During the next few days the city of Umag is the centre of the ICT industry. WinDays13, the biggest IT conference in the region, is being held there from April 22nd till 26th. Two of our experts, Merlin Rebrović and Luka Abrus, are among the prominent 127 lecturers that will be introducing the conference participants to new trends in the mobile industry.

Mobile First strategy

If you’re at WinDays13 and you’re interested in hearing how smartphones and tablets changed the IT industry you should head out to Coral 6 where at 5,15 pm on Tuesday our CEO, Luka Abrus, is talking about Mobile first strategy and mobile trends in the world.

Mobile First is the idea that websites should first be designed for mobile devices, including only those tasks or items that website visitors use most. Have you wondered about how the market will look like in 2015? For many companies, getting their mobility strategies off the ground and successful is the highest priority project they have in 2013.

Communication is the most important part of any project

Merlin Rebrović, our new head of the UX team will be giving a lecture about the development of modern software through user experience and design. If you’re in Umag on Thursday you should definitely go and see his lecture which starts at 4 pm. Twenty percent of the lecture is going to be a demo presentation.

The role of a designer and a programer is intertwined from the very start, always keeping in mind the goals of the user. The lecture will give an introduction to the importance of wireframes and lead you through different phases and iterations of a wireframe life cycle using concrete examples in practice.

Enjoy the lectures!

From 10th to 12th of April, London became the UX capital of the world. The best people in the field gathered around for inspiring talks and intensive workshops. Covering all the talks during the three days of UX London conference would fill a small book, but luckily they were all centered around a few themes and some surprising discoveries. Mind you, these are all my personal impressions, so someone else might have different experiences.

“We don’t know what will work”

Designing something top down (CEO -> designer -> customer) in one go and expecting it to solve all problems and make money is a dream people who want safe and guaranteed results have. It rarely works and some of the spectacular fails we’ve heard at the conference just drive home the point.

What designers should do instead is observe people, find problems and pain points, design solutions and test them as quickly as possible. It won’t be perfect from the first try and that’s why they have to iterate quickly and often. Working closely with a user or a customer is the key. This is not new and some people were always aware of it, but I feel it’s finally becoming mainstream. Very slowly, but certainly.

Most successful case studies presented at the conference were done in that way. Methodologies like Lean UX, task modeling and participatory design emerge from a need of a structured and defined workflow. I’m very happy they were covered in workshops by experienced practitioners.

The advance of technology is way faster than we think

Computer power that doubles every 18 months, embedded devices with more power than personal computers two decades ago, robots that replace human labor and personalized genomics are game changers most people are not aware of. They are not in daily news or marketed to us as such, but they are omnipresent through other products and services, and deeply affect social and cultural changes for the last ten or fifteen years.

They are happening exponentially so it’s very hard to predict what will happen. A few of the talks touched on similar historical events and how people tried to fight “the new order”. They failed. If it improves life conditions of the majority, the technology will prevail. Always did and always will.

Due to fast changes, designers will find themselves without a stable technology skill set and safe guidelines. The risk and uncertainties will be heightened. The only thing that will change very slowly is human nature. Embrace those as facts and work with them, not against them. Be proactive, learn aggressively and open your mind to new experiences to stay ahead of the curve.

There are no UX gods

Most speakers at the conference were well known and respected. They hold high positions in their organizations and many think of them very highly, sometimes attributing them with divine aura or insight.

And then you go outside waiting for your lunch and see they are getting wet in the rain, too. Some can’t function without a coffee in the morning. Some have trembling fingers and voices when walking on a stage. When asked about a problem you have, they don’t have a sure-fire solution. And that’s a very good thing for two reasons.

1) When you see someone is not perfect, he or she appears more accessible. Everyone at the conference was extra friendly and receptive to all questions and comments, between talks or during workshops. To learn, grow and create is only possible in that kind of environment.

2) It also means they have similar problems and hurdles along the way as much as you do. But they worked and learned a lot, and created something notable. If it was possible for them, normal people, then we should be able to do it too. And I believe that’s something every speaker tried to convey – “You can do it also. Now go and do it.”

Diamonds are girl’s best friend. And so are mobile apps. Especially ones which will make you feel like a princess just by using it. Diamond in the Rough is one such iPhone app and we’ve just launched it for our client.

