Engineering User Delight, Intuit's Data Platform, and StackMob

For our February meetup, we'll be taking a peek inside Intuit to get some tips and tricks for building great apps for small businesses, and then we'll take a close look at StackMob, which offers some great tools to help us with that.

We'll start with a talk from Intuit's mobile team:

Engineering for User Delight

Why do some apps engender a feeling of delight and craftsmanship? Why do other apps feel bland or boring?

In order to deliver a rich user experience, subtle details can be the most important differentiators in conveying a feeling of overall quality and satisfaction to users. Tyler Fox, iOS software engineer at Intuit, will explore in depth user interface details and interactions that can delight users and help differentiate apps without getting in the way.

Then we'll hear about opportunities for mobile app developers who want to hook up to Intuit APIs:

Leveraging Intuit's Data Platform In Your Applications

Did you know that Intuit is actively supporting an ecosystem of third party applications that solve small business and consumer problems?

Peter Vogel and Tim Hobson, engineers on the Intuit Partner Platform (IPP) team, will discuss the Data Service APIs that Intuit supports, the types of applications that have been successful with them and how you can leverage them in your applications.

After this we're going to go in-depth with StackMob:

Put your Backend on Stackmob

StackMob, a mobile application backend platform, cuts your development time in half by handling all of the backend functionality of your app. From the client you can easily trigger datastore, authentication, push or geo-location operations, just to name a few. Matt Vaznaian, iOS Software Engineer at StackMob, will walk through the features StackMob provides, as well as what it looks like to develop an iOS application which integrates StackMob as the backend.

CocoaConf San Jose Ticket Giveaway

I'll have a free ticket to CocoaConf San Jose (http://cocoaconf.com/sanjose-2013/home) (April 18-20) for one lucky drawing-winner. Bring a business card to enter, and if your card isn't drawn, REGISTER HERE (http://cocoaconf.com/sanjose-2013/register) and use the SVIOS code for a 25% discount.