I build a couple of “apps” every day. This is how I do it.
I often hear friends complain about having great ideas that never take off because they lack the means for execution. “If only I could code, I’d be a millionaire,” they have told themselves more than once.
Truth is, as some of you may already know, life is never that easy. Even if you become a great coder, your idea may not be as marketable, profitable or even as original as it sounds over a latte, and your execution needs to be extremely well done, presented, and distributed, in order to compete with all those other people having similar ideas. You are going to have to test your hypotheses, prototype, test again, iterate, pivot, growth-hack, and other startup buzz-verbs. Then as tools evolve to make each of these steps easier, markets are going to get saturated, and competitors are going to pop up all around you before you even have a working prototype.
The days of “build it and they’ll come” are UPPERCASE LONG gone, if they even existed. Heck, the days of “build a great product and they’ll come” are gone.
But even though front-end code (apps, websites) is only rarely the main limiting factor in building successful software, it often holds a prominent spot among limiting factors, at least in tech startup founders’ minds. At tech events I have heard speakers boast about having validated all of their hypotheses, to later close with statements such as “now we just need to build the app, and if you’re a great developer, please come talk to us!” Don’t get me wrong, validating before building is a proven strategy in most contexts, especially if the app is just a distribution channel for your great product. I’m just pointing out the limiting nature the interface layer.
In fact, it is pretty common for front-end developers in rich tech environments to be approached by strangers with ideas, or with development needs within small companies, even after all of the core product and back-end is completed.
Today, front-end code is still a limiting factor in the quest for building great apps.
For a while I have regarded this limitation as a disease of the current nature of software development. So yes, I have been rooting for a cure that would likely make my own occupation unnecessary. Every time new tools are released to make front-end development easier and faster, the symptoms become less visible for those who employ them, but the syndrome remains.
Even in companies and agencies full of smart front-end developers building applications in bounded fields such as productivity or e-commerce, their job still requires tackling many user experience problems as completely new ones, tossing out old code and creating new one all the time.
So when I told my very smart friend from a large Seattle-based company that over the past year we had created a sufficiently comprehensive code base that would allow us to cleanly create and integrate new functionality into the Relevant app with very little effort, I did not expect him to believe me at first. “That never happens, but keep going…” he interjected. I would have thought the same. And before the technological singularity (if it is ever to happen), this is likely to remain an absolute truth on software development as a whole.
But I postulate that, outside of gaming and other predominantly sensorial software categories, front-end user exeperience is evolving into a relatively restricted field, and with the right wiring/piping of graphical interface elements with a powerful API aggregation platform, the utopy of being limited not by development but only by ideas, is perfectly possible, and we have gotten pretty close to it.
Cards: This is where I justify the quotes around the word “apps” in the title.
Relevant cards, although not apps in the strict sense of the word (they are not standalone pieces of software), are interactive, aggregate multiple device and external APIs, and have a brain of their own. Their interface is composed of a growing set of templates. Their brain responds to complex instructions to gather and re-structure information from the web or from your device, just like our favourite apps.
The Nearby card, for example, searches our surroundings for interesting places (such as restaurants or coffee shops), seamlessly aggregating Yelp and Foursquare reviews and ratings. Tapping on a place reveals relevant photos and menus when available.
The Movies card displays movie listings and reveals showtimes and other relevant information when tapped, using different sources.
Other popular cards include Weather, Transit, and News.
We have worked really hard to develop a platform that makes it a relatively simple task for us to create new cards, and we have succeeded; during the last few days I have found myself building more than one card per day. Some while shopping at the mall, or right before going to bed (users need not worry; the cards still go through careful QA and debugging before public deployment). And I can assure you, if you use Relevant and think that some cards could be smarter, richer, or more interactive, this is a reflection of our ability to imagine new functionality, rather than of the actual reach of the Relevant platform. Relevant cards can be as powerful as the services they channel, while being much lighter and faster than the average app or website. In fact you can have multiple cards in your deck without any apparent effect on the speed of the Relevant app.
Relevant cards may or may not be the future of mobile interfaces, but their success (most cards are added to hundreds of decks after made available in the library) is a reflection of a strong need for a more seamless and smarter interface layer between internet services and mobile screens. We are extremely grateful to be part of this shift, so the goal of this article is not to brag about our own ability to build cards in minutes, but to open up a channel of communication with anyone who may be interested in easily creating interface layers for existing services or even their own back-ends/APIs. Take it as a very first step towards the upcoming opening of the Relevant platform to the public.
Follow me, email me, and join the conversation below to learn more about our vision for the interface layer of the future.
Visit relevant.ai to check out Relevant.
Become our friend to learn more about intergrating and aggregating web services to build Relevant cards. Android users/makers: Yes, we’re soon coming to Android :)