Diamond in the Rough is one of the world’s leading natural, rough diamond jewelry brand. Their product line is made of diamond rings, but not the classical diamond you might find in most of the jewelry stores – these diamonds are in their untouched form, showing out the inherent beauty of these precious gemstones.

Make me feel good!

We’re never satisfied with simple, purely informational applications. Sure, the apps we make should provide basic information about our client’s products, but the app is sucessful as long as you really want to use it. The idea for Diamond in the Rough app was to give you the feeling of wearing one of those rings before actually buying them.

If you want to see how any diamond ring from their offering would fit you, all you have to do is:
* download the free Diamond in the Rough app
* click on “Try on a Ring”
* choose whichever ring you want – they’re all nicely sorted into several styles
* and take a photo of your hand with the ring on it!

The photos you take can be saved to your photo roll or shared with your friends on Facebook or Twitter!

Once you’re satisfied with the ring, you can use the app to find out more about rough diamonds – like that the Diamonds in the Rough team examines thousands of rough diamonds to find just a handful of ones naturally perfected or that each ring is hancrafted uniquely around the specific shape and color of the rough diamond. The app also showcases some extraordinary pieces and if you’re soon about to get married, maybe you’ll want to check out the bridal collection – some of the nicest and pretiest rings we ever saw are there.

If you really want to see how you’d look with a rough diamond ring, download Diamond in the Rough app now and check it out!

P.S. Our QA team really tested the app thoroughly. Click here to see how.

The year started with the hunt for the new office space. Actually in January we had found our current office, but we didn’t move in until mid June. Our cool new office of 400 m2 in Knežija, neighborhood in the western part of the city of Zagreb, is just five minutes™ walk away from the previous office location. One of the office rooms was “sacrificed” for the table tennis activities, but due to the constant growth of our team soon we will need to be more creative in organization of working space in order to keep the room reserved for the most important activity in our office. There were weekend tournaments, night duels, epic duels in 5 sets and bunch of trash talk. Way to go!

In the past year, following the footsteps of ShoutEm, we have founded the company in New York, Five Minutes Studio Inc. Actually, the process is quite simple, fast and not at all expensive, all you need is a capable lawyer (if you need a recommendation, let me know). So through our New York office we made lots of new contacts and met many of our clients with whom we created series of applications like Spotify application for Matador Records, awarded LaLa Lunchbox, useful SweetPicks app and smart The Fit Brains Trainer app, as well as participated in the NYC BigApps 3.0 contest. Besides long-lasting partnership with Real Networks, we started on couple of more similar cooperations with clients like LiveWire Mobile and Verve Mobile. We support both of the new clients in the area of mobile and server side application development and with such clients, where we have project autonomy, greater responsibility and long-term partnership, we plan to build our company.

We met a bunch of interesting people last year, and besides having meetings in WeWork, the co-working space where our office is located, we also had less formal meetings in places like Starbucks and Chipotlea (burrito!), and very formal meetings in huge meeting rooms on top of NYC skyscrapers, where we tried to show up in as large as possible numbers to avoid talking about the 40-member team, but actually standing there alone in front of a dozen of inquisitive stares. We have special memory of visiting G-Unit Records team, founded by 50 Cent. But there were missteps too – hiring external sales consultants who work for a fixed monthly fee proved to be a failure. We’ve lost count of number of transatlantic flights we’ve had, with sometimes even free upgrade to business class (experience ruined by flying back in economy class as in the saying, “now you have it, now you don’t”). We were also comfortable with making exotic two-days trips to Seattle, learning techniques of how to inflate an airbed in just a few steps, distributing Croatian chocolates to visitors on our stand at the South by Southwest conference in Texas, and Viktor’s apartment in New York sometimes really looked a lot like a bus station. Fun times!

Meanwhile in Croatia, we’ve been building a team carefully and numerous interviews resulted with acquisitions of ingenious new team members. We reinforced quality assurance team in Osijek office where now we have team of 6 offering independent QA services, and one of our larger clients is AVL. Also we rounded out our UX team, Five Minutes Experience team – although the working principle of this team has been applied in all the projects since the beginning of the company, now the process became more formalized and we’ve reached the better quality and speed, as well as improved prototyping and wireframe creation process.

