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Learn Developers Podcast
docseason 1, episode 7 previous episode | episode index | next episode this is a transcript of one episode of the samsung developers podcast, hosted by and produced by tony morelan a listing of all podcast transcripts can be found here host tony morelan senior developer evangelist, samsung developers instagram - twitter - linkedin guest tomas joscak head designer, vienna studios in this episode of pow, i interview tomas joscak from vienna studios tomas is an amazing watch face designer, winning the 2019 best of galaxy store award for best indie watch face designer some of his designs? he's priced them in the hundreds dollars and people are buying them and, the software he uses to create the graphics? it's typically not used for designing watch faces you’ll want to listen in and learn not only how he designs high-end watch faces, but also his tips on marketing listen download this episode topics covered galaxy watch studio for tizen galaxy store coupons galaxy store badges banner promotions social media multi-language support best of galaxy store awards transcript note transcripts are provided by an automated service and reviewed by the samsung developers web team inaccuracies from the transcription process do occur, so please refer to the audio if you are in doubt about the transcript tony morelan 00 02 hey, i'm tony morelan and this is pow! podcasts of wisdom from the samsung developer program, where we talk about the latest tech trends and give insight to all the opportunities available for developers looking to create for samsung on today's show i interview tomas joscak from vienna studios tomas is an amazing watch face designer, even won the 2019 best of galaxy store award for best indie watch face designer some of his designs, he's priced them in the hundreds of dollars, and people are buying them and the software he uses to create the graphics it's typically not used for designing watch faces you're going to be surprised enjoy so thomas, tell me who is thomas joscak tomas joscak 00 48 welcome, i just check interesting question oh, well, i will describe myself as somebody who has to learn as an example and cool class storage goals i said one goal a few years ago, i wanted to run a marathon so i prepare myself one year long and afterwards, i barely use the sport shoes so then i have other goals again tony morelan 01 18 so it sounds like maybe a short attention span that you're into something for a brief moment and then after that you move on to the next challenge tomas joscak 01 27 yes, definitely tony morelan 01 29 so tell me, how did you get your start in design, tomas joscak 01 32 design was always kind of a hobby of myself and even if i do have two phds in natural sciences, i always have to be somewhere in a field where nobody had been before so it is a research where i'm working on something new, or i'm producing something new in the field of design i love it tony morelan 02 00 so you're so your education is not design base you said you have two phds in natural sciences tomas joscak 02 05 yes, yes, i never studied design tony morelan 02 08 wow it's pretty amazing because i mean truthfully you are one of the top sellers on the galaxy store when it comes to watch faces and you know your quality is amazing so to hear that that is really coming out of as a hobby is pretty impressive tell me how did you first hear about the samsung galaxy watch tomas joscak 02 26 the exact moment i cannot remember right now however, i cannot forget the first day after my first launch phase having published on galaxy store and after i looked at the statistic and there have been more than 4000 downloads for this first model myself i was surprised shocked and i definitely knew that this might be something you how did you first hear about selling tony morelan 02 53 watch faces, you know in using our software galaxy watch designer at the time which is now a galaxy watch studio tomas joscak 03 00 okay, i was starting designing workspaces in a phasor creator studio before so i had some basics already learned before and so switching to galaxy stir was actually nothing new from the big difference was only the market, which seems to be extremely huge from my point of view tony morelan 03 26 so the market for the galaxy watch faces is much bigger than the market when you're producing them through facer? tomas joscak 03 32 yes, at least, this was my impression one year before tony morelan 03 36 okay, so how long have you been designing watch faces tomas joscak 03 39 right now it is three years i know it before i got my first model, which for my brand as a present to my 14-year celebration party and since then, my i'm just playing with watch faces tony morelan 03 53 or so is this what you do full time or do you have like a is this a side gig for you? this is, you know, what's your main focus? for income tomas joscak 04 02 at the moment is my full-time job and he has is creating nice income actually the best i ever had before even if i compare it with my company in vienna a few years ago tony morelan 04 15 in what was that company, tomas joscak 04 17 this was a pure research company at a field of renewable materials so completely different staff we had up to seven employees but however, from the revenue point of view now it's even bigger tony morelan 04 31 wow so you are based in austria but tell me where are you originally from? tomas joscak 04 36 so i was born in czechoslovakia, in slovakia in part where am actually right now as we are speaking, this podcast together, i was doing my parents and afterwards i got few opportunities in austria and germany and so i stayed in austria tony morelan 04 53 and is it just yourself or do you have employees tomas joscak 04 57 at the moment? my brother is strongly supporting me creating also some brands, domino's martinez, a luxury brand from our portfolio is coming from him so we are two full time now working at this project and sometimes we are cooperating with tony morelan 05 16 freelancers in this globally he'll reach out to freelancers from around the world to have you help with some of the design aspects tomas joscak 05 23 yes, we use platform where different designers are implemented or can make some projects corporation tony morelan 05 32 do you work out of your house? or do you actually have a place of business tomas joscak 05 36 i started as maybe also other designers in my kitchen so my first project so first watch faces have been created in a kitchen afterwards, i go to one room in my flat, and at the moment, we do have an office with my brother and as a next step, we would like to establish a full time or full-size photo studio tony morelan 06 02 okay, okay so i noticed that you have actually four different brands when you go to your website vienna studios com there's actually four different brands on their vienna studios masterpieces we are watching as well as dominus matthias, can you explain the different brands? tomas joscak 06 21 we have many different brands and actually the basic order first one has been vienna studios, which started everything else domino's martinez is luxury brand for my brother, as i mentioned before, is really creating original design i'm more focusing on the functionality and if you're asking about many brands, we are dividing different products into brands, according to price segment, basically tony morelan 06 52 yeah and let's talk a little bit about that because, you know, one thing that's unique with your brand is that you've got some very high-priced watch faces i mean, it's my understanding you have watch faces you know, you've been in the above $100 $200 tell me about those high-level price watch faces and why is it that you decided to offer them so expensive? tomas joscak 07 16 well, we started, i started to sell my watch faces at 199 $1 99 yes, dollar 99 for a piece however, this space is so competitive and it's really hard to be a good designer in this place that after i could feel skills and i was able to prepare high complicated watch faces, i decided to offer them for higher prices and actually, at the moment, you're correctly we are offering different special watch faces up to 400 was dollar per piece tony morelan 07 55 wow, that's amazing so another amazing aspect to you is that you actually won best of galaxy store award in 2019 can you tell me what the award was that you won and what that means to you? tomas joscak 08 08 i can remember well, this call will shout and charlotte called me and mentioned in a wonder indian designer 2019 only after nine months really to be full in the business, so i was completely shocked and even more impressed by the fact that we are to four bestsellers worldwide, so i would never expect it such a sexist after a few months tony morelan 08 39 that's amazing that's amazing and that's when i actually first met you is when you came out to the award show that i was hosting, to give you the award for best indie designer, so congratulations again so i want to talk a little bit about marketing and some of your tips and approaches for marketing tell me about your use of coupons tomas joscak 08 59 coupons is a big project for us it's excellent instrument however we use coupons very solely and actually, as a customer or a fan of vienna studios or dominus martinez, you can win a free coupon once a mount so this is the way how some people could get our expensive watch faces even for free tony morelan 09 28 okay, that's great that's great i also noticed that you when you go to your website, you actually are doing promotions where you're giving away actual watches so tell me a little bit how you're utilizing that as a promotional giveaway tomas joscak 09 42 yes, after a few months, as you mentioned before, we are pretty successful in the business and we try to give something back to nice community which is growing and we do have more than 3000 subscribers at our website and everybody who is subscribing there has a chance now to be not only free coupons, possibly, but also a smartwatch galaxy watch active two at the moment we are running this giveaway until end of this year, and we will think about something new for the next year tony morelan 10 19 excellent that's a great way to build your subscription community it's interesting, i can tell that you've got a lot of marketing experience so tell me a bit about how did you gain that marketing experience? is this something that you're just learning, you know, on the fly right now? or do you have a background a little bit with them with when it comes to marketing? tomas joscak 10 36 i think a good opportunity to learn this stuff was to have my own company so i am partly not only a designer, but also a kind of businessman so we are always forming activities and evaluating it and checking what is working for us, where we do see some revenue streams who are not and this elevation happened maybe on a daily or weekly basis so there's a lot of adjustment and trial and error actions we are using tony morelan 11 13 that's great it's great to be so active when you're, you know, figuring out your marketing approach, or using any social channels like instagram to promote your watch faces tomas joscak 11 23 we are in instagram right now we do have a couple of thousands of followers however, we are not sure if this will be our future instruments, at the moment as a best a marketing instrument for us is to collect email addresses through subscription of our website, which was also in a recommendation from around from samsung, who don't know us this feature could bring something even after maybe three months of my activity at galaxy store thank you okay thank you here's tony morelan 12 02 ron's got a lot of great advice ron's the one who he runs our forums so yeah, much appreciation to ron what about galaxy store badges? are you using any badges on your on your platform to help promote your watch faces? tomas joscak 12 17 yes, we are using standard general veggies for our different stores and those are placed actually in description of our watch faces as well as the instagram on or on our website tony morelan 12 33 excellent and i know that badges are a great way for you to go back and see the analytics you know the data on what's driving your sales so always happy to hear when designers are using the using badges what about banner promotions, have you had a chance to be featured on any of the banner promotions on the galaxy store? tomas joscak 12 50 yes, we are featured in the banner promotion is always a great and profitable issue for us or the banner can drive the revenue really high so the laughter banner promotion and we are happy that we are in tony morelan 13 11 sure and for any new designers out there that are listening in band promotions they run for is it two weeks? is that what it is on the on the galaxy store? tomas joscak 13 19 yes, yes, two-week periods tony morelan 13 21 and this is where you provide a graphic of a banner it's basically an advertisement that appears that helps drive users to your to your store and i know speaking from my experience of banner promotions are huge so great way to get your name out there and drive up your sales so one thing unique about your business is your quality of your photographs and your videos tell me a little bit about that do you have some experience? are you hiring an outside photographer to come in and do that or is this something that you're actually doing yourself? tomas joscak 13 55 and my short fuck us character i was happy to be a photographer as well for a few months before so i have pretty nice lenses and some good technique from that time so i just use the good quality stuff i have already and maybe the pictures are now good or we are we are happy able to quality however, i started just to be in the front of a window and making my first video with a smartphone only so all of this you can actually see it our youtube channels where we delete the old videos where the quality is so poor however, to have a visit video presentation seems to be really important at every watch face so 99% of all our watch faces do have a promo video tony morelan 14 48 okay, and it's you can always spot a vienna studios watch face video because of the white gloves that's something unique i always see these white gloves you know, holding the watch very elegantly are you? are those your hands inside the gloves? or do you have a professional model that you're bringing in to wear the white gloves tomas joscak 15 10 these are my hands the big advantage of making these videos was that before as i work from home, i prepared a small mini photo studio close to my computer so after which phase was ready, i just turn my position into this photo studio beside me and making a video really in a short time in the best possible quality and then i sell off the first two videos that at this magnificent because the watches are so small, have different displacements or some few nice places of my fingers have been there in a really big screen so i started to use goals and find now so i don't need to care about my nails quality anymore? tony morelan 16 01 got it so you don't have to hire a professional hand model that you don't have to worry about getting a little dirt under your fingernails because you just put on the nice fancy gloves love that tomas joscak 16 12 that's the point i think customers like it too tony morelan 16 15 sure, sure so how many watch faces have you published to date? tomas joscak 16 21 published maybe together it will be more than 700 wow, think about this number the three years? yes i think the 700 are solely on galaxy store so like count also my former watch faces it would be somewhere around 1000 and more watch faces tony morelan 16 40 i do understand though, that they're not all available that you actually utilize what you're calling a pop-up brand, which is where it's just for a limited time this watch faces available which kind of helps drive up you know the uniqueness behind the watch face which increases the value so tell me a little bit about your approach on offering a limited release, watch face tomas joscak 17 00 okay, we are playing with different business models and this was one of those we created a brand out there limited, which is a lot more available and to store it delimitation was only 30 days during this time we sold a nice amount of this ultra-limited brand so we'll prepare something for the future as well tony morelan 17 26 excellent no, that's it's a great a great approach again, showing off your marketing experience to help drive your sales so tell me where do you get your ideas from your watch faces tomas joscak 17 39 it's hard to say i'm just walking through the streets or driving and has the hardest time when i got some ideas under the shower tony morelan 17 51 so in the shower, tomas joscak 17 53 in my shower tony morelan 17 54 yeah, typically people are singing in the shower but you're actually designing watch faces in the shower tomas joscak 18 00 well i'm singing to, and then i find myself as i'm running to the corridors our white paper and putting ideas on it and then i can dry myself and doing other stuff tony morelan 18 14 that's good it's great yeah, you're already on the paper so is your approach into first sketch? or do you start designing your watch face straight on the computer? tomas joscak 18 23 yes, i'm sketching a lot i have much more ideas let's say it's time to make a real product out of it tony morelan 18 32 okay tell me a little bit about the tools that you're using so what software using like adobe photoshop adobe illustrator? what are you using to create and design your watch faces? tomas joscak 18 42 well 95% of all my vote faces are created in powerpoint tony morelan 18 51 powerpoint yes, the microsoft program for doing slideshows you're using that to create your watch faces? tomas joscak 19 01 yes, yes, definitely a lot of designers surprised whenever when i mentioned this, however i am is a really powerful