Ł_APP! #2: app development from the inside and outside

The first time lucky, the second time well-prepared: the latest edition of Ł_APP! was just as amazing as the first one. We’re happy to notice that with every meetup, more and more people become interested in our initiative!

The high attendance rate proves that we were right on time when we decided to create this event. Ł_APP! is meant for everyone interested in app development, not only coders or designers (although we had both as speakers). This comes as no surprise – everyone has a mobile phone nowadays and it won’t change anytime soon. 

So, what did we talk about? Here’s a quick round-up.

Going from Left-to-Right to Right-to-Left

Olka Fiszbak-Biernat, Head of Design at HTD, introduced us to a challenge she had to take with her team. The app her company developed was meant to be sold in the Middle East. Nothing easier than translating the interface from English to one of the languages from the area, right? Well, not exactly. Alphabets used in languages such as Arabian, Persian, and Azeri (to name just a few) are meant to be read from right to left (RTL). It’s in opposition to the Western alphabets read from left to right (LTR). However, words are just the beginning: the direction in which the text is supposed to be followed impacts one’s sense of time and purpose! 

For example, if you see a comic stripe and you’re an LTR reader, for you the story begins in the first frame on the left. For an RTL reader, that’s going to be the first frame on the right. Same goes for the passage of time: if your phone is set to Arabic and you go to Instagram stories, the time bar will move – you guessed it – from right to left. Here’s a catch though: the order of numbers, unlike letters, goes from left to right!

Olka talked about a lot of aspects that have to be addressed by designers when tackling such a task. The stakes are high: the target group is around 700 mln people. 

Making things easy with Flow

Aleksander Piotrowski, freelance experienced Android development, is always on a lookout for ways to make his work more effective. One of them is Flow. According to Aleksander, it’s the perfect replacement for RxJava. Flow is similar to sequences in Kotlin. However, Flow is asynchronous where Kotlin sequences are synchronous. It also has plenty of properties that RxJava doesn’t have that makes the coding process quicker. To show his points, Aleksander performed a good ol’ session of live coding.

What’s especially nice is that when using Flow, we don’t have to clean – Google does it for us. That leaves more time for important stuff, which makes the freelance gig so attractive in the first place!

AI for beginners 

Most of us still think that Artificial Intelligence is a concept from sci-fi movies. Meanwhile, AI is closer to us than we think. Remember T9 on your old mobile? Exactly. Marcel Jóźwiak and Kamil Wasąg from Enigma Pattern took it upon themselves to present the current state of AI in a funny, beginner-friendly way. 

Firstly, let’s look at the basic classification of AI: 

Narrow Artificial Intelligence – has one specific task, can’t think for itself,

General Artificial Intelligence – can think and behave like a human, learns from mistakes,

Superintelligent Artificial Intelligence – in the charming words of Marcel: that’s how the Terminator movie starts.

Where to look for AI on your mobile? Obviously, AI solutions are responsible for voice and face recognition, text prediction, object detection, photo enhancement, machine translation, device security, and app personalization based on behavioral patterns. Marcel and Kamil talked in detail about their project where AI identifies objects in the picture. According to the guys, if we don’t want to make the Terminator a reality, it’s best to modify the data presented to the AI as much as possible. The more difficult the learning material is, the more control we have over AI.

Interested in any of the subjects above? Follow our Facebook page to receive information when the next event is going to take place: Facebook Ł_APP mobile meetup

You could become a speaker at Ł_APP! if you like! Pitch your idea to artur@binarapps.com