jTribe is currently supporting research that enables blind users to effectively consume complex information using an iPad.

The approach for the project is to develop a haptic feedback device that allows the user to “feel” information on the screen.

Apple has already some good support for blind and deaf users on iOS5 with their “Assistive Touch” technology.

Apple’s Assistive Touch

Here is a valuable article that describes how it works.
Apple’s AssistiveTouch Helps the Disabled Use a Smartphone

The Assistive Touch adds a floating button to the screen. Touching it will bring up menu options that can be used with one finger or stylus.

No matter if you need Assistive Touch or not – go and try it out. It’s under Setting -> General -> Accessibility.

2011 was an incredible year for jTribe. We have been working hard on some impressive apps and met some great new people along the way.

2011 Highlights

We started the year with some great work for the Australian Open event.

We then did more corporate consulting work for iOS and especially for Android. Some great apps came out of this for large brands. We are proud that some of those apps are in the top ten of their category in the AppStore and Android Marketplace.

We won a mobile solution contract with Metlink which required some of the best technical talent and a lot of wall space for mockups and sketches.  We found both – talent and wall space.

The jTribe office and co-working space is now buzzing with mobile developers and startups which create this unique high energy environment. We are specifically proud that people tell us that they love coming to work.

Our iOS training program is a great success and we are going to extend that to Android in 2012.

We delivered 20 apps in 2011 for iPhone, Android, iPad and Android Tablets.

We estimate that apps jTribe has developed have been downloaded more than 5 million times.

What we worked on

Looking back to 2011 we worked pretty hard. We worked hard helping clients and providing the right solution, We worked hard attracting the right people and we worked hard creating the right business structure for jTribe.

Crazy hours went into the Australian Open iPad app from everyone at jTribe and Ogilvy. The effort resulted in a successful iPad app with much media coverage. The highlight of the app was the signature panel. Tennis fans used the app to collect autographs of their favourite tennis stars.

The Australian Open iPad app was actually developed by jTribe people around the world. The core team was working in our Melbourne office. Some of us where traveling to Germany, Switzerland and Italy and did actually work partly form there to make sure we can deliver the app to a high quality standard. This was a great team effort and an awesome start into the new year.

Then we entered into work with larger corporations and provided consulting around mobile app development. Our corporate history came handy in those engagements.

We delivered a suite of learning apps for iPad and and Android tablet. Especially the html5-based app was a good test of some theories about cross-platform development. We will write about that experience in a separate blog post.

Next on the list was a challenging project to build a mobile delivery platform for public transport. We created a an end-to-end solution with a great team and a mix of technologies. The complex rules around public transport were a challenge but we manage to finish the project successfully and look forward for it to go live in 2012. Some invaluable learnings came out of the project and will feed into some exciting methodology work we plan for next year.

When we were asked to help delivering a suite of mobile banking apps we were thrilled. Our passion not only for iOS but for Android was a great benefit for the client as we could deliver for both platforms professionally and with a continuous delivery approach that is required within a corporate environment.

Another successful project was the development of a suite of apps for a real-estate organisation. Again, we scored with the combination of iOS and Android skills.

In between all this we managed to help start-ups with their ambitious plans and developed several end-to-end solutions. What we like when working with start-ups is the potential of scale. So whatever we build needs to be able to scale assuming that the start-up business becomes a success.

In between we worked on some enterprise apps. With South East Water we created an app used by fields staff. A museum solution in NSW was another in-house enterprise app we built and deployed.

With apps like Cheese & Wine and Beer Buddy we developed some apps we like a lot – who wouldn’t? It seems Apple liked Cheese & Wine too and it was feature multiple times for it’s innovative cheese wheel navigation menu.

Thanks to our clients

As jTribes consulting capabilities have been growing we got involved in some great apps for large clients in Australia. Again, we cannot reveal all the details here but still want to reflect on some aspects we can talk about.

We were honoured to work for some top brands like IBM, News Limited, Metlink, a large bank, a large realestate organisation, Education Services Ausrtralia, South East Water, and NSW Department of Education and Training.

We also loved working for our non-corporate clients which include some startups and private app developers.

We definitely enjoyed working with all the attendees of our iOS training courses in Sydney and Melbourne.

People @ jTribe

We are excited about the new people we could attract at jTribe.

We hired Dougal who is looking after technical aspects of mobile web. His experience in building Rails apps and HTML5 apps will be great in the new year when we start engineering of hybrid apps that combine the best of native mobile apps and html5-based content.

We got Janet as our producer on board in 2011. She is the one who gets things delivered. I cannot imagine how we could have survived without here in the last year. Mastering client requirements and the delivery process around iOS apps and Androids apps up to the submission process make Janet an invaluable member of the jTribe team.

We hired Gerald who helped us building the public transport solution as a contractor. Now, as a permanent member of jTribe Gerald will help us building great iOS apps.

We hired Anita who will be working on iOS and Android apps in the new year. Welcome!

Our work depends a lot on specialist contractors which joined our team temporarily in 2011. Thanks to Ray, Andrew B, Alex J, Jeff, Jonny, Frank, Terence, Luke K, Linden, Nick B, Ben, Rich, Kasper, James, Alex T, Andrew W, Maricar, Wayne, Marc L, Sebastian, Thomas, Ronja, Sarah, Louise.

We had someone leaving jTribe. Patrick, our business partner in Sydney, is no longer with jTribe. A serial entrepreneur, Patrick is now focusing on his other enterprises. It was a great ride and it was good catching up with him in Sydney for dinner this month.

Partners & jTribe

Thanks to our partners jTribe could expand into new areas or industries.