instrument of powerpoint tony morelan 19 12 that's crazy i mean, i've used a lot of powerpoint, you know, in my years in fact, i often tell new designers, if they're looking to start a career in freelance graphic design, they really need to learn powerpoint, because people typically don't like using powerpoint, you know, when it comes to putting presentations together and if you can become, you know, a master of powerpoint, well, there's a lot of work out there because people just hate using powerpoint so to hear that you're using powerpoint to create the graphics on these luxury watch faces is just mind blowing i mean that that is absolutely amazing that you have figured out a way to use powerpoint at that level so that's excellent so tell me to date i think i read somewhere that you have over 1 million downloads, is that correct? tomas joscak 20 04 oh, well done 1 million, i think tony morelan 20 10 no, actually at the moment we have more than 5 million downloads 5 million wow that is just amazing so congrats on that tell me a little bit about leveraging free watch faces i know that a lot of designers they'll offer some of their watch faces for free but then the others are paid give me your idea on utilizing free watch faces to help raise your brand level tomas joscak 20 44 free workspaces are great however we are using it very rarely maybe there's one or two per brand and in our stores where we are offering luxury, luxury watch faces which we did $100 plus, we don't use any of those free watch faces so my recommendation would be it's a nice to have some, but not a lot tony morelan 21 11 got it? yeah and i agree with that because you want to really drive your sales so, you know, utilizing free watch faces to help raise brand awareness is excellent but don't over saturate the market with free watch faces so yeah, totally agree with you with that having been a designer now for watch faces for three years and millions of downloads i'm sure you've come across a few challenges so share a little bit about some of the challenges maybe that you've had to face tomas joscak 21 39 well, at the moment, i cannot remember any issue according to brands selling points or design, however, are big challenges right now, according to the coronavirus i spoke to other designers and currently we are the most hated at this crisis at the moment so our sales go to really down in everyone met this year and what we saw was that actually the elect luxury segment a lot of watch faces was actually stopped selling in this time really? tony morelan 22 17 yeah and that's not surprising considering all the you know, our world is going through right now that can understand where people are wanting to you know, watch where they're spending their money so hopefully that will change in a soon enough time so tell me are there any features you would like to see added to the galaxy store or to galaxy watch studio? tomas joscak 22 38 well, i'm personally very adaptive person so i, i am working, whatever is on the table, i try to squeeze the most possible out of it and i asked myself, what can i change to be successful at the market or with the two which is provided to us so basically, i could have some issues but i'm focusing on the on the market right now and on the on the revenues we are able to produce tony morelan 23 12 okay okay so tell me what is in the future for vienna studios do you have any, you know, any updates? what's your plan for the future? tomas joscak 23 23 we will definitely launch some new limited additions to the code successful pilot project we ran before and we have a plan to make a really, really very realistic digital watch face version of a real mechanical watch i cannot tell you any more to this project we are right now speaking to possible licensing partner, but these will be i think, very original offer at the galaxy store tony morelan 23 57 awesome super excited to see that when it actually becomes available so can you talk a little bit about multi language support and how you're utilizing that feature on the galaxy store to help market your watch faces globally tomas joscak 24 11 in the galaxy store, we are starting always with only english version of our watch faces however, if this one particular watch face is popular in other countries, so afterwards, we are translating all the descriptions and promo pictures into the language where the sales are growing tony morelan 24 31 okay, so just to just to help new designers understand, when you first publish a watch face, you publish it in english, that's the preferred language but seller office allows you to create alternative pages that you can put in the native language for different countries so that if a user from that country is viewing your seller office page, they'll see it in their native language it's great to see that you're united in the future, and it's a nice approach when you're just looking at you know, if you've got increased sales in those different regions that it's worthwhile to then translate it so who's doing the translation? tomas joscak 25 10 basically, we are using automatic translations, okay and for example, german language is familiar with me so i look at the languages where we are in and rest is automatic at the moment tony morelan 25 24 okay, nice so i also understand that you're doing something that you're calling an outlet store so tell me a little bit about your outlet store and how you're utilizing watch face watch faces on that tomas joscak 25 36 outlet store is a really another success story of vienna studios as we started promoting and selling, high priced looks at a watch faces there was a lot of people who would like to have one but i don't want to pay as much are cannot afford for these high prices so afterwards we have a certain amount of dyslexia watch faces, we decided to put the oldest one into a new creative outlet store with a huge discount so at the moment the people are able to buy alexa watch faces even for much lower prices in the outlet store tony morelan 26 23 that's a great approach it's the first that i've actually heard of someone using that approach to sell some of their older watch faces so very interesting i love that so i'm guessing you're familiar with some of the other top watch face designers out there on the galaxy star can you tell me you know, give me some names who are the designers that you that you are impressed with that you follow with the names that kind of jump out for you? tomas joscak 26 48 okay, there is a lot of great designers out there i can i could mention a few x9 studios, infinity watch faces however, the best one for myself and now level four for himself is matteo dini a few of his watch faces, and he could claim be like designing every pixel so i'm really impressed by work of matteo tony morelan 27 18 yeah, he is he's an amazing designer based out of italy you know, one of our top watch face designers i think a lot of people are impressed with what matteo dini has done some of the other names that you had mentioned x nine i actually am doing a live chat with john from x nine studio tomorrow so we're going to be doing a live chat and i'll be talking to him about theme designing and watch faces signing he's also another past winter with the galaxy store awards let's say you had mentioned infinity watch faces that's chris shomo he's an excellent designer he's actually the one who i first discovered when i learned about galaxy watch designer at the time, which is now galaxy watch studio so, you know when i first learned about chris and what he was doing with galaxy watch, and let's see, you mentioned your rarity oh urarity yeah, he's got just amazing designs and if you have a chance to look at his videos, the work that he does with his videos is just outstanding is definitely someone that can inspire a lot of people tomas joscak 28 25 yes, uratity tony morelan 28 27 yet another guy? yeah so bergen is great he's an excellent designer again, one of the designers that has been there for a while, who does some very nice realistic watch faces so definitely some designers to go in and look for when you're looking to get inspired for creating watch faces so i have one more question for you when you're not designing watch faces what do you like to do for fun? tomas joscak 28 50 oh, fine and except designing watch faces, which is really relaxed for myself if i am looking for fans my buddy, i love to visiting sauna tony morelan 29 02 oh, asana yeah oh, nice that's a good time to relax good time to relax now, i also heard that you are the father of twin four-year olds is that correct? yes, correct good i'm sure you're looking for a lot of time to relax i can only anticipate that that would be a little crazy at times tomas joscak 29 23 now, and they have been my twins have been at the beginning of my business, actually, because i couldn't work only during day slept so we started to get actually tony morelan 29 33 oh, nice nice nice wonderful okay, tomas i absolutely appreciate you taking the time to sit down with me and record this podcast, tons of fun lots of great inspiration so keep up the great work and i'm looking forward to seeing what vienna studios puts out in the near future so thanks tomas joscak 29 48 thank you thanks outro 29 50 looking to start creating for samsung? download the latest tools to code your next app, or get software for designing apps without coding at all sell your apps to the world samsung galaxy store check out developer samsung com today and start your journey with samsung the pow! podcast is brought to you by the samsung developer program and produced by tony morelan
Learn Developers Podcast
docseason 2, episode 1 previous episode | episode index | next episode this is a transcript of one episode of the samsung developers podcast, hosted by and produced by tony morelan a listing of all podcast transcripts can be found here host tony morelan senior developer evangelist, samsung developers instagram - twitter - linkedin guest drazen stojcic urarity urarity links urarity galaxy store - galaxy store/urarity urarity facebook - facebook com/urarity watchfaces/ urarity instagram - instagram com/urarity watchfaces urarity twitter - twitter com/uraritywatch urarity youtube - youtube com/user/romulicstojcic drazen stojcic linkedin - linkedin com/in/drazen-stojcic drazen is the 2020 galaxy store award winner for best watch face collection not only do we talk about his rise to becoming one of the top watch face sellers on galaxy store, but also his fascinating career path and it all started when he became an award-wining author, after writing his first novel at the age of 16 listen download this episode topics covered galaxy watch studio for tizen galaxy store galaxy store badges social media photography videography animations sdc19 best of galaxy store awards transcript note transcripts are provided by an automated service and reviewed by the samsung developers web team inaccuracies from the transcription process do occur, so please refer to the audio if you are in doubt about the transcript tony morelan 00 01 hey, i'm tony morelan and this is pow!, the samsung developers podcast where we chat with innovators using samsung technologies, award winning app developers and designers, as well as insiders working on the latest samsung tools welcome to season two, episode one on today's show, i interviewed drazen stojcic, the super successful watch face designer behind the brand, urarity, drazen is the 2020 best of galaxy store award winner for best watch face collection not only do we talk about his rise to becoming one of the top watch face sellers on galaxy store, but also this fascinating career path and it all started when he became an award-winning author after writing his first novel at the age of 16 enjoy tony morelan 00 48 so i have to start by saying i am extremely excited to kick off the new season of the podcast with one of my absolute favorite designers drazen from urarity drazen stojcic 01 01 hi hi, tony thank you for having me tony morelan 01 04 yeah, excellent i'm so excited to have you on the show let me first start by asking who is drazen stojcic? drazen stojcic 01 13 so well, i guess i could say the basics you know, i'm 38 years old i'm from europe, from croatia, and married and i've spent last four years designing watch faces for samsung devices and after a lifelong career in all sorts of media related stuff, i found myself in something that i really enjoy doing and it turned out i was pretty good at it and so now four years later, i'm i've received the award for the best watch face collection and is it's been like, you know, a crown after all that hard work and, and time and effort put into it tony morelan 02 07 so you're saying that if you started about four years ago, doing watch faces, that means you pretty much started at the beginning of this whole opportunity for designers to create watch faces for samsung so tell me like, how did you first learn about samsung wearables and, and then ultimately designing drazen stojcic 02 23 so i think it's a similar story with most early developers, you know, we are all a bit of gadget freaks and so i've had samsung, the very first samsung smartwatch was because i had a samsung phone as well and so when samsung made their first wearable, i was like all over it, you can customize it, you can do anything, it was just a device that could like measure your heart rate and stare at some very basic stuff, and had a camera on it correct and it had a camera on the wrist yes and you know, at that time, my whole life was around photography and so having, you know, a camera and a wristband that was like, awesome, you know, i just, i loved it and so when the new versions came out, obviously i was, i was upgrading and at some point, a friend of mine, who was my work colleague, actually mentioned, you know, you're pretty good at design and you all you have all this previous experience with i had some experience with designing mobile apps, for like 15 years ago, for before even android existed, you know, it was like, the very first touchscreen phones that showed up and i teamed up with a with a programmer, and we made a mobile keyboard and so i was doing the graphics and the design, and he was programming and so he knew all this because we talked about it and he said, you know, you have to watch you have the knowledge, why don't you try, you know, there's this cool software where you can just you don't need to know programming because i'm not a programmer and there's this cool software, you can download it and you can like make your own designs for your watch and so i downloaded the galaxy watch designer, and now it's a galaxy watch studio so and i loved it i loved it i within a week i had like, watch face ready, and i want to publish it yes it just started from that just you know, pure luck tony morelan 04 51 yeah, that's very similar to how i got my start i mean that you know, i attended this event at samsung where they you know, told everybody about gear watch designer yeah and came home that night and was so excited to be able to, in a sense, do programming without any coding so i could use all my graphic design skills, but yet create this, you know, interactive watch phase i mean, it's just, yeah, i bought in real quickly to it so i know that you've had quite the journey to get to the point where you are now as a watch face, designers doing lots of different, you know, jobs, but all within the same sort of family of everything related around media well, yeah so tell me how you got your start indesign drazen stojcic 05 37 so i guess i've always liked you know, even as a kid, i had like, these artistic tendencies so i would like draw a lot and i would paint and i would write and do all sorts of stuff, you know and so my first experiences were basically with computers, you know, and those were computers where you didn't even have an os on them i come from croatia, which went through an armed conflict war in the 90s and i was just a kid at that time, but after the war, my elementary school, got to the nation in, in computers, so none of the teachers had any experience with that and us kids obviously, never even seen a computer at that point and so i think it was like a un donation or some sort of a charity program and so yeah, and so they set up a classroom for us, that was like 15, or 20 of computers, and a teacher from arts and crafts was assigned to do something useful with those computers and he was an older gentleman who didn't know english, who didn't know it was just the oh, you figured this out and so he asked kids in the school, it was anybody interested and i always was fascinated by technology i think it was like four kids from the whole school that signed up for this that was like, first contact with, with computers and everything i did later on was, in some sense connected to it you know, i when i got my first home computer, i was just like, drawing stuff, all the all the time, i was just like learning software, sketching, stuff, making, i don't know, school, newspapers, stuff like that, you know, everything was, you know, one thing and then the next thing and so, after high school, i was into music at that time and so i ended up being on local radio station yeah and so because the station was part of like, a network that had newspaper and radio and, and a tv station, i spent next couple of years moving from one to the next and so i moved from the radio where i worked as a as a dj and tony morelan 08 07 so a dj, spinning music i mean, yeah, drazen stojcic 08 10 yeah that's great yeah, i actually really did some, like, nightclubs stuff so i would work during the day on the radio station and at night, i will be working like cocktail bars and really, tony morelan 08 22 dj drazen drazen stojcic 08 26 yeah, and so and, you know, this is all time before internet so there's no internet at this point and so obviously, being in a radio station gets you new music, and then you can, you know, use that music to put on parties and