One of our interesting mobile solutions implemented for clients on the local market is the digital publishing solution for magazines, presented in Croatia Magazine, iPad and Android tablet application created for Croatian National Tourist Board as well as Croatian IT magazine for iPad, (Bug.hr. The usage of our mobile solution for retailers has been expanded to Serbian market through launch of the new m-IDEA application. We have also been preparing new mobile solutions for different industry verticals, but we’ll leave that for 2013.

Throughout the year we cooperated with the universities attracting the best students and presenting them an alternative to job offers from Facebook, Google and other giant companies abroad. Through collaboration with eSTUDENT we sponsored the App Start Contest in the development of mobile applications and as a part of “A day-trip to my future workplace” we hosted a group of students who were interested to visit our office and spend a day in our company. For students, we held a number of technical and business lectures, either through official curriculum on FER (Faculty of Engineering and Computing) or through special events and the Student Tech Club. Furthermore, we sponsored BEST Code Challenge 3.0 competition. In the local tech-community, we are active through conferences (primarily lectures on WinDays, Weekend Media Festival and WebCamp), mentoring in Zagreb Entrepreneurship Incubator and Founders’ Institute, and we are still active in promoting the software export through CISEx.

We have launched a new series of events called Zagreb Tech Meetup focused on local startups and technology behind their tech products. On each event we hosted five startups with 7 minutes presentations of its product focusing solely on technology. So far, in a popular Zagreb club Pepermint, we have presented all together 15 startups already and through 2013 we plan to continue organizing such events on a quarterly basis. Today when everyone is talking about investments, business plans, struggles with bureaucracy and crises, we decided to deal with something that got us where we are now – technology.

But I’m very happy to mention all the great things that happened inside the company. Moving to the new office space where we are no longer separated in small rooms made us more homogenous, although table tennis, regular Friday After-Work-Beer gatherings and paintball on Sljeme contributed to it as well. In 2011 we grew moustaches and in 2012 we grew beards. Knowing that here at Five Minutes most of us are real music-addicts, it is not a surprise that we have created our own internal Five Minutes radio station and developed our own streaming music software for the local network. And with regular tech-talk gatherings in our coffee-room we tried to overcome barriers between teams and share specific technical knowledge.

And of course, probably the most interesting activities were Hackathons. So far we held two and each was reported on our blog (#1 and #2). Those Saturday activities resulted in a series of amazing projects – from the presence detector in the table tennis room (because waiting in front of the toilet doors is OK, but waiting for the table tennis not so much) to the automated system for unlocking the office door. So at the entrance of our office now we have an Android smartphone installed at the doorknob used for typing in the code and everyone has got a special mobile app for entering the office.

Finally, we recently published a job ad seeking 6 developers. So far we have found one, but the interviews are continuing and we expect new team members in January and February. And to quote a Warcraft peon, in 2013 we are ready for “work, work”. We will dig deeper and push harder trying to forget the local environment we are in and focus on growth, new jobs, new businesses and outline Croatia on the world map of software and excellent technical knowledge. Good luck to all in 2013!

Luka Abrus
Five Minutes CEO

We all gathered in one big room. It was packed, but very cozy and friendly. Every time someone got something working, we could all turn around, look at it, comment and applaud if the thing didn’t crash :) There was one debugging ducky for each project and they were the common theme of the day.

Here’s what we were working on:

1) Hacking the Pololu 3pi robot

The 3pi robot is designed to excel in line-following and maze-solving competitions. It can be programmed in C and it’s a very fun way to play with robotics. The guys made a short track, a bigger race track and a maze to see how can they push the limits of the robot. As you can see in the video, the robot can also be used to transport duckies.

2) Gesture rich note taking

Designers tried to create a minimal and gesture rich interface for a simple and efficient note taking app. Developers followed with their iOS skills to create a very nice prototype, deciding to go forward with the full implementation. We hope this is not the last time you hear about this.

3) Get milk

The work continues on our internal office app for task and event organization.

