Steve Jobs said that and it’s repeated by the people who recognize how much important is building apps as much nice as user-friendly.

And it was the theme of my presentation as “visiting lecturer” at the Augmented Reality & Mobile Experience course held by Prof. Spallazzo at the Design Department of the Polytechnic University of Milan.

Generally speaking, designer and developer are two very different kinds of people, both in terms of education and personal tastes.
These differences often cause communication obstacles when they have to work together, for example to make an app for mobile devices.

So, in the first part of the lecture I talked about the best practices the two figures should follow, since knowing some details of how one works helps communicating better with the other.

In the second part I briefly showed the tools used by developers to make apps for the three main platforms: Apple iOS, Google Android and Microsoft Windows Phone.

No, I’m not a fan of any of the three operative systems! 😉
As I told the students, “I just can’t, as a professional”, but I started from iOS because in my experience it’s the ecosystem in which design and code are aspects historically treated with the same importance.

Being a class with a focus on technology applied to cultural heritage, I closed the lecture talking about the project Rationalism in the Province of Como.
Who better than rationalist architects did know how to use the rule of the golden mean, nowadays evident in the user interface design of iOS 7 and Windows Phone?

Thanks to Prof. Spallazzo for the invitation. Given the interest in this matter, together we hope to organize a course about app design and development.
Meanwhile, the presentation (italian only) I made for the lecture is available on SlideShare.