so, yeah, so it's like, using one job to make money on the side and so, and then i moved to the newspapers where i worked as a as a journalist, because i always enjoyed writing tony morelan 08 58 and i think i heard that you actually received an award when you were much younger for you you actually wrote, yeah, drazen stojcic 09 07 yeah, i wrote a novel when i was 16, actually and i, when i was 17, i got two major prizes for best first novel in croatia that's great from like, really a respected, you know, people in croatia who are basically in our top of the crops and so that was also a push that led me into journalism eventually, right and, and during my journalist days, i had a situation where we were a photographer that was supposed to cover an event with me, he couldn't make it and there was no one else and because at that time, people from my newspapers already knew that i was like into computers, and i have a like, always chasing something and so my editor said, you know, we just got these funny new digital cameras, maybe you could pick one up and just take two shots, it'll be fine for the print, you know, just try to keep people in frame, you know, it was and so that was my first experience with digital photography and i was instantly in love with that and so, actually, that day, i would always ask that i take my own shots and basically, i would, i would take photos of what i'm supposed to do, and i wouldn't, then i would spend the rest of the day shooting like, anything i could find and i would, i would intentionally only leave some of the photos that i thought were good i would leave them on the cart for photo editors so they can see that tony morelan 10 55 they can see your work that's great yeah, drazen stojcic 10 56 exactly and so after a while, i got a call from the from the photography editor and it was all like this transitional period where they were moving away from film and classic film cameras into digital yes and so he said, you know, are you? are you leaving these photos on the cards? because i kind of liked them? and i said, yeah, well, you know, i liked this thing you know, this digital photography seems to suit me and within a month, i wasn't working as a journalist anymore i just really, yeah, i just moved on to photography overnight wow and so my photography work, then, you know, i learned a lot of stuff from the, from the more experienced photographers there but i was also able to get on this train really early of, of this digital photography that was just coming in a lot of older photographers had a problem with this, they couldn't adapt so well so, so quickly, you know, it required working with software and all of that stuff that i basically was used to and so a few years later, i, i partnered up with a very senior and well-respected photographer here in my town and he had a big production company that was basically multimedia we had like a video cruise, we had cgi designers, we had sound crews, we had, you know, full multimedia production along with design and so i did basically the same thing i did before i did here so i would move from one to next position and i just kind of learned along the way, too, i have no formal education in either of these things yeah so it's all just learning from other people and learning on your own trying to, you know, get something new, i had a desire to express myself and so it was always something media related, and now share all of these things from the past and especially i don't know, there's a lot of, in my past a lot of work with marketing so working with marketing companies with like, production teams, and you'll learn what clients want, how they think how all of this kind of came together and lead into, into urarity tony morelan 13 34 yes, yeah, that's, that's, it's amazing i mean, i have to say, i'm extremely surprised to hear that you say that you don't have formal training yeah, but hearing about the experiences, all of the years, and all these different areas that you've, you know, had an opportunity to work in, it really shows because i think that's where you urarity stands out from many of the other watch face developers, it's all of the other assets that are required to be successful you know, when you see your videos in your photography, you can tell that someone with excellent expertise is putting this together, because it's not just a computer rendition or a 3d model that's rotating i mean, you actually are taking a camera on a dolly and doing rotation with it and to me, that's what really stands out because that's pretty unique to see from a from a developer, you know, marketing on samsung platform it gives it such a realness, you know, where you actually see the product and it gives confidence when you're thinking about it, should i make a purchase? so i think that is probably one of the biggest factors for your success when i see the work that you do i agree and that's basically the whole logic i started doing this right from the beginning because drazen stojcic 14 51 i kind of knew that it wasn't enough to make just the watch face itself look good so everything else to look at the same level, yeah, so, and obviously over the couple of last years i've, i've, i've advanced further and my, my designs have become better and my marketing materials as well but the core idea is still the same, you know, if you make, you can make the best watch face ever yeah, but if your presentations is not good, it's just the customers won't get it tony morelan 15 30 exactly so i understand that you've already is not just draws in that you actually have partnered with someone who has expertise in, in these areas of like social media and marketing and whatnot, that's helping you so tell me a little bit about the other person that is involved with, with the urarity success drazen stojcic 15 51 so at first, it was just me and you know, for probably first two years, i did all of this stuff on my own but then, as i advanced and as i got more and more customers and more and more of this production behind this, i realized that i needed help and my brothers do dumb, ugly he just came fresh out of college that had marketing as one of the major classes in it and so he knew about my watch faces, and he would frequently helped me he and i came up with the name the urarity tony morelan 16 35 yeah, so tell me that tell me the history that you came up with that name drazen stojcic 16 38 yeah so because my brother has this knack, for, for coming up with funny names for stuff and so we would frequently do that for like, all sorts of statements will make up names for the products or for name for names for companies or find, you know, funny word plays and stuff like that, when i figured out that i needed the brand, and i couldn't just, you know, be just me, it needed a brand name and so we're just talking about this and so a lot of people think that your urarity is basically you and urarity, which it is but the main idea behind it is basically because the first four letters of the word urarity actually mean watchmaker in creation tony morelan 17 29 that is great drazen stojcic 17 31 yeah, so we started from that, you know, it was like, because even today, you could see like these shops around the town that had like this art so it was just, you know, we're just making fun and your charity just popped up somewhere, because i knew it would work well in english although it is a bit of a tongue twister i still liked how it sounded and how it looked and i like this double meaning because it worked in, in our language as well and so he and i came up with this name and then over time, he just kind of started helping me more and more and at some point, i said, okay, now, i think you could probably handle a lot of this stuff better than me, because you actually do have an education process and so my brother has been helping me ever since he's basically the whole marketing and customer support and all of that is his work so i'm purely doing the creative stuff tony morelan 18 39 that's great that's great yeah, it gives you an opportunity to really focus on your expertise and, and allow him to focus on his expertise so is your urarity, pretty much your full-time job drazen stojcic 18 51 yeah, it has become over time for a long period i also did a lot of side jobs, but the pandemic changed a lot of that because this is a job that you can do from the comfort and safety of your home yes, and my side jobs that were mostly photography related basically, there weren't there anymore when all of this started and so for me, it was like the perfect the perfect job to do during these times where you had to stay at home a lot either i've actually used the opportunity to do a lot of the stuff that i would previously maybe put off so i did a lot of housekeeping you know in the store, cleaned up the descriptions and all that stuff that usually just you know, you don't have enough time to do all of that and i kind of fine tune to everything that we did so for us it's been a positive effect in that sense tony morelan 20 00 yeah, no, that's, that's, that's great i mean, there has been a lot of challenges during this past year for many people on all different areas, i will say you are not the first person who has said that, you know, this opportunity that samsung has provided to developers, you know, really the, you know, indie designers like yourself, you can still continue to work from your job where it is safe so that's, that's great absolutely and i mean, even before this, having the opportunity to work from home has been quite a refreshing change for me, because a lot of the work i did before, involved, a lot of traveling a lot of staying out of home, which is, you know, it's great fun for a drazen stojcic 20 42 while but then as you get older and you need, you get a wife and a house and all of a dog and all of that, of course, you prefer staying at home, it's not as a lot of people are thinking i don't want to stay at home no, i'm fine i'm not complaining tony morelan 21 05 so yeah, back when we were allowed to travel, that's actually when i first met you, because you came out to san jose and attended our conference sdc 19 so it was great to actually meet you in person, i was very aware of your work prior to that so when i actually got to put a face to the to the brand, you were already that was a great moment for me, i was honored to meet you so tell me about that what was that experience like for you to come out to san jose and get to actually see the samsung people in person and also be at the conference? drazen stojcic 21 35 i think it was probably the biggest milestone for me, it changed so much in terms of perspective of what this whole thing is about because up until that point, i would have contacts with people from samsung and from other developers as well and i still do, but you know, actually deciding to get on a plane and fly on to another side of the world, and then be a part of this great event and the whole buzz and all of these people from all over the world, it was just eye opening for me because as many developers or better to say designers in in galaxy store i don't have a lot of experience with these tech conferences and so, you know, coming to san jose meeting people from samsung meeting, meeting other developers having a talk with them, and just exchanging, you know, opinions and ideas and i loved it that that's it you know, i wanted to do this for real now yeah, i think that was the point where it shifted in my head that, okay, this is serious stuff and there's a great support from samsung, which it always was there but just putting a face to the name of all these various contexts they had, it just made all the difference tony morelan 23 02 and i have to say one of the highlights for me was sitting in a room with who i thought were the rock stars of the designers i mean, here i was, you know, chatting with you and next year was matteo dini and then bergen, tomas from vienna studios and i'm like, oh, my gosh, man these are the designers that are just making incredible watch faces on the store and we're all in this one room together, just you know, having great conversations so it was wonderful to be able to meet face to face with many of these top designers drazen stojcic 23 36 absolutely and i especially enjoyed talking with you i think it was one of the best conversations i had there just i think we clicked really early on and definitely you have two perspectives on the on the whole thing, you're started as a designer, and now you're in samsung, so you can kind of relate better to the stuff that we're talking about tony morelan 24 00 exactly yeah, that was one of the main reasons why i took the position and i think one of the main reasons i got the job was that samsung really wanted to have someone with that voice internally so that i could be the liaison between taking the suggestions and the challenges that the designers have and trying to give a route to solving some of those issues and making the platform even better exactly unfortunately this year, we couldn't have the conference because of the pandemic as many people know we did an online award show and i was absolutely honored to be a part of the team that awarded you the best watch face collection and you know without a doubt, your collection just is amazing you know i still i look at the animated watch faces you do i see the videos that you put behind your watch faces as far as the project goes, and you are clearly deserving of this top honor so tell me, how did you first learn that you were winning this award from samsung? drazen stojcic 25 10 okay, so first of all, it was really an awesome thing you know, i was just blown away by the fact that i got the award i never, i never really expected it, when i started making watch faces that will end up in me getting some sort of an award for this or making all of this success that that has happened in the past years, actually, that how i found out was because i got this strange email that said, you know, just to notice that there will be an online event at this time and date and let's stay in touch i mentioned this to matteo dini, you know, did you see there's going to be an online event? and, you know, he said, i didn't get any email about this she was the winner last year, she said to me, oh, wait, i know what this is you probably won an award so i basically found out about this from a matteo tony morelan 26 18 that's funny that's funny i want to kind of go back a little bit and let's talk about your actual workflow when it comes to designing watch faces what is the first thing you do? are you grabbing a pencil and a piece of paper and starting to sketch? do you just dive right into the computer? drazen stojcic 26 34 i think it really depends sometimes i will just get an idea from a totally random spot like one of my most successful watch faces, the inspiration for it came from the blue glow around an elevator button that i just liked tony morelan 26 55 and which watch face says that drazen stojcic 26 57 it was the pulse series yes, yeah and so i was in this elevator and he was like some hotel and then there was this button that was beautifully glowing, like pulsating blue and i was just looking at it and i loved it and so i wanted to use that glow and have the similar effect on a watch that i came home and i started i started up after effects and i made this blue ring that was glowing, but it just wasn't working, you know and so i started playing with motion and then i figured out that it'd be cool if it looked like it was coming out of the screen like it was slowly moving out to the edges and so i had this thing, and there were no watch hands, no numbers, and nothing else, just this pulsing thing and i loved it tony morelan 27 52 so you've created this glowing, really cool animation what's the next step? i mean, you've got to be able to turn this into a watch face so are you just playing around with different shapes to create the you know the form? drazen stojcic 28 05 because most of our watch faces are animated, i would do the animations and then i would just grab one on screen from the animation series and then i would start like playing in in just pure to the trying to figure out what can i do? where could i put some of this simple code stuff going to work one with another? where are the watch hands going to be? is this going to be a digital watch face? or an analog watch face? is it going to have like a lot of info or not a lot of info and so it's going back and forth so i would sometimes start with an animation and then edit it 15 times over until everything fits one within another and it's just it's really a tedious process once you start complicating things with animations and animations do complicate things is immensely you know, i sometimes envy designers that can make really awesome watch faces they're not animated, because i don't know how to do that so anyway, that's funny yeah, yeah and it's also funny when they tell me oh, you can make all these awesome animations and i'm thinking yeah, but you don't have to make them and you still make us and watch faces tony morelan 29 26 at that point, are you using illustrator or photoshop? drazen stojcic 29 29 yeah, i use a lot of software so i will use basically the whole adobe package so everything from, you know, premiere photoshop, illustrator, and i also use 3d software like cinema 4d or even sketchup for some of this stuff you know, if i just want to make a quick idea to see how it works it's just a whole bunch of stuff you know? various software's that i'm used to, from before, you know, there used to from my previous work so it's not like one thing, you know, i'm sure people could do just fine using probably one serious graphics software but because of the animations, it's just not enough you need to have like all this other stuff, too tony morelan 30 20 of course, just to mention, we both are very familiar with tomas just checked from vienna studios, still astounds me and if you