The Story of an App

Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to speak at the 2013 Mobile Development Day  conference at the University of Illinois Research Park. I gave a presentation about the development process we used at mpressInteractive to build the Spanish-English Dictionary iPhone app for the University of Chicago Press. It was a multi-session conference with over forty speakers covering technical, UI/UX, and entrepreneurial topics on mobile development. You can find a write-up about it in the Daily Illini here and a photo album here from the Research Park Facebook page.

In my presentation I try to give a broad over-arching picture of the development process that unfolded in the summer of 2012. After giving some background on the saturated app space for multilingual dictionaries, I then describe our collaborative workflow with the Un. of Chicago Press, which had many elements of an agile development process, such as short iterations and regular interaction with our client to get feedback. I also cover many of the design and software engineering challenges we solved in order to deliver the app in just under four months. You can find the app on the Apple app store. I think it's one of the better Spanish-English dictionary apps available.