us their images and just charging a small fee if we're giving it away for free. If you wanted to, if we wanted to say charge for it, they were interested in then saying, okay, well, let's talk royalty. But the biggest thing about free is that it reaches your biggest audience. It's just this, look, I can't run a parallel universe simulation to say if we'd charged this much, it would have been, we would have had this many downloads. But you heard this morning in the keynote for the Mona, MoMA, sorry, not Mona, Example Art Lab, just when they dropped the price, the downloads skyrocketed. Free is such a, you know, even a dollar is seems to be a huge barrier to people. Free is just powerful for that, for reaching your biggest audience. But don't think free would mean that it's not actually going to bring you in any money. So when you look at the work that we've done in collaboration with partners, plus the grant money that has come in for an inspiring Australia fund, just under half a million dollars has come through the museum's doors now, because of this app that we put out there for free and we released the source code. So free doesn't mean no income. So the next question is success with a question mark, because we've had over 70,000 downloads over this this two and three quarter year period. And we've got four and a half star rating in the App Store, which in a way is a good measure of impact that the four and a half star ratings is going back to yesterday's keynote. If you're looking at impact, people actually going in, there's two that's over 228 ratings. So that's not like a handful of people. That's a fair whack of people giving giving us ratings in good comment and good feedback. But what does that that first number seems seems great, but it doesn't really tell us that much. Because, you know, we don't really know. Do the users actually do they actually even open the app? Now, this is more of an issue with iOS. The Google Play Store does tell you whether apps are still installed on a user's device or not. So you actually get a here is your download and here's what's still installed, which is sort of great from a developers point of view, but slightly odd from a user's point of view. Knowing that they're collecting that data. So that sort of information, how people are using your apps, very important. So we didn't put that in to our first release. We only sort of found out about the fact that Google Analytics is available to add to your iOS or your Android apps so that you can actually add that in. If I would assume most of you are also sort of using Google Analytics for your website. So you can actually add in another another key for your app. So that's a serious thing. That's that was a mistake that we we made. And we're rectifying with the new releases for Inspiring Australia. The big thing was releasing it as open source. And I can't, you know, we're developing code. We're not, we're not in the business of really making money out of software. You know, as and I think we're all in this position where organizations, it's the content that's there. And in a lot of ways, the content is the star of the app. I mean, if I had didn't have beautiful images, I thought I didn't have all this information. It's it's nothing. So that the code itself is very simple. It's a very simple app in a lot of ways. So let it loose. I would suggest that if you're considering developing your own app in house that yes, look open sourcing your code is a great idea. Think about it from the start. One of the things that we did after we released the app, the reason there was a quite a delay in releasing the source code is I needed to go back and tidy it up for public consumption. And so knowing that from the start would make it a lot easier. But it's not just a case of putting your code out there. We're not actively running a open source project like Linux, right? We're not having that updates and development. But what we did do is we published a blog as we're getting the code ready for people to hit the ground running. So we published a field guide to the field guide blog where we explained, you know, the image sizes and what people would need for their content, how to get their content into shape to put it into the app. So we put that up there. You will get people asking questions about how to use the code still. So if you're releasing the code, it would be great if you've got someone ongoing who can answer those questions. And if you're really lucky, what happens is people find and fix the bugs in your code and give you that feedback, which is what happened from the people who worked on the Auckland Museum app actually sent us back and said, how do you guys might want to fix this up? Which was great. So that's the other benefit of getting your code out as open source. And this is the other benefit. I mean, really, this is an internal impact for us to know that really we helped these projects to exist. I mean, they, on their own, they might have got their, you know, they might have been produced anyway, but we've played a part in helping these and possibly more of these guides getting out there into the world. Now, platforms. So this is one of the, as I said back before, this is a big reason why you want to be sure you really need an app. As cultural institutions, we sort of have a remit to cover as broad an audience as possible. And we know that there are sort of two big different platforms out there for mobile and tablets. And you've got Apple on one hand, and you've got Google, the Google Android on the other. When we released NiOS only, we got a lot of requests through the years to say, when are you coming out with an Android version to which our response was, well, it was a side project. We don't actually have an Android developer in-house on staff, someone who can do the code. So it's sort of going to have to wait until we get some funding. And so you might be in the situation of going out there and saying, OK, well, we've got to produce these, cover this code base. So it does double your cost. It's not that can come across easily to another, because not only the code is different between iOS, Apple and Android, the user experience is different. How the user interface works on people's expectations are different. So to be a truly native app, you need to cover both. And the other consideration is, well, when we released it, what we found now, so we released in May for Android, and even with a long tail that we've got on iOS, if you look at our daily downloads, Android downloads are about 10% of the downloads, 10% of the downloads of the iOS that sounded really awkward. So a lot smaller than our iOS downloads, our Apple downloads. And that's reflected across the board in some of our other apps, where you can see that Android downloads represent 20, maybe 30% of our downloads that we see compared to, you know, of the total downloads. I will say though, it's much quicker to publish into the Google Play Store than it is. Apple does make you jump through a lot of hoops in terms of actually identifying who you are and saying, yes, we are a legitimate institution. And comparatively, you publish to the Google Play Store, and it's up there and across there in a day, whereas you can wait up to two weeks for Apple to approve your content. Well, so last bit, the biggest hurdle, why did it take so long for apps to appear? And it comes down to this. It's content. It's having the content. Not only is it, well, it's a bit more than that. Content is sort of easy. We've apocryphal story for you. I'll call it apocryphal. Discussions about producing a field guide for someone, and they were saying, talking to their curators and saying, well, you know, we need the content. And the curators said, we've got the content. It's right here. It went back to the bookshelf, pulled