haven't listened to this podcast, go back and listen to it i'll let you in on a little secret tomas uses powerpoint to create his design so when i hear you talk about, you know, all the complexity of creating these animations, and you know, truthfully, you know, you have to become somewhat of a pro with photoshop and illustrator really to leverage all the tools in there yeah, to hear that tomas uses powerpoint, i know that you were surprised as i was drazen stojcic 30 51 i was blown away i met tim us for the first time at sdc and, and we had a really nice time talking and so naturally, we came to the, to this talk about software, and you know, and he said, you're never going to guess what i'm using to make my watch faces i was thinking, maybe he's using like, i don't know, some game or something like that some of that free graphics software or something more simple and so when he said, powerpoint, it blew me away because and this is what i was talking about so there are developers, they can make really awesome successful watch faces with software that wasn't even intended for this year and, and they can have great success yeah, so it's, it's just so awesome and i have huge respect for what he does and, and i totally recommend also listening to that podcast it was so cool tony morelan 31 53 i will say one thing that you guys have in common would be the photography after you've created the watch face so just like yourself, tomas is doing real video recording of his watch faces you can see his gloved hands come on to screen and do all the tapping interaction on his face so again, it's extremely important to find your unique way to showcase your work and both you and in tomas have done that drazen stojcic 32 23 yeah, yeah tomas especially with in because he, he is a he makes premium, like high end premium watch faces that are basically like for, for general public and so him using the gloves and having all these nice backdrops and everything it just sort of fits within the brand and with the whole identity and everything that he does and so i when i start making videos, and i started right from the get go, because i realized that people needed to see this thing in action because it was animated i also wanted to set up like some of the basic standards, how i'm going to do this, what's going to be the approach and so most of my videos are like have colorful lighting, and a lot of motion they're always in motion i don't make static videos because that's also something i wanted to emphasize the animations give a lot of motion to the watch faces and so the videos are kind of like even more emphasizing that there's this you just need to figure out what is the main point what are you trying to do with your designs and then have that same idea taken from the watch face to the screenshots to your app description, to your videos to your online social media it just all needs to tie into one nice bow and then it works tony morelan 34 02 definitely i would say another thing that really stands out for me when i think of the brand urarity is color you do not shy away from color i can tell that you must spend a great amount of time thinking about color i know we're on a podcast and you can only hear us at this moment but i can actually see you and right now your background in your room is changing in color you must have some sort of led lighting the chest tell me about color and how important it is to you because i can tell it is a big factor drazen stojcic 34 34 yeah, it is it is and actually you know funny things you notice about the background because i would frequently set up my room lights to go with the with the colors on the of the watch face that i'm working on that's great or sometimes i will i will just like use these i have these cool led lights that you can customize and all that remotely and sometimes i will just like mix these colors in real life and just see what's, what fits you know what works? and a lot of it helps me having experience within photography, you learn what colors work one with another? how brightness functions, how do we perceive brightness on a screen, it's kind of like, when you're framing the shot for that photograph it's not that different from setting up various elements on the screen, because you're still trying to get that golden ratio or intuitively program to like certain shapes and certain forms and certain ratios, and certain colors as well yes and so depending on the mood, i guess i'm trying to make or the effect that i'm trying to get, i will use a lot of color, or i will use muted colors and some sometimes i don't think a lot of people notice it, but not all of my watch phases have like black backgrounds, although they look like they do, they have a slight tint, and it can be just the tiniest amount of maybe blue or green it and, and for me, it makes all the difference i spend huge amounts of time with color i don't stop until i'm perfectly satisfied and now having my brother in all of this a lot of the times i you know, i will be happy and he will say i'm not so sure i think you need to make like, i think you need to change this and then i was like spend another week changing colors so it's a long process it's not yeah, you know, you don't do it in one night tony morelan 36 42 i loved hearing what you said just about black that that truthfully, black is not just black, you can have warm black, you can have cold black and so i often do that where i'll use the color picker in photoshop and you know, if i've done my design, i'll try and find the sort of the feel of the of the face the you know, what's the tone of it and i'll sample that and then within color picker, i'll go down to the to the almost to black, but it has just a little bit of hint of that yeah, whether it's like an orange or a blue or something because that then like you said, it ties in that background, that the foundation of the watch face still picks up what feels like that ambient lighting from the other elements exactly drazen stojcic 37 25 that's exactly what i'm talking about i take a lot of time perfecting my watch faces and that's why i guess that's why i don't make a lot of them you know, i'm not like this super producer i didn't make like 100 watch faces a year? yeah, it's always maybe 10 or 12, or 15 tony morelan 37 48 so how many total? would you say you have available on the store? drazen stojcic 37 51 yeah, so at the moment, i think we have around 100 or 110 okay, i've made a lot more actually, in these four years, especially in the beginning, i would make a lot, a lot of i think a lot of developers go through this, they will just churn out just bump, bump, bump but after a while you see that? it's just it doesn't make sense it's very few hold backs, you know, let it sit for a while get everything polished to the very last detail and then once you're totally satisfied, then you publish yeah and so as time goes on, i'm more focused on making the watch faces as perfect as they can be, rather than getting them out as quickly as possible tony morelan 38 41 yeah and i think that also what comes into play is the support that comes around that watch face so what you have to do from a marketing standpoint, all of the different, you know, elements that are key to successfully marketing your watch face if you have hundreds and hundreds, it's hard to maintain that this way it sounds like you can focus on you know, a smaller collection, but still be able to then put a lot of time into the marketing drazen stojcic 39 05 side of things exactly the more watch faces you have the bigger problem you have down the road when it comes time to update and eventually does so i really think that this is a like a situation where you need to think about not the quantity but rather the quality because in the end, the customers also recognize this, you know, if they see you made 300 watch phases in a year and the year has 365 days, you know you're not sending the right message and i will frequently go and be very critical of my own work and so after a while i see a bunch of mistakes i did or i'm not totally satisfied with some of my older work and i will just remove it i will just take it, take it down, clean up the portfolio, polish it so when a customer comes, you know, they only see the very best, or at least the very best for this moment that i added i mean, you know, of course, yeah tony morelan 40 08 so would you mind sharing? how many downloads total? does he already have? drazen stojcic 40 15 so we're close to 700,000 downloads now, wow, stretched over a period of four years and a large part of this was paid watch faces, or, you know, i don't know, the exact percent, which was, some of them were free and will frequently use free watch faces to, to promote, or other things that will, for example, in terms of marketing strategies will frequently do like, buy one, get one? yes and stuff like that, you know, where a customer still gets a free watch face but, you know, we also turn them into a painting into a paying customer as well tony morelan 41 05 so let me ask you, how do you approach that? does the customer have to show proof of purchase? what's your, what's your approach to that? drazen stojcic 41 13 so we asked them to show us a screenshot of from their, from this store, or sometimes will like, be fine if they can just show a photo of their watch, with our watch face on it, or things like that, you know, any proof is fine we're not really playing detectives here or anything yeah so on one hand, we want to give something for free on another hand and a lot of these customers are our returning customers, because they, they are familiar with our watch faces and with our system, and we know a lot of them over the years, there's really been customers that have supported us right from the very start tony morelan 41 58 what's your approach with marketing on social? are you doing much in the way of that? drazen stojcic 42 03 when i started with watch faces, my main kind of venue was youtube, because of the animations and all of that, i just needed a video service that could, you know, show the watch faces in action so i was building up this youtube channel for a long time and then after a while, i also started doing facebook and instagram but it takes time, it really does and i didn't really realize how much it can be useful until my brother took over and start doing it like for real sure you know, he had only this one thing to focus on for example, our youtube channel is close to 2 million views now and we only have our watch face videos so that does kind of tell you a lot, there's a lot of things that you can do to promote your watch faces and so over time, we are also we've also teamed up with some of the more popular tech channels or people who are doing watch face reviews, or who have an interest in this and so we would team up with them, have them promote some of our work, give some of coupons for free sure, something like that some discount stuff like that and facebook has also been very good for us instagram, and, you know, i my brother does so much stuff that some of it even i don't know, you know, he's like, doing stuff on reddit, on the forums tick tock, really are the place yeah, i really don't mess into this so i gave him like free rein to do as he thinks because obviously, this is something that he does and knows better than, than me tony morelan 44 06 yeah okay excellent and i'm sure across all of this, you're leveraging galaxy store badges is that correct? drazen stojcic 44 12 yeah, absolutely you know, we, we were actually a part of the galaxy badge pilot program and so quickly, we, we kind of got this additional step into our workflow so we will use both individual badges for like certain watch faces, but we are also frequently using our, like, our main badge that leads to our whole portfolio because and as you mentioned, you know, we i think we have a strong portfolio so sometimes the first thing they see is the whole layout, everything we've done so and it's been very useful in terms of, you know, following the clicks and all of that the statistics and there's a lot of science in this, i guess it's very interesting when you start analyzing the data that you can get from these badges and clicks and all and see what works what doesn't yeah, yeah because obviously you're trying to maximize the effect, you're not going to spend time or, or money or effort into something that doesn't work tony morelan 45 19 yeah, definitely so tell me what is in the future for your entity? is there anything that we can anticipate? drazen stojcic 45 29 well, so as i mentioned before, we had a lot of success with our mechanical watch faces that have these highly customizable appearances and so for the last couple of months, i've been toying with this idea of trying to do the same thing, but with digital watch faces and getting that same wow effect for customers that, you know, oh, sorry yeah right, great so just today, i got my new the 21 ultra tony morelan 46 20 oh, did you okay, drazen stojcic 46 21 yeah, yeah, i just arrived this morning and so i, like 10 minutes before we started this, i had to transfer all of the data and settings from my old phone, of course, and one of the things that it transferred was also the alarms so i switched off the alarm at the old phone, but i forgot about the new one so that's why i went off tony morelan 46 47 that's too funny right so you were talking about in the future, doing some animations with digital? yeah, drazen stojcic 46 53 yeah so i mentioned before that we had huge success with our mechanical watch faces that that had really customizable appearances and so for the last couple of months, i've been playing with this idea of repeating that same thing, but with digital watch faces and it's, it may seem like it's a simple transition, but actually, it's not and it has its own unique challenges, because making digital watch faces is completely different idea behind it and different visuals, and it just needs a different approach and so i'm kind of messing with that i'm trying to find the best thing that that i think it will be like good first watch face to try and repeat that same success sure tony morelan 47 44 that's exciting to hear because i would love to see that your urarity face in a in a digital form so super excited to know that we can anticipate that so before we close off this interview, you know, i have to say your english is amazing you're from croatia, but you speak perfect english i know, there's a little story behind how you learn to speak english can you share that? drazen stojcic 48 07 yeah, sure so i mentioned before, you know, we had this war thing here when i was a kid and so during the war, it's not that different from the pandemic, you know, yeah, you spend a lot of time indoors, you know, you can go out, you can play your little kid and so it just coincided with this period where we got like, first cable tv and so before that, there was like, three channels all in one language and that was it and then, you know, we got like these cool things like cnn and cartoon network and all of that stuff and i didn't know a word of english other than, you know, seeing some of the movies and stuff like that and so i was just like, i would watch hours and hours of this and a cool thing was that it was subtitled so yeah and so just, you know, listening to the words and seeing the translation below, it just helps so much, you know, with the meaning and with the phrases and with the correct pronunciation and all of that stuff and then later on came to computers and with the computers, eventually there came a period where i did a little bit of online gaming, and then you would talk to people from all over the world and then you just hit too, you know, you got to start speaking and i would frequently talk to people from the us or from england, or even people from other parts of the world and you know, english was always something i enjoyed, and i just fit so perfectly and because i travel a lot, it's also proven to be really useful for me yeah, of course tony morelan 49 56 so what you're saying is that you learned english by watching ren and stimpy? drazen stojcic 50 01 yeah, pretty much that's pretty much tony morelan 50 04 that's great hey drazen, it’s been excellent to have you on the podcast thank you so much for joining me and much luck in the new year drazen stojcic 50 13 thank you for having me and just you know, i'm very, very happy and honored to be on the podcast i always enjoy talking to you and i hope that this year sdc will be possible and that we will meet in person and see the other developers as well, you know, i really missed seeing them last year tony morelan 50 37 yeah, no, it'll be great to get everybody back together exactly excellent all right well, thanks, drazen drazen stojcic 50 43 thank you, tony outro 50 44 looking to start creating for samsung download the latest tools to code your next app, or get software for designing apps without coding at all sell your apps to the world on the samsung galaxy store check out developer samsung com today and start your journey with samsung tony morelan 51 00 the pow! podcast is brought to you by the samsung developer program and produced by tony morelan
Learn Developers Podcast
