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Filip Frącz

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• on android, ios, mobile, TT, TT Mobile

TT Mobile showcase

My friends at TT are really busy trying to get the mobile clients out the door and into production. TT’s twitter account is buzzing with all kinds of photos and videos. I am really happy and proud of how far my apps have come. The end result is looking beautiful and I am sure the end-users will be delighted by both the design and functionality.

I really enjoyed working on TT Mobile, as it presented a very unique set of challenges. How to effectively push price updates over potentially slow cellular connections? How to ensure users don’t accidentally place trades (butt trading anyone)? And how to effectively integrate with the rest of TT’s eco-system? I think the team did a splendid job and the apps are rock solid. One disappointing fact is that both Android and iOS apps could have been released over a year ago, had we chosen to re-use logic. There are ways to write the code once, and use it verbatim on multiple mobile platforms (naturally the look-and-feel needs to be done separately, so that the app feels “native”). I have long argued with the executives and advocated for shared business logic, since it seemed like a no-brainer.

  • Shorter time-to-market. In today's fast-moving world it's imperative to be there first.
  • Lower cost of development.
  • Less bugs.
  • Parallel releases on multiple platforms.
  • Lower long-term maintenance costs.
  • Less testing effort.

Other companies are not as short-sighted and have long recognized the benefits of writing the common logic once, instead of re-implementing it for every platform. Xamarin has their cross-platform C#. Google is pushing Java with its ability to share code between Android, iOS and the web. Dropbox uses C++ for shared logic. RemObjects has their cross-platform Swift. Not to mention frameworks like Flash and Cordova. I still cannot believe that the decision makers would rather have us maintain two separate codebases, but I guess you need to be good at engineering to comprehend the benefits.

On a positive note, I am extremely pleased with the aesthetics of TT Mobile apps; graphical design and usability are essential. Nobody wants to use an app that looks “f-ugly” or that feels cumbersome. Folks at TT spent countless hours doing usability studies and polishing the design. Trust me - a lot of love went into making of these apps. They look awesome, they are snappy and I really hope you’ll enjoy them :)