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Countries Using Champions App

Apple iPad

iPad isn’t the first tablet to hit the market. There were many tablet laptops in recent years. Most of them ran Windows and had a full scale OS behind them. Compared to those iPad doesn’t have a full multi-tasking behind it. Has a closed appstore. Has exactly one connector port. Zero USB connectors. Yet I still think that iPad is going to be a great device.

To figure out why iPad is going to be a great device, let’s think about it from a non-techy, non-developer point of view. Imagine a person who doesn’t spend 16 hours of their day in-front of a computer screen. They are the casual PC users. Most of their activities during the course of the day involve: checking email, chatting, surfing, playing games etc. For all these tasks iPad fit perfectly. Most people use their computers to work on stuff in Microsoft Word, preparing their presentation in Microsoft Powerpoint etc.

iPhone revolutionized the usability of smartphones. For the first time an average consumer could simply browse to a store and buy an application which automagically downloads itself, installs and ready to be used without using any cable or wires or instructions for the users on how to install it. Magical! iPhone wasn’t about the device itself. Yes multi-touch was amazing, yes the screen was good and yes it had an apple logo at the back but what really made it amazing was the Appstore. For the first time a developer could push their work to the consumer in straightforward manner. If you have ever tried to find a decent Blackberry application and then download it and then install it you will know what I mean. It was a painful experience. With iPhone it was a pleasure. All information safe and secure, I don’t need to pull out my creditcard for the purchase, it is already there all safe and secure.

Now as a developer I know that there are issues with Appstore. It isn’t a perfect world out there. So yeah I don’t agree with some of the things Apple does with Appstore. At times their approval process doesn’t make any sense. But from a consumer standpoint, it is exactly what I wanted.

Over the past couple of days I have been having discussions with the team on what would be a great iPad application. We have already decided to create a Champions App for iPad. But we wanted to see how we can leverage that big multi-touch screen to create creative applications.

I am excited. Very excited. This is just the beginning.

So what does Champions do?

• Easy to read summary panels
• Games schedule
• Ball-by-Ball coverage
• Full scorecard

Why did we build this?

Frankly, there are a few cricket applications on Appstore that provide somewhat similar functionality but all of them lacked one  thing – usability. I have written a complete review of Cricinfo’s cricket application on iPhone and you can read my frustration there. We wanted to build an application that will make cricket easy and fun to follow. So this is our first step towards that.

One of the main design decision that went into this application was the “summary panels”. We wanted to allow our users to quickly look at the game summary without scrolling or tapping too much. So we decided to create “summary panels” which give you a quick summary of the game and allow you to view full scorecard or ball-by-ball coverage of the game quickly and easily.

This is just version 1.0, we hope to add many features in our next release.

Give it a try and tell us what you think. If you like the application please leave a review.

You are responsible for your own experience.

In my short (and still going) time in entrepreneurship, I have learned this lesson many times. When I was starting this journey, I always asked other successful entrepreneurs (offline & online) about their experiences. The best advice I ever got was similar to this statement.

Soon I realized that this is true for everything in life. If my experience was similar to yours, or yours similar to mine, than what would be the fun in that? I am glad the way my life experience has been so far. It has been a challenge, fun, sad, happy, exciting, nervous, long nights, sleepless nights and much more.

In my opinion, one of the mistakes that we make as humans is to look up to someone as our “role model”. While the concept of “role model” is good, what it can potentially lead to can be dangerous.

We look at successful startups and we try to convince ourselves that we if we replicate their success story than we will be automatically end up with the same success. This isn’t true at all. Its their experience that made them what they are. You can’t replicate that. You can’t replicate the experience Bill Gates had while building Microsoft, you can replicate the experience Steve Jobs had while building Apple.

So stop trying to recreate experiences, build your own. Enjoy what life throws at you and make the best out of it.

There are a gazillion problems out there that need your skill-set, your time, your efforts and your ideas. Go out there, solve them, help others. That is what your life experience would be.

I have been using iPhone since the first one came out. I have been following cricket since I can remember. Naturally when I got my iPhone I was excited to follow my cricket from anywhere, anytime. Cricinfo has been the leader (and the only website) when it comes to cricket coverage. They simply have the best coverage, not necessarily the best UI though.

I have written before about their website redesign. So I won’t talk about that today. Although, there is so much that they can be doing with their website to make it more user friendly.

Today, I am going to be talking about their iPhone application. It is so disappointing that it made me browse to their actual website more frequently via my iPhone than to use their mobile application.

So those of you who haven’t used their iPhone application, I highly recommend you to give it a try before further reading this review.