docseason 2, episode 6 previous episode | episode index | next episode this is a transcript of one episode of the samsung developers podcast, hosted by and produced by tony morelan a listing of all podcast transcripts can be found here host tony morelan senior developer evangelist, samsung developers instagram - twitter - linkedin guests samsung internet advocacy team samsung internet dan appelquist, director of developer advocacy, samsung laura morinigo, developer advocate, samsung lola odelola, developer advocate, samsung ada rose cannon, developer advocate, samsung kevin picchi, developer advocate, samsung listen download this episode topics covered the benefits of samsung internet browser web standards and user experiences foldables and responsive design privacy and security ar/vr augmented reality / virtual reality android developers immersive web weekly 5g tours w3c helpful links samsung internet website samsung internet blog samsung internet meetup twitter – samsung internet developer advocacy transcript note transcripts are provided by an automated service and reviewed by the samsung developers web team inaccuracies from the transcription process do occur, so please refer to the audio if you are in doubt about the transcript tony morelan 00 01 hey, i'm tony morelan and this is pow, the samsung developers podcast where we chat with innovators using samsung technologies, award winning app developers and designers, as well as insiders working on the latest samsung tools welcome to season two, episode six on today's show, i'm joined again by dan appelquist from samsung internet but along with dan this time will be several of the developer advocates that work with dan that help developers build for the samsung internet browser during our chat, we'll talk with experts on building responsive web experiences for foldable devices, privacy and security on the web, and exciting new technologies related to web xr in the samsung internet browser enjoy hey, dan, welcome back to the podcast dan appelquist 00 48 great to be back thanks for having me back tony morelan 00 51 yeah, so i've already asked who is dan appelquist on the earlier episode but for those that don't know, you are the director of developer advocacy for samsung internet and i would highly recommend that you go back and listen to our episode from season one dan appelquist 01 05 it was great i loved doing that tony morelan 01 08 yeah so last season, we had you on the podcast, we talked about the samsung internet browser web standards, the importance of privacy and security in things like progressive web apps, dan appelquist 01 18 right and you'll probably hear some of the same things that you heard last year but hopefully, i'm going to give you something new as well tony morelan 01 27 in this new episode, though, i understand that you actually have some of your few of your experts from your team that are going to join us and give us a deeper understanding of samsung internet, as well as some new and exciting topics correct dan appelquist 01 37 that's right, developer advocacy for us as a team effort so i'm really excited to have the team here talking about the different areas of expertise that they're that they're working in, and the different technologies that they're playing a part in tony morelan 01 50 for new listeners let me ask again, what is samsung internet dan appelquist 01 55 so samsung internet is a browser, it's a web browser, it's a browser, that samsung ship on all android devices so if you have any kind of android device from samsung, your default browser is going to be samsung internet we're the purple planet that you might see on any samsung android device we are also available on other devices besides samsung devices so you can actually download us from the play store, you can download us from the galaxy store as well so that's pretty exciting because it means for developers especially it means that you actually don't have to have a samsung device in order, you know, we certainly encourage you to have a samsung device but if you don't have a samsung device, you can still load and test your website in samsung internet, which is definitely something that we suggest you do tony morelan 02 49 so what does samsung have a browser in the first place? dan appelquist 02 52 well, i think it comes back to the question of why do we have multiple browsers the web is enriched and is in continues to evolve because we have a dynamic in the web where users can choose people can choose which browser they want to use the web with and they can make that choice based on what they perceive to be the browser that gives them the best user experience the best features, you can access the same websites with all the browsers, that's the idea we'd never want to see a web where you go to a website, and it says, can only be accessed in google chrome or can only be accessed in microsoft edge or can only be accepted samsung internet, that would not be a good web to live in so when it comes to interoperability, the web is extremely interoperability for the web is extremely important however, it's at the level of all the features on top of the web browser that helps you to experience the web, where web browsers differentiate and compete and that's that is a really important dynamic because it helps the web to grow we've seen in the past how when one browser dominates the entire web innovation on the web stagnates and we never want to see those days return again, that was early 2000s when i he was like the single i think that 90% market share or something like that so strategically, we're pretty certain that having multiple browsers out there and having this dynamic and this conversation about what the best features are, is really important for the web, and it's really important for people who are using the web at the end of the day tony morelan 04 39 yeah, yeah, definitely i think that sort of competition is what helps, you know, drive these companies to come up with new and innovative ways to improve the technology absolutely so um, so let's talk about the chromium project so i understand that samsung internet is based on chromium chromium is the google led open source browser project to build a safer, faster more stable way for internet users to experience the web, correct? dan appelquist 05 04 that's correct yeah so i mean, google chrome is based on chromium there are lots of other browsers that are also based on chromium so microsoft edge is based on chromium samsung internet is based on chromium there are a lot of other browsers that are based on chromium brave is a great browser for desktop that is based on chromium that has a real strong focus on privacy and vivaldi is another one that is, again, they have a focus on serving developers on desktop so there's a real good ecosystem of chromium-based browsers out there and we're very happy to be one of the most used, if not the most, i think we are the most used chromium browser out there besides chrome well, so as for what our role is, in the chromium project, we definitely take the basic chromium build and we, we put samsung internet on top of that, however, we are also contributing back into the chromium project so we're, we're a strong contributor into the open source chromium project and we also take the chromium project, and we build samsung internet on top of it, which means building a lot of our own user interface on a lot of our own features and some of those features are the things that we're going to talk about today so what's tony morelan 06 26 the role of the developer advocacy team? dan appelquist 06 29 so we have a small team, we are based in london, what we do is, we talk to developers, we blog, we write code, we are at heart developers, who are technologists, who know how to speak developer because we are developers and we all have experience building production websites, production code and we also are, so we're out there, we're communicating but we're also listening and part of our role is to listen to the developer community channel the feedback from the developer community back into our engineering group we're very adamant that developer advocacy is an engineering effort we work most closely with our engineering team, both in seoul and in the us and we also play a role when it comes to internet standards or web standards so a number of us are playing leadership roles in different w three c working groups, w three c is the web standards organization, the world wide web consortium, which was founded by tim berners lee, i co-chair something called the technical architecture group there, which is like a review board for new web technologies ada, who you're going to hear from is the co-chair of the immersive web working group, which is working on web xr all the team members are playing some kind of role when it comes to web standards, which is important for us as well so having said all that, i'd like to first of all, introduce laura to the podcast, who's going to tell you more about what we're doing with foldables and with responsive design tony morelan 08 14 hey, laura, welcome to the podcast laura morinigo 08 16 thanks, tony how are you? tony morelan 08 18 very good very good so let me first ask what is your role at samsung? yeah, so laura morinigo 08 24 it's going to be two years that i'm part of the developer relations team so i'm a web developer advocate for samsung internet wonderful and tony morelan 08 33 you are based in london is that correct? laura morinigo 08 36 exactly in london, uk tony morelan 08 38 now, i will say that you don't sound like you have a british accent so where are you originally from? laura morinigo 08 43 really? i don't i'm originally from argentina yes, tony morelan 08 49 yes and i do know that you actually are working with my counterpart, diego lizarazo who speaks spanish as well you two are doing some webinars together is that correct? laura morinigo 09 00 yeah, exactly we're doing samsung and española that means samsung in spanish, where we do workshops, and things like that and actually, we're going to have something in june so stay tuned, guys nice tony morelan 09 13 looking forward to that so we're here to talk about foldable devices and samsung internet first, can you tell me what exactly is a foldable device? laura morinigo 09 21 well, yeah, full levels are devices in which the screen falls and you have an inch, and there are mainly two different physical form of factors so you have devices with a single flexible screen those are called seamless and devices with two screens, which seem and samsung lund two main devices which are seamless, the galaxy see sleep and then sec four, two what does this mean for developers? yes, so everything that is new for users is new for developers to because for develop first means new ways to create content with foldables, you have the chance to do multitasking, open more than one up at the same time and take advantage of the biggest screen it's like you have in the tablet inside your pocket so developers now you can create new ways to reach out to users, including from multimedia to different types of websites tony morelan 10 29 sure, sure now, i know that, obviously, when, when you've got your phone and you're holding it vertical, and then you rotate it sideways, you know, the content generally changes and that's called responsive designs yeah how is that related to foldable? laura morinigo 10 43 yeah, responsive design means that you create your web app, and the web app should be adapted to whatever the screen size of the device is so it doesn't matter if you open your web app into a smartphone, or in desktop, it should look good, right? so developers that are familiar with responsive design, they're not going to find any difficulties adjusting the content to this new devices because right now, foldables, as allows you to have more than one screen at the same time, that the size of the viewport change so you still need to apply responsive design, responsive design is a must that will help your web app, improve its seo and make it accessible and weight foldables is going to bring new functionalities that can be a productivity game changer and even make the tablet experience more portable, and even explore are the different features tony morelan 11 44 now i know with this new technology, it's got to be difficult to start developing for it without having standards so is that something that you're working on for foldables? laura morinigo 11 55 exactly so we know that it's really important for developers to have a certain kind of guidance, and for the users so they can have a really good user experience so in order to do that, we started exploring, which are the right approaches to develop web apps for foldable devices and in partnership with other companies like, for example, microsoft and intel, we started to take up and lead to thinking about responsive design, to take into consideration the different form factor of the screens of the device itself there is currently a standard working draft, that is called device poster, where we actually show to the developer, which is the current posture that the device is having, for example, if it's flip, if it's just in a vertical position also, the developer can take advantage of that information and create cool stuff, of course so what's the best way for developers to get started with developing for foldables? yes, so again, if you already have some experience with responsive design, you still need to apply the same rules to start developing web apps for foldables but besides that, you need to keep in mind that there are new things that you need to implement in order to do that you have some resources in our blog posts, we usually post most of the things that you have to keep in mind new rules or testing that we are doing with these new devices follow the standards that we are actually doing, be part of the conversation and samsung recently launched in its remote test lab, the test to actually test with a ritual foldable device so you can check your web app in that device tony morelan 13 54 so you actually don't have to own a foldable device exactly yeah it's an actual real device from what i understand you're just controlling it online exactly do you have any examples of use cases where developers are taking advantage of foldable devices? laura morinigo 14 09 yes, of course, as i mentioned before, if the user can take advantage of this device, for example, doing multitasking, and so on, developers can do and that's the idea one of the new ways that these phones take advantage to developers are for example, with games users are really excited when they have the chance to play their games in bigger screens so developers are trying to take approach of these advantage and make their web apps will fit into a better screen size to improve the user experience the other way that foldables are changing the game and is like an innovation is the dependent of the posture of, of the device, you can do different things for example, if you have a flip, and if it's in a flip mode, you can actually use your one on one screen to watch video, or even make calls and then you see in the in the in the front screen, the camera, and then in the other screen, you see the console so it's made a better use of currently, what you can do in your web app tony morelan 15 35 yeah, sounds like you can really turn your device into being much more versatile so are there any features coming in the near future that we can get excited about? laura morinigo 15 43 yeah, i think, you know, these initiative was started by samsung, and then other companies followed and i think that's a good case, because it means that it's not just a trend, i believe that these things related with responsive design, and hardware innovation are coming further so even when we talk about dual screen or the way that you sir can see their content so the very first part, i will say, let's see how their users react at these foldable devices, i think most of the feedback is really positive so that means that new things are coming tony morelan 16 28 so what's the best way for developers to follow you and learn more about what you have to offer related to samsung, canada and foldables? laura morinigo 16 36 great, so we usually write our blog posts in samsung internet blog posts, and you can follow us at in our social media samsung internet the same with medium, you can find our articles there in some of the events that we participate soon in my case, you can follow me on twitter, my twitter is paul, this is lada, okay tony morelan 17 01 and i will include all of the links to this in the show notes so you can easily get to those with laura, it was great to have you on the podcast and just wanted to say thanks for giving us a little insight into samsung internet and foldable devices laura morinigo 17 14 amazing and thanks for having me dan appelquist 17 16 by the way, tony, i'm also really excited about the work that laura has been doing with diego from your team around spanish language developer outreach that's a whole another area that we're very committed to in terms of reaching out to more to wider developer and the wider developer community tony morelan 17 35 yeah, that's one thing that i've realized too, is how well we are expanding our reach with not just you know, us or people based in, you know, in in the uk, but we really are reaching out to this global community of developers so it's great to see what diego and laura are doing as far as the spanish speaking developers dan appelquist 17 53 yeah, that's really good so so next, i would like to introduce lola from my team, who is focusing on privacy she has been, amongst other things, participating in the privacy community group in wcc, which is one of the forums in which we talk about emerging privacy technologies that are being added to the web and she's going to tell you a bit about what we're doing in samsung internet when it comes to privacy tony morelan 18 29 hello, and welcome to the podcast lola odelola 18 31 thank you for having me tony morelan 18 33 yeah so tell me what is your role at samsung lola odelola 18 36 so i am a web developer advocate on the samsung internet team got it tony morelan 18 41 so let's talk about privacy and samsung internet knowing that just about everything we do online can be tracked what privacy features are integrated into the samsung internet browser experience that gives users more control over their privacy and their data? lola odelola 18 53 yeah, so the samsung internet actually has a lot of features baked into it that kind of highlight its private nature, if you will one of those features is the privacy dashboard, which shows you the number of items that were blocked in a