In 2011 we partnered with Odecee to provide mobile consulting services into the financial services sector. Appsperhaps provide us with great user experience services. Tim from NET101 was a great mentor for us around digital marketing. Growingdata helped us to expand our integration platform into .NET. Partnering with Monash University increased our R&D capabilities. We will be working with Navy design in Melbourne to produce apps with most awesome user experience and design.

Android heated up in 2011

jTribe did commit to Android from the very start of our mobile existence. The year 2011 gave us a glimpse into the future of mobile projects. More than 30% of our work was Android-related. We feel that 2012 will be an incredible for Android and jTribe is well prepared to help our clients delivering Android apps.

Start-ups & jTribe

We cannot give too much away as some of these projects are top secret but we want to reflect on some of the work we did with start-up businesses.

This year we found ourselves becoming technical partners for new startup businesses. These projects are fun as they allow us to provide the whole spectrum of mobile solution consulting.

One start-up engaged jTribe to build a mobile social network platform. Again, this was an end-to-end solution with a strong back-end component and an iPhone app. Think instagram plus foursquare plus a secret ingredient. We cannot wait to see the app launching in 2012.

Another project was an end-to-end retail solution including an iPhone app, a website and integration to a payment gateway and a content management systems for retailers to manage products. Technically, the project used our full breadth of skills like ruby, Objective-C and added some new skills like MongoDB. The product is finished and the client is currently planning the launch.

For Madewell, we built the initial version of Yumtable – an app for last minute restaurant booking.

For Invoice2Go we built the Android app. A very useful app for any business. We are pleased to see how popular the app is and how successful.

Touch and feel

We are excited about some serious research we are involved in.

The iPad opens up a whole new world of possibilities for blind users in interacting with digital media in a way that is intuitive. I am very excited about our work we do to help visually impaired people using touch devices to access digital information.  The research is around adding tactile feedback so a user can feel the information. For the next 2 years jTribe will be actively contributing and co-funding a research project and will be working with Monash University, Victorian Department of Education and Early Childhood Development and other partner organisations to create apps for blind users.

Kids and Educational app

We love to learn and we want to help kids to learn. For Education Services Australia we produced a whole suite of apps for iPad. Our kids were great testers. This way my kids understood also what I do for a living – which is a valuable side effect.

Spreading our knowledge

Our iOS training series was a great success in 2011. With trainings in Melbourne and Sydney we have given many keen new iOS developers a good start into the exciting world of iOS app development.  I have to admit that teaching was the most rewarding work form me in 2011. Seeing how the scholars soak up the information and build their first iPhone apps is a joy.

We are extending our program and there will be Android training courses on offer in 2012. We hope that this will enable new Android developers to build successfully apps for the Android Marketplace.

What’s going on in 2012?

Let’s save that one for another blog post. There will be some surprises and some exciting things happening as we never rest pushing innovation and fostering a great work environment for our people.

Here’s a sneak peek at a couple of the games which we thought were cool. You can check them out here

Fish Market is an interactive trading game teaching kids about supply and demand by selling fish at markets in Australia and New Zealand. The goal is to maximise your profits so you can buy the most sought after fish – The Fizzler.

Talking Dino is a bit of fun – your kids can design their own Dinosaur from scratch, which is then brought to life with an animated display.

The Development Process

The games were  flash applications and we redeveloped them for the iPad using Cocos2D for four of them. The other was developed by our web developer, Dougal who used his web skills to come up with a great HTML5 version of the Wishball app. Backbone.js was one of the basic frameworks used for the HTML5 app. Using cocos2d helped us create great interactive apps and nice animations, but we had issues with memory leaks due to the number of assets needed to create the animations. It was a quick fix once we identified where the leaks were happening, but tracking down the leaks (by manually running every class and subclass) was a real mission. Credit to our developer Frank for meticulously sifting the code for those.

We hope your kids will love those little gems.

He inspired us in our start up. Our projects. Our lives.

“I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next.”

[NBC Nightly News, May 2006]

And that’s what we will endeavour to do…

We just wanted to share a few of our own memories and thoughts to show our respect for Steve Jobs. The man who opened a path for entrepreneurship in start ups, app development and every day ideas. jTribe was inspired by his vision, his drive and passion for getting things done. And most importantly, getting things done well. We were lucky enough to be there at WWDC to see him the last time. For us, seeing his keynote in person was a life inspiring experience. And now, humbling to be part of history. He gave our industry a purpose and a presence and we will endeavour to live and breathe his vision.

The whole curriculum has been updated and now includes Foundation 10 for English, Maths, History and Science. We developed the app with a flexible framework so it can be updated when the curriculum changes and can be used offline. Download it here.

jTribe is proudly supporting a research project that aims to help blind and visually impaired people accessing information via an iPad. Haptic feedback will be used to allow blind students accessing graphs and other highly visual information on an iPad device. The research is based on work done at Monash University – jTribe will help by making it available on the iPad device.

The project is using haptic and audio feedback to improve educational opportunities in the blind community by improving access to graphics based on a touchscreen computer.

The plan is to improve blind student’s educational experience and opportunities, particularly in maths, art, design, science and technology. It also has the potential to improve opportunities in the workforce using the haptic feedback to understand graphics of charts; organisational, graphs, spreadsheets.

jTribe will be involved in the iPad app development of the project and we’re partnering with Monash University, Victoria Department of Education & Early Childhood Development, Vision Australia and Catholic Education Office of Melbourne.

From the app store description:

“YumTable is ‘the’ street smart last minute restaurant booking app that links hungry people with last minute dining deals. Use YumTable to book last minute dining deals anytime you are hungry with just a press of a button. No phone calls, no fees and with all bookings confirmed. Simply browse restaurant deals by time, cuisine and price. Click to book a table, invite friends to a meal you’ve booked, and get map directions all from the app.”

Cheers.