Musings

LinkedIn’s iPhone App is great, but I will come straight to the feature which impressed me most and that is it’s integration with native Calendar app on iPhone. When you access the menu by tapping the icon on Top-Left (Pretty common UI element these days), you see an option to view Calendar and you can see your calendar events right inside the LinkedIn App, but what makes it really interesting is you can see Photos of all the attendees of an meetings and when you select an attendee, you are taken to his LinkedIn profile. I like this feature so much that instead of opening native Calendar app on my iPhone, I just open LinkedIn and check my calendar there.

Ok so what as an App Developer we can learn from this? We learn that while creating an iPhone app we should think how we can use smart-phone features like location, calendar, contacts, camera, sensors etc. in such little but innovative ways to add value to our app. What LinkedIn has done is that it has offered its users a new facility which is not even available on its website. Mobile app should not necessarily always have lesser features than a website, sometime it can have some extra features as well like in the case of LinkedIn app, so always think how can you use various features of an smart-phone.

Of Course there are many other things you can learn from LinkedIn app. They have slide-from-left menu screen and then slide-from-right for setting up some preferences, then we have pull-down-to-refresh gesture, all these have become pretty standard in any good app these days. App is fast and fluid and whole UI is generally very nice.

Basically what we need to ultimately remember is not see a mobile app as just a smaller screen version of website or desktop software, so we should not just try to fit everything for small screen of phones. We need to realise that mobiles are used differently than computers and mostly at different times and situations so we should strive to give our users optimum user-experience to suit all this.

Kiran Prasad who heads the mobile development team at LinkedIn puts this very beautifully:

We’re looking at the ‘entrenched’ use case [for desktop users], the coffee-and-couch use case [for tablet users], the two-minute use case [for mobile phone users].

You can read the complete article on VentureBeat.com for more of his insight.

Hope you found my little analysis of LinkedIn app useful and use some of it when you create that next great app of yours. I am also a big fan of LinkedIn as a Software Development Company (Not just their App Development) and you can read about their ‘Continuous Deployment’ model to know why.

Thanks for reading 🙂

I have been toying with idea of developing a phonebook application for sometime now. Here is what I think:

Location/Time-Zone Aware PhoneBook: Whenever I travel, I try to connect with people I know from that city. Contacts/PhoneBook app on my phone has address field as well, but there is no way to search contacts by city, country etc. I think if we can search our contacts by city, it will make things a lot easier.

Sometime before calling somebody I need to figure out their time because they are in different time-zone. If somehow I can see the time for a contact based on his time time-zone, then it will be easier to decide when to call him.

If we integrate PhoneBook with GPS/Maps, we can see our contacts on map and may even see contacts near your current location. There are apps which show your nearby friends on map, but haven’t found any app which is integrated with your phonebook. Similarly city name stored with the contacts can be used to automatically derive time-zone and show user’s time. I just wonder why our inbuilt phonebook/contacts on mobiles don’t support this already?

Other Possibilities:

I think this new PhoneBook can have enormous scope. It can be integrated with SocialNetworking sites like LinkedIn, FaceBook, Orkut etc so that your PhoneBook shows profile photos, updates from these sites as well. Some companies have already started doing this. PhoneBook 2.0 and INQ1 come to my mind immediately, though there are others as well.

I miss one more thing in the current PhoneBook, which is search contacts by their profession/company. I may know many lawyers, doctors but when I need one, I can’t think of somebody immediately, so if phonebook contains company/profession info about my contacts and allow me to look-up all doctors or lawyers when needed, it will be cool.

PhoneBook is most basic but very helpful application on any mobile phone, but its probably being overlooked by most mobile handset/software companies. I think complete overhauling of existing PhoneBook application is required and RIM, Apple, Microsoft and Google can do a huge favour to all the mobile users by replacing existing PhoneBook apps in their respective mobile OS by what I would like to call PhoneBook 3G.