certain time period it shows you where that blocked backward reis directions or pop ups or apps that open you know, sometimes apps will just try and open the internet, it will show you if there are any apps like that, that it blocks as well so it's quite detailed actually in that regard and it also it also allows you to set settings about if you want warnings about malicious sites, or if you want to block automatic downloads, and is actually in this dashboard where you would set smart anti tracking too, which is another feature basically, smart anti tracking is samsung internet's way of giving the user the ability to say that you don't want to be tracked online so it automatically renews tracking cookies, which are way for basically websites to track your behavior and things online so if you want to switch that setting on, you can do that from the privacy and security dashboard and you can have it to always be in on you can have it to never been on or you can have it to secret mode only, which is like when you have incognito mode or, like when you're in incognito, you can switch off tracking in there, as well so yeah, tony morelan 20 27 so what about ads? how does, you know, i get a lot of ads that always pop up when i'm visiting websites lola odelola 20 33 yeah so the cool thing about the samsung internet browser is that we have the ability to download third party ad blockers and what makes that unique is that you don't have to go to the galaxy store or you have to go to any app store to download these ads because the app store is very heavily integrated into samsung internet, you can actually download them directly from the browser whereas with other internet browsers, you'd have to download from their tony morelan 21 04 app store equivalent sure, sure well, it makes it really easy, then lola odelola 21 07 yeah, straightforward tony morelan 21 09 how can developers learn more about web standards? no, that's pretty important when it comes to developing lola odelola 21 13 yeah, so like, as the web advocate team, we are very involved in web standards and developers can like get to know more about that by following our work, particularly work we're doing so like in the privacy community group, which is public and open to everybody where we discuss things like the global privacy control, it's not yet a web standard, but it's something being worked on by a host of different organizations, different people, from people from the new york times to the bbc, to, you know, lots of different orgs and the idea behind the global privacy control, is that you have a one stop shop to indicate your tracking preferences tony morelan 21 55 so does that mean that users really have the ability then to decide what they want to be tracked? and what they don't want to be tracked? lola odelola 22 03 i'm not quite what it means is that so you know how you go on a website? and it says, hey, do you want to be tracked? and you might say, no, and then you go to another website? and it says, hey, do you want to be tracked? and you're like, no and you know, if you answer no, for one place, you probably mean no, for, you know, everywhere, you probably don't want anywhere tracking you so what the global privacy control says is that instead of having all these different, you know, pop ups that come up, every time you visit a website, that is a one stop shop in your browser, that you can say, i do not want to be tracked, or i do not want my data sold, or whatever the case may be and when a website, when you visit a website, that website should read that signal from that control and then it shouldn't even show you that box, it should even show you that pop up of do you want to be tracked? because it should have already read it? got it? okay okay tony morelan 22 55 okay, great yeah so do any scripts run on the browser or the device? lola odelola 23 03 so no, which is? that's like, what gpc that's kind of what makes it cool that no scripts need to be run on the browser, or the device for this to work is going to be something that that is not going to be reliant on that, basically tony morelan 23 19 so is there any other work that you're supporting within web standards? lola odelola 23 22 yeah, i mean, there's loads and, you know, we don't have time to list them all off now but something else that we are really backing is the private click measurement, which is a way for users’ privacy to protected to be protected by removing tracking data, while still supporting click attribution across sites and it's basically saying, we are not going to allow cross site tracking, but we are still going to collect those clicks but there won't be any unique user data attached to those clicks so you won't be able to follow tony, through his browser history, essentially seen what he's clicked on but you will be able to know that somebody, person t has clicked on these links and you can collect analytics in an anonymous way that way tony morelan 24 11 so i've noticed this sometimes, like, i'll go to a website and next thing, you know, i go over to facebook and now i see that there's an ad that is related to you know, something previously, lola odelola 24 22 yeah, it's kind of similar so basically, what these ad networks do is say, you know, you've got ad network com has an ad on twitter, and you click that ad on twitter, and then you go over to facebook and accident, same ad network com has an ad on facebook, and you click that link, both of those clicks go to ad network com servers, and they are not able to build a profile of you based on the ads that you've clicked on to see what you're interested in so now when you visit you know these sites you do now get ads related to those like these, i mean, basically creates like this like mesh network of clicks around the internet of things you've touched around the internet and build a picture of who you are tony morelan 25 05 so in other words, what you're saying is with private click measurement, only the ad companies know that their ads been clicked, but they're not able to really follow you know, my journey on yeah, okay, gotcha okay so how can developers become more aware of web standards to influence the influence of their work? lola odelola 25 23 um, yeah so as i said before, the best way would be to get involved with wcc, and the web standards work that's happening there now, i will say there is a bit of an accessibility issue because it is member only for some for like the working groups and stuff and you have to pay to become a member however, there are public open free groups, you can be a part of such as the privacy community group, where a lot of web standards get discussed before then we've to work in groups so for example, gpc private clicker measurement are both currently being discussed in the privacy community group and there are other similar community groups as well tony morelan 26 02 right now it says something can we include the link to that in the in the show notes for this podcast? lola odelola 26 06 yes tony morelan 26 07 excellent we'll make sure to do that so what's the best way for developers to follow you and learn more about what you have to offer? yeah, so if anyone's interested, lola odelola 26 17 you can follow me on twitter, i am at lola delilah, and you can check out my writing on the samson internet blog and i think those are the best two places awesome well, tony morelan 26 27 lola, thank you very much for being on the podcast today and just wanted to say thanks for giving us insight into samsung internet and privacy lola odelola 26 34 thank you so much for having me, tony dan appelquist 26 36 it's been great, really great to hear from lola there about some of the things that we're doing to help keep users experience of the web more private so i'd like to introduce ada, from my team who's been focusing on web xr, she amongst other things, is the co-chair of the wcc immersive web working group where she's actually helping to build these standards and she does a lot of work when it on building demonstrators began conferences and events, etc to demonstrate the value and the exciting types of user experiences that can be built using these technologies joining ada, we also have kevin, who will be talking about 5g tours, which is a project that we participate in and we're very excited about putting webex r into action in that project tony morelan 27 34 ada kevin, welcome to the podcast ada rose cannon 27 37 thank you so much for having us it's great to be here kevin picchi 27 40 yeah nice nice being here tony morelan 27 44 so ada, let me first ask what is your role at samsung? ada rose cannon 27 48 so i'm a developer advocate for the web browser samsung internet i'm as well as that i'm also co-chair of the wcc immersive web groups these are the groups that deal with making web xr work in tony morelan 28 01 the browsers and you're located in the uk is that correct? ada rose cannon 28 06 yeah, based out of london and kevin, what about you? what tony morelan 28 08 is your role at samsung? kevin picchi 28 10 so i'm also developer advocates, and i'm also based in the uk office as a doctor but i do understand that tony morelan 28 17 at this moment, you actually are not in london, is that correct? kevin picchi 28 21 exactly i'm in switzerland right now, in doing this tony morelan 28 25 what exactly is web xr? ada rose cannon 28 28 so what they saw is a browser api that lets you access the sensors and displays of immersive hardware via immersive hardware, i mean, things like virtual reality headsets, or augmented reality headsets even your smartphone is an ar capable device, provided it's like a pretty recent one often, modern fast smartphones are able to use machine learning in order to work out your surroundings to do good augmented reality so what the axon lets you build a single experience that runs through the web browser that works on all of these different devices? do you tony morelan 29 04 have to install any applications or plugins or anything, ada rose cannon 29 09 it's great all the user needs to have installed as a browser sometimes if it's not already installed as a requirement by the browser, ar core or ar kit on smartphones may also need to be installed but usually it should just work without needing to install any additional things to save on desktop computers or on particular, headset-based browsers they will also have a built in so if you go to a website, it will show you a scene that's 3d, maybe web gl, you can then push a button and the auto immersive you're in vitality or enter the scene or an ar or let you put the 3d content over your environment and they'll just work with one click of a button you're immersed straightaway and that's really the power of web xr tony morelan 29 57 nice so tell me what would some of the benefits for webxr, ada rose cannon 30 01 there are many benefits from doing xr on the web so one of the really powerful abilities is that because you don't need to install anything from an app store, if you need to charge any money for what you're doing, you won't have an app store taking a cut and that's always just a huge benefit yeah on top of that, you're getting the instant engagement so for example, if i wanted someone to check out a demo i build, i would send someone a url, they would click the url, the page would load in a few seconds, and they push the button and they're able to view it in augmented reality on whatever ar hardware they were using whereas if i don't do a native app, they'd have to download it from an app store they'd have to install it, remember that it's installed, tap on it, open it up, request the permissions, and then they'd be able to enter ar and just to all that process, you end up losing a lot of users so not only is it a better experience for users, but as a as a product owner, you will also have much higher engagement and that's really incredibly powerful tony morelan 31 12 yeah, it sounds like it makes it really easy for people to experience ar and vr so let's talk about some of the equipment that that's needed so how does it support headsets ada rose cannon 31 22 so the headset at the most popular device you'll find today is probably the oculus quest two, which is the latest oculus quest device that came out over christmas it supports virtual reality through web xr out the box through the browser and they're one of the browsers that are really pushing the envelope when it comes to the web xr standards they're doing some really amazing work if you've got a headset, which you would tether to you to your computer, then you'd use it with chrome tony morelan 31 51 if you're worried about something as simple as google cardboard, oh, yes, it actually ada rose cannon 31 55 works out of the box if you have a cardboard headset, and you press enter vr on the phones, it will use the vr core part of android to deliver it through virtual reality, which you can just put into a cardboard headset so that will actually work really well and of course, if you're using any kind of smartphone, whether xr works great on chrome and samsung internet on android devices tony morelan 32 20 so the other day i came across this, what i thought was a really cool website, it was had little dinosaurs that i could click and get inside their cage and actually, you know, scroll around with them and see all the different angles is that a good example of webber? ada rose cannon 32 34 yeah, that's xrdinosaurs com this is a really fantastic example of everything web xr can do it's actually maintained by one of the editors of the webex r spec, which is really cool xr dinosaurs lets you experience the dinosaurs like flat 2d on a computer using normal web gl but if you have ar or vr equipment available, such as a smartphone, you can place the dinosaurs in your environment so if you open it up on a phone, you can push the button and you can view the dinosaur standing around in your living room, which is incredibly cool or if you have a vr headset, you can put it on, and then you will be inside the cage with the dinosaur and then you can walk around it this is a really powerful example of the of the ways where the xr can support multiple different modalities of xr with a single build like there's not running different code for each one, like much of the code for vr and ar is still the same you know, tony morelan 33 36 another example i just realized was, i was shopping for furniture the other day and was on this this website where i could select different lamps, chairs, tables, and actually walk into my living room and place these different items in my living room and turn around and see exactly what it would look like in this environment so again, good example of a web xr ada rose cannon 34 00 that's a perfect example this is the kind of thing that web xr really excels at so anything where it's really small, so where the user probably isn't dedicated enough to actually go out and download an app but they probably still be interested in ar, if it's available anyway, anything like shops or promotional materials, that kind of thing is great, because then they can see it, enjoy it and then when they leave, there's nothing left on their device to clutter them up so there's much less reservation when it comes to actually trying it out and that i think that's really powerful i think the technology used to build that particular demo you were talking about was google's model viewer project and model viewer is fantastic for stuff like store pages and product views you add the script to your page, and then you use the model view or tag to display a 3d model on the page which is already ready to go for augmented reality so if you couldn't get it 3d model of your product in the gltf model format, then it's ready to go and that's really powerful tony morelan 35 06 what i really enjoyed was the fact that there was nothing to download, i clicked a few buttons, and there was, so i can definitely see the benefit where webex are, there isn't that hurdle that somebody has to go over, which is the whole download installation, just to experience it, what would be the best way for developers to get started with web xr? ada rose cannon 35 26 well, if you depend how quickly you want to get started so if you want to get started, and you just you already have the 3d model, and you want to just be done straight away, model viewer is a great place to start it lets you just with a single html tag and a script tag, you can have a 3d model, augmented reality ready in your browser and in your website so that's really great if you want something that's like still html based, and a great way to start if you're more of a beginner, and a frame is a fantastic place to start i'll be honest, i've been doing graphics development for years and i also still use a frame for almost all my products, just because it's so quick to get started but also lets you dive in deep because a frame is based on the library three j s, which is a javascript 3d library for working on web gl, which has been around for a long time is extremely powerful and so a frame kind of gives you the best of both worlds but if you really want to get stuck in with the javascript and really get in with the nitty gritty, working directly with three js, or with babylon js is a great way to go but if you want more of an of a fully like integrated development environment for this kind of thing, so if you prefer the kind of all in one it solution, then there's actually quite a few solutions here so there's amazon sumerian, there's play canvas, which is a fantastic engine and there's a really new one that seems really powerful wonderland engine and of course, as the old classic unity, which has a unity export for what xr tony morelan 37 07 excellent sounds like there's a lot of great tools for developers to get started with, with web xr kevin, let me ask you, how is samsung internet involved with web xr? kevin picchi 37 18 well, we shipped web xi by default inside of browser and we always make sure to ship the latest modules out so the