4) Sold apps counter

Our colleagues in ShoutEm created a very nice web-based counter that goes “Ka-Ching” every time they sell a mobile app. We hope it becomes so frequent and annoying that they shut it down :)

5) Festo flying penguin

Festo company created a flying penguin. Some of our guys wanted to replicate that. Unavailability of the specific foil didn’t allow them to complete the project, but they made a great progress with the carbon fiber structure and the wings that can move and rotate in all directions.

The winner of this hackathon was definitely our sales rep Vlatka who brought chocolate muffins after lunch, giving us enough sugar to complete the projects. All in all, it was a great team building event as always. And who knows, maybe we’ll see you on the next one :)

Our partner in this project, Vivity Labs, has a lot of experience in this field; more than 75 million brain games have been played across their Fit Brains network. So, what is this all about?

Keep your brain active!

Fit Brains Trainer is a fully scientifically designed app for your iOS devices (both iPhone and iPad) that provides a collection of fun brain games, personalized training sessions and visual tools to help you improve your brain’s performance. You know how you can get tired while working? Playing any other type of a game might just put you more to sleep; you need something to stimulate your brain cells, something to wake you up and start your brain again. There’s an app for that now!

This was one of the larger consumer projects we worked on during fall of 2012 proving we have a great team capable of covering every single aspect of mobile application development!

As with every other application we get to work on, we put a lot of effort in the Fit Brains Trainer. Our UX team worked on the wireframes and design, while development and QA teams pushed their intellectual and programming skills to make it all happen. We weren’t alone – Vivity Labs provided guidance, especially their psychology team along with the game designers. Both teams worked with us on implementing the actual games and fine-tuning parameters of them to get the most optimal effect for the user.

Only a fit brain is a good brain

The Trainer utilizes an innovative adaptive learning system that automatically scales the level of each brain game to your appropriate level. The complete brain fitness program was developed by Dr. Paul Nussbaum, one of the top clinical neuropsychologists in the U.S. and our app includes more than 360 unique training sessions which will enhance your memory, processing speed, concentration, problem solving and visual skills.

You can also compare your results with your friends by using the Fit Brains Index which measures your cognitive performance across five major brain areas.

So, if you want (or need) to get your brain matter exercising, leave those math textbooks alone – try out the Fit Brains Trainer app now for free and give your brain a quality workout from time to time.

Let us know how you like the app!

If we need to talk about technologies, here they are: Objective-C for iOS development, Java for Android development, HTML5 / CSS / JS for front-end, and Java J2EE for back-end. So, you see, that’s why we don’t emphasize the technologies, as much the quality of programming as such and the ability to learn.

If you’re interested, take a look at the hiring announcement in Croatian. Reach us at jobs@fiveminutes.eu!

If you ever get a change to visit our headquarters in Zagreb, Croatia – make sure to ask about our ping-pong room. That’s right, we have our own ping-pong room with (obviously) a ping-pong table inside and a couple of developers in a match at all times.

Over the time, we learned that we don’t know when some is inside playing which made us sad when we would get to the room and see people already inside, throwing the ball left and right.

Motivated by that problem, we created a solution which we featured in a blog post recently; a presence detector which monitored is there somebody in the room. Being geeks as we are, we weren’t satisfied with just the device and software for it – we wanted more. So we took some data out of it and did a fine usage analysis of our ping-pong room.

Is there a ghost in the house?

So, as you can see, we’re also data nerds. Tomislav Grbin, Vedran Franke and Merlin Rebrović and took the data and created a few charts to visualize it. If you look at the first chart, you can see that Tuesday is the day when the room has been used the most. Funny, Saturday has the lowest usage index, even lower than the Sunday. Yep, we’re playing here on weekends as well!

However, we’re also working, which can be seen on the second chart; most of our games take 5-15 minutes per game. The spike on the left (very short period of time) is caused by people entering the room to chat or just going through to the balcony.

The last chart is the most interesting one. It shows how long our games last in relation to part of the day. You can see that around 11 AM and 6 PM we have the most games – short ones, those long ones (60 minutes and longer) come after working hours. If you look closely, you’ll see that there are several games being played at every time of the night. It looks like we’re having some paranormal activities inside. It’s either that or someone had a sleep-over in the room :)

So, this is what our team works on in their free time. Doesn’t get more geekier than that.

