The July Mobile Monday meet up had a great turn out with lots of new faces and lots of exciting stuff showcased.  Here is a recap of what was covered during this July Mobile Monday Meet up. First up was Dale Zak who is the main developer  of the Ushahidi iPhone  and iPad mobile apps giving a presentation on Mobile Design Principles. Dale highlighted some of the important and simple design principles one should use regardless of the target platform. Some of the design principles he highlighted are : 

  • Simplicity- where each screen should focus on doing one task very well and less is more
  • Familiarity- Users should instantly feel  familiar to the application and tasks
  • Consistency-this included have same color or font throughout the applications and using similar layout of the same buttons like cancel
  • Fast-app should be quick to open, be responsive to actions and allow cancellation of actions

These are among some of the design principles that highlighted the effective use of interfaces to be used on small screens.

The next speaker was Comark Onami from Pamoja Media, a local company that offers Online Marketing, Creative Development (both Mobile and web) and Consulting. Comark presented Ukulima.net, an Open Mobile Social Network for Farmers.

Ukulima is Swahili for “Farming”

The platform is intended to provide market for the small scale farmers, making it easier for them to interact with their buyers. The services included. Comark highlighted that the platform is built on CodeIgniter which is an open source MVC framework. They have also created an API that allows developers to build applications on the Ukulima.net platform.

A few interesting questions were posted by the attendees i.e.
@jwesonga asked Is Ukulima.net competition for the M-Farm platform recently launched by IPO48 winners, Akirachix? Comark responded by pointing out that they view Ukulima.net as a complementary service to the M-Farm platform.
@torooti asked a question on how the platform would ensure that products ordered through it are actually delivered and whether the platform offered some form of guarantee against such occurences. Comark pointed out that in its current state the platform is not geared up for delivery and payments for products ordered, future iterations may incorporate this.

Some resources offered for this Ukulima challenge are:

Lastly we had a presentation from Isaak Osiemo a hilarious upcoming developer who talked about the MsemaKweli(Meaning telling the truth)android app, a constituency development fund (CDF) monitoring application. Hot on the heels of the recently launched Open Data Initiative (https://www.opendata.go.ke), the application is able to take photos, add comments and also share with 3rd party social network. This is not the first application of its kind, just recently Nokia launched a CDF monitoring app on the Ovi Store. The application though not similar to the MsemaKweli application in terms of functionality, also allows users to get data on CDF projects in a particular constituency.

To interact with the Beta version of the Msemakweli android app download by clicking here.