developers can benefit all the good from the tony morelan 37 32 api and what about samsung phones? how well do they work with webxr? kevin picchi 37 37 all of them are compatible? as long as you have the samsung internet browser installed on your phone? you can experience webex are tony morelan 37 45 excellent in ad, i know that you're working also on web standards can you tell me a little bit about web standards, maybe some of the challenges with that? ada rose cannon 37 54 yeah, so as i mentioned earlier, i'm co-chair of the immersive web groups these are the groups that are working on the standards that get built into web browsers that become the api's developers work with to build these experiences and working on the web standards can be really challenging, because people have high expectations for the privacy you'd get from the web like you don't go to a website and expect them to immediately start spying on you through your camera, or doing anything really super dodgy the web browser is there to protect you and because we're adding new api's to the browser, we can't do anything that's going to breach this expectation of privacy and security and because it's the web, it's also got to work for as many people as possible so accessibility is also an incredibly important task so these are the kinds of constraints you've got to work in but on top of this, as graphics developers, we really want to get people working with the very latest features you can find in immersive hardware and we want people to build the kinds of experiences that rival what you can find on native and so balancing these privacy and security expectations against letting people have the most access to the hardware is a real challenge, because a lot of the hardware to do with immersive hardware, such as augmented reality is to deal with revealing more information about the environment and letting the developers work with it so for example, for something like working out where the user can place 3d models in the environment, the underlying engine actually can fully scan your environment and work out what the exact shape of stuff is and its color but this is a lot of information, which is too much that a lot of experiences don't actually need and so it would very easily let someone write an abusive application without giving too much additional functionality so actually the early versions of real-world sensing in web xr just let you query a single point from a single ray at a time so this lets you do stuff like placing a single object on the floor on the walls but we're not exactly scanner through someone's room and this is the kind of balances we have to make and because we have had developers come back to us and say they do need like higher precision, more wide scope, scan, like room scanning this is the kind of thing where we can build an additional api to, to let developers have this but at the same time, we can warn the users that what the developer is trying to do might potentially be more dangerous just like when a website is trying to turn your camera or microphone on, it will warn you yes, in the same way, if the website is trying to get a 3d scan of your entire apartment, we want to warn you about that, too and so this is the kind of balances we have to make tony morelan 41 04 so i know that is one of the big benefits around samsung internet is all of the privacy that you get when you use samsung internet nice to see how that's carrying over to web xr how stable would you say vr is on web xr? ada rose cannon 41 22 so vr itself is very stable, vr was one of the first parts we completed in in web xr, there's actually been vr in the web for like a long time, there was an old api called web vr, that was deprecated last year, but since then, web xr, we pushed very hard to be able to totally replace web vr with web xr with the same capabilities so what vr is pretty stable, i doubt there'll be any more changes to it at all so if you write something, targeting vr, yeah, lots will probably stay the same ar is a little newer and there are newer api's to help with augmented reality so some of the more hit testing, depth sensing stuff, some of this is like a little newer, there may still be some privacy issues that need to be resolved, which may have some interface changes but generally, these are also getting pretty stable a lot of the stuff that might be arriving in the next couple of months, or have arrived in the last month or so might have a few changes so it's important that developers do continue testing that stuff and do keep an eye out for when the api's do change because occasionally, we will get feedback that some that we've developed has a major security flaw we've missed and we can't just leave that out in the wild, we do have to change the api to fix that issue tony morelan 42 50 so are there any new features that you can share related to web standards ada rose cannon 42 55 so there's new features being developed all the time and the really nice thing about web standards is that the develop totally in the open so if you want to see all the latest work that's going on, you can check out the immersive web github, where you can see all of the issues that are being worked on in real time on web xr and all the related modules there’re a few modules i'm really excited about one, which is still super early days would be some kind of dom layer, api that would let us put dom content into a web xr scene so like html elements, and css, this is like kind of a tricky thing to do and it's something we've wanted for a long time and i'm hoping it won't be too far in the future when we eventually get it so what tony morelan 43 42 it is, is, since i am new to web xr, myself, what is dom content? ada rose cannon 43 47 so dom content is like html and css content so like, the normal stuff you'd see on a website, so like, forms, images, buttons, you know, that kind of thing? links, okay, so is this where if i am in either a vr and ar environment, this is where you can actually have like buttons that are clickable within that space? yeah, exactly so in addition to making your 3d environment where the user can grab stuff and pull stuff, and have 3d models, you can also have part of a web page in the environment and that may sound quite boring, because it's just going to be like a 2d rectangle with content in it this lets you use the heck demand css api's that are already available in browsers to build 2d interfaces in vr and ar as well so for example, if you had html form reimplementing, that whole thing out of rectangles and shape in 3d modeling application is kind of a pain, sure, but just being able to write some html and take advantage of all the really powerful 2d layout capabilities of the web is just a fantastic feature and will let developers make the most out of both 3d and 2d tony morelan 45 03 nice, nice yeah so what are some other technologies that go well with web xr? ada rose cannon 45 08 so the first one that comes to mind is like web rtc so this is what lets you do video sharing and audio sharing over the web tony morelan 45 17 in web rtc stands for real time communication, correct? it does, yes ada rose cannon 45 21 so this lets you, for example, if a means kind of some kind of social vr situation, i could do some kind of cool between me and another person so i can chat with them in an efficient manner that's peer to peer without needing to go up to a central service okay and another thing that's really useful for social vr stuff is websockets so websockets lets you do incredibly high bandwidth, very, very fast data connections between your client and the server so you could have many people in a single room, or with having all their positions and rotations shared over websockets so you can see people moving around and walking around in real time and so using their free web rtc is like the kind of the two things you need to get a really good social web experience tony morelan 46 15 so what about the technology, web audio? how was that working with web xr? ada rose cannon 46 20 so web audio is a really interesting api so web xr doesn't actually bother dealing with any audio stuff out of the box there's not like specific information you need for working with audio but the really powerful thing about web audio is that it has stuff like a 3d panner node with hrtf built in so you can already do 3d audio in the web long before web xr came along, which is incredibly cool so you can have correct 3d audio, using the web audio api using the web and it's something that's like a little tricky to set up there's a really great library by google called the resonance project and it lets you like define the surfaces around you so you can say the floor is hard there's no ceiling is where the walls are, and will correctly work out the echoes and the reverb and so you could have multiple sound sources, that will sound really good and you'll be able to know where they are instinctually? because they're done in 3d wow and this is really powerful tony morelan 47 22 yeah, cuz i could see where if you're like moving throughout that environment, your audio is going to be changing the sound reflection from within the room to be able to experience those changes yeah, that seems really powerful ada rose cannon 47 35 yeah, so you can take the information from web xr, for example, the position of the user's head, and then you feed that into a library like resonance and that will automatically handle the correct sound from the user's perspective, which is pretty amazing tony morelan 47 53 yeah so what about 5g? how is webex r and 5g working together? ada rose cannon 48 00 so 5g is totally amazing and this is definitely kevin's cup of tea so he should answer this one kevin picchi 48 06 so 5g would essentially improve your experience using webex so for example, you could have way bigger models downloaded on your phone with a higher quality, and it would simply load faster you could also imagine having multiplayer experiences and having almost zero lag or latency tony morelan 48 29 now, i know that you're working on 5g tours, what exactly is 5g tours kevin picchi 48 34 so 5g tour is a european project in which samsung participates and we test the 5g performances in different environments, in which the first one is touristic environment where we try to enhance the experience of tourists while they're visiting a city there is another one which is the mobility one, we try to enhance the way people move in the city and we also try to improve and create new experiences in a way that we make the city safer so let's say there is an evacuation, we can provide guides and we basically use 5g in all of those verticals to improve them tony morelan 49 19 so to talk a little bit more about making cities more secure or safer what exactly do you mean by that? kevin picchi 49 24 so we have a use case that we're working on internally to take all of it is making evacuation easier and faster by leveraging 5g, for example, have some sort of augmented reality application lunch instantly on the phone after people in the airport and the application would basically guide the people out of the airports in a safe way so let's say there would be a fire and you would be guided around the fire and in the right direction nice tony morelan 49 55 so can you tell me how is samsung internet involved with the with 5g tours? kevin picchi 49 59 well, it's so we're working on basically three sub projects in the 5g tour, where we take advantage of web technologies so what would those technologies be? we're using web xi web rtc, web sockets, and web each id those are the web api that ada just talked about we're trying to fuse them with 5g to improve those verticals tony morelan 50 25 so tell me a little bit more what is web rtc kevin picchi 50 28 one of the use cases we're working on is making museum experience experienceable by multiple people so the goal of it is having two or three persons in a room in a museum room with a piece of art, and being able to have them both in the room and been like letting them experience the artwork, take a look at the artwork, maybe move things around the room and all that taking advantage of 5g, which reduces latency and people tony morelan 51 01 feel better nice and this is in a vr environment is what you're referring to correct? kevin picchi 51 05 yes tony morelan 51 06 so what about web h id, which i think stands for human interface device? is that correct? kevin picchi 51 12 yes that's kind of like the gamepad api in a way that this api lets us send probe packets to the devices so to put it in a simple way, let's say you'd have a remote controller that is not compatible with the gamepad api, you could use this api to basically send bro comments to a controller and you could have some kind of communication going and we're using that api with the remote controller that we're using in another use case, in which were basically communicating with remote and getting sensors data and we're using them as a controller basically tony morelan 51 59 nice, nice to see the versatility of it is there any news coming out that you can share that's related to webex r and samsung internet? ada rose cannon 52 08 web xr is evolving really quickly the best way to keep up to date with new news and events and all the cool stuff that's happening in web xr is to subscribe to the immersive web weekly newsletter it's a newsletter that comes out on tuesdays and is a really great way to stay up to date with everything that's happening in the immersive web world tony morelan 52 26 nicely and we'll include a link to that newsletter in the in the show notes what advice do you have for developers looking to start building for samsung internet and in webex are? ada rose cannon 52 39 probably my best advice is to find an environment you're happy working with i really like a frame, there's quite a few out there, i have a few getting started guides on a website i maintain called immersive web dot dev so it's a great place to look at the different ways you can try out building web xr there's also some really useful tools out there, such as an emulator that lets you emulate immersive headsets in the web browser so you can test your site without needing to actually put on a headset, which is a really great way just to like experiment with stuff as you're building it and is a tool that i use an awful lot right so that's great to hear tony morelan 53 18 so are there other ways for developers to follow you and learn more about by what you have to offer? kevin picchi 53 23 yes, surely we're mostly active on twitter at samsung internet and you can also find our blog and our samsung internet page on the developer samsung com slash internet website you can also follow us here and i on twitter my ad is kevin peaky p icc h ii ada rose cannon 53 46 and mine is at ada rose cannon tony morelan 53 49 well, even kevin, it was great to have you on the podcast just wanted to say thanks for giving us a little insight into samsung internet and web xr ada rose cannon 53 57 thank you so much for having us it's been really good kevin picchi 53 59 yeah thanks for having us sunny dan appelquist 54 03 yeah, so good to hear about what we're doing with web xr and the immersive web i it's a technology that i think is really game changing, especially in the way that it democratizes xu, democratizes, ar and vr and really brings the value of that technology to more people across different types of handsets different types of devices it's really, it's so important we've talked a lot about different aspects of samsung internet, what would be the best way for developers to even learn more? well, you can first of all, visit us on our homepage, which is developer samsung com/internet or you can just click on samsung internet once you go to developer samsung com there you can read about our latest releases, you can read about the team you can have links to all our social media we are samsung internet on twitter, our dms are open there and now account is managed by our team directly so if you're dm’ing, samsung internet, the entire team here will read it and we will try to get back to you but also, if you have bugs or if you have problems, you can use that as a great channel to reach us or you can just add mention us on twitter, and we'll be happy to have a conversation with you there we're also on linkedin, if you search for us on linkedin, samsung internet, you'll find our linkedin page and we're happy to interact there as well we're on medium if you search for samsung internet, again, that's linked from our page at developer samsung com/internet we blog on medium and we also reflect that blog on developer samsung com so that you can see us everywhere you go hey, dan, it was great to have you on the podcast just wanted to say thanks to you and your team, for all the great and exciting things that are coming with samsung internet thanks for the opportunity and thank you for all the work that you've put in closing 55 59 looking to start creating for samsung download the latest tools to code your next app, or get software for designing apps without coding at all sell your apps to the world on the samsung galaxy store check out developer samsung com today and start your journey with samsung the pow! podcast is brought to you by the samsung developer program and produced by tony morelan
Learn Developers Podcast