Initial thoughts:

The application is very rough. It is not completely a native application. The only native component is the tabbar at the bottom and the actual content is rendered inside a UIWebView. My guess is that this application is built using PhoneGap or some similar technology. Nothing wrong with using such technologies but when the UI doesn’t follow the convention it creates all sort of issues.

The Main Screen:

The main screen contains three different sections: Summary, Current & Recent Matches and Upcoming Games. The idea is well thought out at least in a sense that it gives me a snapshot view of what’s going on. When you tap on a game it has two reactions: 1) dispatch a request and 2) flip the current view. This flip is not so user friendly. The reason being that it is not a “native” animation, it is a webkit enabled animation which isn’t that smooth.

Also the tap has no response, the usual tableview on iPhone has a “blue” or some sort of background feedback that a touch has been detected, which doesn’t happen here.

The tabs at the bottom react very differently as well. When you tap on a tab it first shows a loading image and then shows the actual view. This should be the other way around. First show the view and then load the data.

Match Details Screen:

Once you tap on a certain game you are then presented with a mini-match detail screen. This screen has a sort of tabular layout where information such as score, last 12 balls, run-rate and a small quick highlight from the game is present. There are also two large buttons for “Scorecard” and “Ball-By-Ball” view of the game. This is perhaps the only sane UI in the whole application. One thing that bothered me a lot was the “back” and “refresh” buttons at the top. Those were trying to simulate “UINavigationBar” but really when you scroll down you loose them from the screen and every time you have to refresh you have to scroll up. Again this is a restriction due to the “design” of the application.

Scorecard:

A very ordinary looking scorecard. One of the key vital information missing from this screen is the “balls faced” by the batsman. Seriously, that is so needed here. But I guess Cricinfo doesn’ t think that’s important information. Also, the tabs don’t really look like tabs at the top.

The refresh and back buttons are still having the same issue.

Ball-by-Ball:

This view really lacks the visuals that would make it much more exciting and pleasure to use. It is very plain and simple and missing a lot of key elements. While reading the ball-by-ball commentary, if you want to check on current batsman’s score, you have to actually go back one screen and then come back. Why can’t the “Match detail” view and this view be merged somehow?

There is a lot of room for improvement here.

While Cricinfo does a decent job of covering cricket on their site, their mobile application can certainly use a complete redesign. There have been some major bug fixes in recent updates. Most notable bug was the inability to view more than two innings of scorecard. So during the test match the scorecard view was only showing the first inning scores for both teams.

Another short coming is the inability to distinguish the follow-on of a team and no push notifications (not that big of a deal).

And I did end up meeting some really great people!

This is part 1 of the series of posts. This post is going to cover all about my experience in Islamabad.

First off before landing in Islamabad, during my transit from Abu Dabhi, I met a really nice young fellow (not that I am really old or anything) Naveed Zafar. Naveed is an IT/network professional based out of UK and was going back to Islamabad to visit his family. We had a nice exchange of ideas and thoughts around what can be done in Pakistan. Thanks for the talk Naveed, it really help me forget the first 14 hours of my flight from Toronto to Abu Dabhi.

Next, I met up with Owaeis Kiyani, a very energetic and young entrepreneur from Islamabad/Rawalpindi. Owaeis had me curious about his next startup called GidMid. So I asked him to tell me a bit about it, he wants to keep it off the record. So I won’t go into details but it all sounded very interesting. We also talked about his journey into entrepreneurship so far and the experiences he had as a freelance developer and even helping his friends and family in getting into the freelance business. Thanks for the lunch Owaeis.

Then after a day’s break and eating as much as I possibly could. I ended up scheduling a meeting with Aamir Attaa the founder/editor of ProPakistani.com – a technology related news website. I had very long and interesting conversation with Aamir regarding his views on online journalism, media, marketing, advertising and technology in Pakistan. I can confidently say that what Aamir is doing with ProPakistani is simply an outstanding effort and example of how to leverage the power of web to generate value for yourself. He is a great person, with very well thought out ideas and if I was running a newspaper in Pakistan, I would certainly hire him as a consultant to get the online presence setup that our newspaper industry seriously lacks.

I wanted to meetup with Osama Hashmi from Green&White but he wasn’t feeling well, so I had to settle with a phone call. I hope you are feeling better now and I wish you a speedy recovery.

I have missed out on meeting a few other good people from Islamabad and Rawalpindi who had contacted me to meetup with them, but unfortunately, due to short time-span of my stay I couldn’t meetup with all of you. InshaAllah that would be done in my next trip, which would be a longer.

To all those whom I met (and didn’t meet): keep up the hard work, encourage people around you to take action and create value.