This week the interview is with the Aktifmob team. They talk about Ghost Slayer, their first app made with Kwik, and future projects. Enjoy!
Tell a little bit about you and your company
Aktifmob is a mobile integrator and digital media company that deals with technical integration for brand owners wanting to go mobile and helping traditional media publisher moving into mobile arena. Our core services include mobile advertising and digital media publication. So, we have been working for partners such as Unilever, Ford, Suzuki and many more, mostly in the mobile advertising and integration to Indonesia cellular market.
What is the app about?
Well, the app was first created as our portfolio and as a showcase to wannabe publishing clients wanting to publish in digital format. It was a bit hard at the beginning in finding the right content for publication until we found that we actually have several publishing rights into old comic books, then we thought why not convert these comics digitally on tablet? Aktifmob happens to have partnership agreements with solution developers with tools to publish these books easily but we were hindered by cost since we wanted to release the first app as an app and not a newsstand or publication item. Secondly, we want this app also to becoming our comic platform to release the rest of catalog as quickly as possible.
How did Kwik help you to build it? Any favorite features?
We didn’t come across Kwik until we decided that we wanted to build an app that runs on Android and iOS, we actually were searching for the right language and we found Lua, nice and simple language that we could learn quickly and supports both Android and iOS natively. Then we stumbled upon Corona and we liked it (may takes time to love it though…) but another problem arise, our programmers didn’t have time to learn the new language due to other projects so we were left with designers whom having a pretty hard time to learn programming. We needed something fast and require tool that would kicked the project from designers’ perspective and that’s when we found Kwik.
Being a designer myself, I must say that Kwik helped us a lot, through several tinkering with the tool, we found best way of working around it, and in fact we used Kwik initially to create dummy and base for our programmers to work on. But, for Ghost Slayer it was our design team that eventually completed the app and learned Lua as well as Corona along the way.
What we like about Kwik? It’s the flow and approach the tool is providing from designers’ standpoint. Using Kwik we can build prototype and base platform for mobile app much faster than before and we are even abandoning our most used prototyping tool and just have Kwik installed in Photoshop. Our programmers loved it too since they could collaborate with designers much faster and understand what the art directors want for the app.
Any trick/tip you would like to share?
Not sure, everyone have his or her own ways in working with Kwik, ours would be to use the tool as the main foundation of our mobile app development. Concepts still take center stage of any app development and since Photoshop is installed in many computers, translating rough sketches directly to Photoshop and build base codes with Kwik helps a lot.
What is your overall experience with us (product and services)?
Excellent, it cuts production time by half in our case and can’t wait to see further improvements you guys would do to Kwik, creating base game platform would be even greater for Kwik. Imagine all physics and game levels can be designed directly in Photoshop and core codes are generated directly from Kwik that would be awesome. You have done a great job to ease any developers…
What is next for you and your company?
Aha, now all of our comics’ catalog will be built using Kwik. After Ghost Slayer we are already developing the rest of the titles and since we already have the foundation, now our designers are feeling like programmer and our programmers are starting to learn design.
We are also working on a new mobile app that is not a book but a full functioning mobile business application using 65% Kwik as the tool of choice. I will let you know on these apps and new comics later on, when we finish. It won’t be long though I can assure you! Thanks to Kwik we keep doing what we love to do, building quick with Kwik.
Thanks a lot to all the team! I sincerely wish you the best on Ghost Slayer and the next ones!