out a paper field guide and put it on the desk. Yeah, we've got the content. What's the problem? So it's not just content. It's content in a usable form. And I've got my Colin McCown reference in now for the scene. That seems to be a theme. And these things contain a lot of content. So for a single entry of a species in an app, in our app, you have a thumbnail. So for our wonderful 20 frog mouths, there's actually two, but it can get confusing. So there's two of them there. So you need one thumbnail, at least one large quality image, the text or the text, information, a distribution map down the corner, audio file optional, obviously. You know, you'll have it for birds, you're unlikely to have it for fishes. So each species in the guide needs at least that amount of information. So when you look at that in total, in our field guide, and these are just a very small sample of the species, we have over 150 audio calls, over 700 distribution maps, over 700 species distributions, obviously, and over 2,000 images that have to be gathered, get rights approval, copyright clearance. We don't have all of these images. We didn't have any of the audio files as part of our collection. We had to source them externally. A lot of the images are sourced externally. We've got lots of images of dead animals. But and we do have a lot of images of animals for from surveys, but those really some really good images. We needed to go out to external photographers to bring them in. So that content and making sure you've got your content together is your first step. It's your biggest hurdle and you want to have that somewhere where it can be reused. And that's sort of the missing piece, I think for a lot of people, a lot of organizations is that having that material in a content management system and perhaps what is missing from our offering, from our open source offering, is a small tool for people to be able to put that content in and then export it straight into the field guide. There's, you know, I mean, I would prefer that your data is stored in a more reusable place. I mean, we store all of our species description in our collection management system, but there may be a need for institutions that have no store at all, which is not necessarily something that we can address, but it might be a challenge for people to contribute out there. So any questions? That first link is a reference to the field guide on our website. It has a link there as well to the field guide to the field guide blog. And the second reference is the GitHub, which is where we put all of our open source projects for Museum Victoria now, and we have quite a few running through. So questions? Any questions? Hey, with the size of the download from making all this stuff in it, does anyone have a complaint about the size of that? And also, has anyone ever requested it for Windows 8 or Windows tablets? We've had one Windows request. We also had a Symbian request as well. We actually, to my knowledge, we haven't had a complaint about the download size, which is a good thing. It is this realisation, it is a big app, but it's nothing more frustrating, I think, for this style to actually get it into your tablet and go, great, I've got it. Wander off into the bush, open it up, and it says, oh, I need to download. No, we haven't. And we make a conscious effort to balance the size of the image and the quality of it as well, so that we can have a reasonable balance of both. So it is something we're conscious of. And what we're actually adding to the code for the Inspiring Australia project is the ability to do content updates without having to put it into the app store. So when we, the first release, if we, to, you know, we noticed, someone pointed out, after we'd released it, the turtle. And it was like, well, if we were going to update it and correct it, we actually have to upload the whole thing back into the app store. And you have to download the whole thing, like Apple don't do Delta's updates. So you have to download the whole app again, just to correct one little thing. So that's part of the code that we're putting up, is that the data itself will be able to do Delta updates if we make those sort of small corrections. Just a real quick question. It's awesome, it looks like a great tool. I wonder if you have, do you get, like, user stories coming back of people going, I used your app and, for example, knowing what little I know of Australia, it's full of animals that want to kill you. Yes. I use it to save my life, for example. Do you have stories like that? We haven't had anyone save their life. It was funny when we launched the Android version, the minister, the science minister, as we had at the time, came along and related about a scorpion bite that he got. But he was in South Australia, so he didn't actually have a version, but that was obviously coming. We do get lots of, you know, for education stories, and it's really interesting how people use the app. We get the stories coming about the schools and education, but one of our staff members was saying that she will sit down with her nieces, and it's like app. And they will do drawings. They don't really look at the app and go through, but they actually use, just look at the images and they'll do drawings or make plasticine models, and it's just, you know, this is for me, it is actually, these sort of stories give that internal impact where you go, you've done something really cool. It's like we don't seem to get the same feedback from the website, so it's great from that point of view. Just one question about the downloads. Any idea why the Android downloads is such a small proportion, which is, one would assume, far less than the proportion of devices out in the marketplace? I think it's something that you see reported quite widely. If you look, and we see the same thing in, I say, web stats. If you look at the mobile, the proportion of users, mobile users who are on Android versus iOS, it doesn't reflect at all the reported distribution. It seems to be that a lot of people who get an Android phone use it as a phone. That's it, and that's what they do. You see this reported across the same sort of idea, the same sort of thing happening in the US. I don't know whether it's as true here, anecdotally, from a couple of New Zealand developers it is. It's just the people, it's just a difference in how people use their devices, and that's what it comes down to. My last question, I was just curious, it sounded like there was a fair bit of work to get images, to source them, but did you look at all the commons, the Wikipedia commons, or Flickr, the licensed content on there? Was the stuff that you needed images of just more so obscure that they weren't in there? Yeah, and obscurity was a bit of the issue that we had in terms of the species we were looking for. We did actually run for the helmeted honey eater, which is actually the state's bird emblem, which is an endangered species. Actually, both our bird and our faunal emblem are like seriously endangered animals, which is incredibly annoying for trying to get photos. So we actually ran a competition with sort of social media to say, look, we had one of our collection stuff with a helmet on eating honey and going, this is the best photo we've got of a helmeted honey eater. Can you help us out? And we got a fantastic response. For that and a few other birds, we did get a fantastic response, actually physically putting the call out there and some beautiful images coming back. We put out some small prizes, but people were happy to contribute. So we didn't find that many just on its own, but when we actually put that call out, you know, we did get a, we got a great response for those images. That's it. So please join me in thanking Simon for the interest. Thank you. That was really interesting.