Building apps is something I have always loved the most. It combines all the things I like when creating new things: it requires creative solutions, has a visual designing aspect to it while also requiring technical solutions and the development tools are amazing to work with. They say: do something that you love and you will never work a day in your life. For me, that is app development.
The apps below are just a small number of apps that I have worked on and am able to share.
NGF – The Dutch Golf Federation
The NGF app is the official app for Dutch golfers. If you want to play golf and rank on the Dutch boards, you need this app. The app is build in Xamarin, using a technique called MvvmCross, which allows for easier cross platform development. With a small team, with me as a lead app developer, we first focused on improving the stability of the then already existing app. Crashes were brought down to almost non-existent, which resulted an increased rating in the store from 3.6 to 4.6 stars.
Trust was also very high from the customer. So much so that they have decided to get rid of plastic cards that give right to play a certain golf course, in favor of a digital card available in the NGF app. The customer wanted to give the users a great experience and we have decided to go above and beyond the request and show the cards in a custom animated card carrousel, which can turn into a simulated 3D view.
Essent Home
For the Dutch energy supplier Essent, I have worked on their Essent Home app. Whilst the app is currently discontinued, the goal of the app was to give customers live information about their current energy usage and the amount of energy that was being generated by solar power. The app was available on both Android and iOS, but I was the only developer on the iOS app. My goal was to first make the app on par with the Android variant and then improve upon that with new features.
The app also supported smart home devices like thermostats and light fixtures, including Nest, Honneywell, Philips Hue and Innr.
KINK
The app for KINK might just be the app I am the most proud of. Don’t let the name fool you, this app is for a popular Dutch radiostation that mainly focuses on the alternative music scene internationally. Not your typical Katy Perry and Jason Derulo filled playlist, but rather Kings Of Leon, Muse, De Staat and many more.
I have written an article a while back about the KINK app with more information. This app supports live streams, podcasts, news, Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. The app uses a self written audio library, that is reused in multiple apps, including K-Rock (Android and iOS), Kermis FM (Android and iOS), Glow FM (Android and iOS) and TOPradio (Android and iOS).
CTouch
This project is special. For the company CTouch I have created a user interface for a big touch screen TV running on Android TV version 5.1, mainly used for schools and medium or small sized companies. On the first day of this project I was given two constraints: make something user friendly (preferably beautiful) and do it within one month. I was the only developer on this project, so naturally that was an enourmous task.
After setting the requirements for the project, including features that they wanted to be included, I got to work on designing the product. First creating mockups with wireframes and later designing the end result in Photoshop. When the OK was given, I quickly got to work and have created a launcher that can be seen above within the deadline with days to spare. The product has since been sold around the world, especially schools. Every now and then when I watch the news and a topic about a school comes up, I spot a screen with that launcher on it and it fills me with joy.