A large part of being productive in our personal and professional life nowadays has to do with the applications we use. However, there are probably hundreds of note-taking apps that have already flooded the App Store. Aware that note-taking applications are dime a dozen on the market, our client has prepared in advance replies to some of the questions that might come up among potential users on the SweetPicks Questions & Answers.

Idea

Idea for the SweetPicks app and unique approach to note taking: “things of life you like”, our client found in daily life situations.

Imagine you are out in the city and notice something you like: a pair of shoes, a gift idea for friends or family, a car, a restaurant, a cool bar or even an exhibition you’d love to check out. Often we think we will remember such things but we simply forget all about it.

So here is where SweetPicks comes in handy. A note taking app that lets you capture all the real things of your daily life into a single note – text, voice clip, memo, picture, location, price. A note can be captured very easily while on the go and found back in an instant at any later time.

Challenge

What made the development of SweetPicks app challenging for us is wrapping the long list of required features the client insisted on in a clean interface that would be easy to navigate and that’s the beauty of it: simplicity with which SweetPicks allows user to make notes is pretty hassle-free considering the myriad features the app offers.

Three different ways to search (by keyword, photo and tag), posting notes to calendar for future reminders, creating favorite lists, sorting and modifying notes, marking location on map, sharing options are just some of the key features SweetPicks has to offer. You can find the whole list of key features and more details on iTunes.

The first version of SweetPicks mobile application is available for download in iTunes Store and the best way to learn more about SweetPicks is to try it.

SweetPicks app is meant to evolve with other valuable features so keep an eye on our blog where we’ll inform you of all the changes about the app which will make your note-taking life much easier.

We like to experiment, so we tried different tools like Trac, Pivotal Tracker, Microsoft Project, Jira, Asana, Trello, Bitbucket Issues and others. Some of these were used individually, others in a combination. My team chose a combination of Asana and Bitbucket Issues. Asana is awesome for managing smaller projects, especially if they tend to overlap. But it lacks the features of an issue tracking system. And since we already used Bitbucket for source control, naturally we chose Bitbucket Issues for issue tracking. So in combining these two, as you can imagine, we found that having the tasks distributed on two different systems makes task management difficult and causes tasks to be overlooked and left behind. If only issues assigned to a person would automatically appear in their Asana task list.

Hackathon we had recently was a great opportunity to explore this idea further. While my other colleagues immersed themselves in cool projects which include hardware related stuff like presence detection and triggering door buzzer with a mobile app, I was eager to solve somewhat less “fun” problem which bugged us in our everyday work. There ought to be a simple way to connect these two services, I assumed.

In my mind, there was a perfect solution, a web service that would be connected to Bitbucket via “issue changes subscription API” similar to Facebook’s Realtime Updates API and to Asana via simple API for managing tasks. After some research, I found that Asana has an API, which makes it easy to create tasks on behalf of a user for which you have an API key. Great, second requirement – checked. As for the Bitbucket, it has both an API and a Broker service architecture, but none of those provide the ability to act on an event of an issue being assigned to the user. There is the Events resource which could be polled in intervals, but that would be useful only in theory, because in reality the resource doesn’t support private repositories. So, without any other ideas, there was one last option to explore – email notifications.

Bitbucket has one annoying feature, as a team account owner you can either turn on or turn off all email notifications. In case they are turned on, the account owner is going to receive a notification for every event in any of the repositories the team is working on. Otherwise irritating feature, turned useful in this case. While thinking about ways of pushing the email notifications from Bitbucket to my web service, it occurred to me that the whole thing could be simplified to an email processing script called on all incoming emails. Sudden realization followed by some furious typing and there was a working prototype. The script would be called on an incoming email notification from Bitbucket, email would be parsed, issue related data extracted and a new task would be created in Asana. After another coding session the system would also be able to receive configuration information (workspace identifier, Bitbucket usernames and API keys for individual users) via email so that there is no need for an admin interface of any kind.

After the coding was done, a dedicated email address was created to which all emails from Bitbucket were forwarded from the team owner’s inbox. That email address was configured to have Bitbucket2Asana script run on every incoming email. And the only thing left was to ask other team members to send their Asana API keys in a given format to the dedicated Bitbucket2Asana email address and they would have their Bitbucket issues appear in Asana as new tasks.

The source code of the Bitbucket2Asana system is available on Bitbucket.