docseason 1, episode 11 previous episode | episode index | next episode this is a transcript of one episode of the samsung developers podcast, hosted by and produced by tony morelan a listing of all podcast transcripts can be found here host tony morelan senior developer evangelist, samsung developers instagram - twitter - linkedin guest diego lizarazo senior developer evangelist, samsung developers instagram - twitter - linkedin in this episode of pow, i interview diego lizarazo, senior developer evangelist at samsung diego is a self-proclaimed tech geek and he is all about coding apps both diego and i work together as part of the samsung developer program and i have invited diego to be a future guest host on the podcast where my specialty is design, diego’s specialty is coding, and his tech geek personality shines as we chat about his path to samsung and how he is helping the developer community listen download this episode topics covered journey to samsung developer conferences covid-19 future of gaming game development global developers spanish webinars learning to code hackathons tizen tidbits helpful links getting started developer tizen org freecodecamp org w3schools com codepen io phaser io scirra com unity com sketchfab com coolors co gimp org photoshop alternative - pixel based inkscape org illustrator alternative - vector based transcript note transcripts are provided by an automated service and reviewed by the samsung developers web team inaccuracies from the transcription process do occur, so please refer to the audio if you are in doubt about the transcript tony morelan 00 02 hey, i'm tony morelan with this is pow! podcast of wisdom from the samsung developer program, where we talk about the latest tech news trends and give insight to all of the opportunities available for developers looking to create for samsung on today's show, i interview diego lizarazo just like me, diego is a senior developer evangelist here at samsung and i actually work pretty closely with diego since we're both part of the developer program diego is a self-proclaimed tech geek and he's all about coding and i wanted you to get to know diego a little bit because i've invited him to be a guest host on some of the upcoming podcasts where he can let his inner tech geek personality shine enjoy so i am super excited to have diego lizarazo on the podcast today first let me ask who is diego? diego lizarazo 00 49 mystery man i am a senior developer evangelist with samsung and in general, i'm a developer that likes to create with people who likes to talk blog, so you're going to hear that during the podcast during this episode, that you're going to ask me one thing, and i'm going to want to answer like 20 different things, because that's why i do what i do i really like to talk, i would like to connect with people, and to try to figure out the kinds of things that people really are passionate about i really like to spend a lot of time doing things that are like, and people can like notice, you know, and that's the kind of thing that i like to find in other developers so i started my career as a developer, i still do coding bad in general, what i do right now is to use the technical knowledge, to be able to connect with older developers, and try to find their passion, the kind of things that really take them and the kind of things that they would like to create tony morelan 01 47 so for those of you who don't know, both diego and i are developer evangelists, we actually work together we've been working together now for how long has it been? it's over a year, i would say yeah, diego lizarazo 01 59 over a year now yeah, absolutely tony morelan 02 01 that's great so before you join samsung, were you already an evangelist for another company? diego lizarazo 02 06 yeah, yeah, i actually have been doing developer relations for like seven years now so different companies, the first time that i did, it was with microsoft, and he had the same chance to do something similar way that red hat and also with a company that franken automotive, you're going to be able to find that a ca technologies that one get acquired and now well, i've been doing that with this role with samsung for a little bit over a year, like i said, tony morelan 02 35 so how was it that you actually first learned about this role at samsung? diego lizarazo 02 39 well, at samsung, he, i think i was looking for another opportunity like it, like i said, ca get acquired so i wanted to continue doing things on developer relations and i started looking and well, obviously, whenever you see something like a name of samsung, that's going to pop into a search, you know, so it's such a big company so influential that immediately like, wow, developer relations with samsung so i immediately honing into that and well immediately applied and fortunately for me, it worked out tony morelan 03 14 yeah, no, we were really excited when you joined i will say diego is an absolute character he is so much fun to work with but outside of his very outgoing personality, he is truly a tech guy i mean, i am amazed at the knowledge that you have that you that you brought to the team i do remember during the interview process, you were the one of all the applicants that really blew us all away because you went above and beyond already creating some great code as part of the process that we just said, oh my gosh, we need to we need to have this guy now something unique is that even though diego and i work together in the same team, we are actually on opposite sides of the country so i'm based in the west coast and you are on the east coast so tell us a little bit about why you're there on the east coast where you are and how did you end up there? diego lizarazo 04 06 well, i am in atlanta in atlanta metro so in georgia, i have been here almost seven years so i moved here for my first developer relations position so that was a position that i mentioned with microsoft and they had an opening here and i end up moving before that i was living in, in texas before that i lived in michigan for a couple of months before that i lived in spain and before that, i was living in colombia so it was kind of like a long road to make it all the way here tony morelan 04 42 and your birthplace is colombia, correct? diego lizarazo 04 45 yeah, yeah, i'm colombian and that's where i started my career so that's where i went to school to be developers so i'm going to start working as a web developer so from then they move to spain aid candidates some consulting so that's going working for yeah, like a company better and you really like your client in my case, it was our telecommunication companies so like for anyone that is in europa, they may have heard like telefonica or bts, or british telecommunication and which one orange, orange was the other one and but after that, i started doing something a little cooler that was the making designer so i had the chance to work as a game designer in spain with a spanish company and the funny thing is that i really well, it was like getting to hang out that's when i had kind of like these big realizations, but i could do something else with my background and is that as a game designer, you don't really have to program you don't really have to code but you have the chance to work with developers so i well, i was a developer, so i had to create game documents and talk with the developers but also had to talk with artists with publishers with marketing so i figured out like, i can take that technical knowledge and actually learn how to explain that to people that may be technical may know how to program or that have no idea about those technical issues or problems or aspects of a game so at the time is kind of like, well, i don't know what to do with this cool and but later, like at two positions later, when i move here to the us, it was like oh, do supposition that actually does the entire point, like, program and talk with other people so i'm sure that it really worked out yeah and i think that's one of the best things that you bring to the team is your ability to communicate so not only do you have all this amazing knowledge when it comes to coding, but you do a great job as far as teaching so i am i am super honored to work alongside you so i have to ask you though, too so do you do a lot of gaming yourself? i mean, do you play games now not as much because most of the time, or i'm working, or my kids that have several kids, they are calling jumping on me literally, i'm playing with them so and the other times that i have to opportunity to do something with games, usually i'm creating game demos, you know, like small games and things like that so i don't really have much time i have a few, like, mobile games that i play constantly bad note, like serious gaming, like i used to do, like, the times when i was single back didn't have any worries in the ward and then the xbox was feeling my free time and that that is not happening anymore tony morelan 07 36 so originally, you were a gamer that coded, but now you're a coder that games when from time to 07 43 time 07 45 yeah 07 47 that's correct tony morelan 07 48 that's great tell me you've been with samsung now for a year we've actually done a lot of events together we've actually done some traveling together, which has been great went to korean and both visited our headquarters there we've been to many conferences across the us, i'm sure you've come across a few challenges so tell me similar, like, what are the biggest challenges you faced in your role here at samsung? diego lizarazo 08 09 well sometimes is the entire thing of trying to figure out what's the best thing that you can, the best knowledge that you can bring to a certain audience so samsung has a lot of technologies and fortunately, we have a lot of fans around the word but sometimes, some people are going to be more interested in some technology or another one so i don't think we have anyone in the company that can know everything about every single aspect of samsung well, obviously i have a focus like watches smartwatches phones, gaming, bad sometimes some people can only come in like, hey, do you know about this screen or like, i didn't even know that we had that screen? do you know what is the price of this older device? i didn't know so many times i have to go back and tell them like look, let me check or give me your email and did not respond to you and i'll try to figure it out because seriously, samsung is covering a lot of different technologies yes, samsung electronics, betty vehicle by they brought her company, and we have hundreds of thousands of employees around the world so it's really hard to know every single aspect of samsung other times it has to do a little bit more like with challenges in in conferences, and things like that but fortunately for me for something, i think most of the conferences, most of the events, they have gone really well and it's more like trying to figure out like, what is it that people want to do? what is it that people want to talk about and bring that content to them? tony morelan 09 38 yeah, you know, and i have to agree with you because when i joined samsung as an evangelist, this was the first time that i actually not only was in a role like this, but the first time that i worked for a company prior to that my entire career i was just a self-employed freelance graphic designer and that was my challenge was when somebody when we were out at an event someone would ask me a technical question that i just didn't know the answer i felt like i was supposed to know that answer so it took me a little while to understand that you know what, you don't have to know everything fortunately, we've got great contacts and you know, pretty quickly, i could probably get an answer for you but, yeah, as an evangelist, we're here to help teach, but sometimes we have to go do a little research ourselves diego lizarazo 10 23 yeah to understand, but he's, i think part of the like, the fun thing, the questions you get during the conferences tony morelan 10 31 oh, yeah no, and i love how eager you are, whenever there's a new challenge that's posed to you or someone said, hey, can we you know, can we try this? you're like, give me a little bit here and let me let me figure that out but yes, definitely so that being said, what is the best part of your role? diego lizarazo 10 46 those weird questions, those ones that that you are kind of like, wow, i didn't have any idea that someone is even interested in dad, you know, or the people that come and tell you i have really weird story, and that you are like blown away because like, wow, like the really are doing things that i didn't even know that you could do, you know, so with samsung technologies or other technologies, and i have had some people, some developers that come to me and show me like a small demo and then i even like wonder, like, how did they do it? you know, like, if i was going to kind of like, start doing that by myself right now, i have no idea how to do it, or like, it's going to take me some time and then that kind of like forces you to say like, hey, what kind of thing do i need to learn next? and specifically with samsung, i think we really get a lot of innovation we get new devices every year or sometimes even like, two three times a year and then you are never short in terms of like, what is it that i need to do next, there's always something that you can do some sort of like project but it could be like a personal project, where we could be whatever, but, but you are always going to like you have something it's not static even before we started, like working under covid circumstances, i think almost every month we were trying to figure out like, okay, what is the next event? what is the next conference? what is the next thing that we're going to do? and now it's like, okay, how do we do the same things without even like, really reaching in person, you know, like older developers into different communities so it's always challenging and i think challenge is one of those words that is quite interesting because a lot of people see it as something then i usually see it as something good if there's a challenge that means that that i have something new to do something new to learn and, and data that i really like about my job and about this position you know, tony morelan 12 54 it was just this morning that i was reading one of the comments on a tutorial video i had posted on youtube the person asked like, you know, so how do you do this it was he wanted to show the rotating progress bar on a watch and i had i had known how to do it i just hadn't put that out to the community yet and i thought, you know what, this is a perfect time for me to do that so i quickly just threw up, put together another video tutorial, posted it to youtube, basically just answering this question but you know, here, it was a great opportunity for someone in the community to reach out to us and ask a question and, and, you know, i'm able to respond right away with another tutorial video so, yeah, that interaction with the community is great and also one of my highlights you had mentioned a little bit about covid and how it's affecting, you know, the world, our group so give me some specifics how is that actually impacting your role and your challenges as an evangelist to reach developers? diego lizarazo 13 53 well, one of the things that i guess we, i would say did work and unfortunate is that i did you know, this year, we were thinking about doing more events live so we were what are you putting our calendar, and we're going to take it easy we were going to, to figure out when to start doing that so really the big change is that we have to accelerate that response we have to move to create content online faster than we were expecting but we were already in the process so that's something that i think we're fortunate that we didn't have to come up with something out of nowhere, if we were already in that process but apart from that is sort of weird, not traveling as much as what we were doing not having the chance of like going to the booth is something smooth and getting all these people sometimes like the randomness of conference when people just only walk by you and you're like, hey, you have like a couple of minutes to talk about something that you can already do online but then you have older kinds of randomness like the ones that we get on our youtube channels or to forums or, or other or things like that so that i think is like one of the biggest things the other thing is that i think right now it would one after so many months is beginning to get a little bit of like online like a little bit like tired a little bit jaded is like i don't want to do another videoconference i don't want to do another, like video call, because everyone is doing that you know, so you have to, like figure out like, okay, what kind of like new content is going to keep people entertained? how do we change the format and things like that, i think is a big challenge for anyone living in these times but at the end of the day, it's part of the challenge and the challenge i am looking forward to the time that we can start like doing again, conferences are going to be a little bit of refreshing and i think a lot of the ideas that we had four this year that we're going to jump to start executing on that bad but yeah, you it's his day to day thing and personally, i have felt always going to change like everyone else but i've been working remotely for over seven years so it was not like a huge process of a patient i think it was more for you, for example exactly yeah tony morelan 16 16 so our team, our team is based in the bay area in northern california diego works remotely in atlanta so yeah, i can totally understand that you kind of already had your set up for us, it was a little bit more of a shock because we no longer went into the office, you know, we all kind of had to put together our home offices i was fortunate because i had done it for, you know, close to 20 years so i still had my nice little setup here at home so it's worked out well i would agree with you that the, you know, one of the biggest impacts has been that face to face opportunity to meet with designers and developers at conferences that that's, you know, we're missing out on that you are correct when the new year began big push was, hey, how can we broaden our reach? how can we make our teachings or information accessible globally? so we were already, you know, five steps ahead towards that type of content delivery yeah, like you said, we just had to put it in gear and move a little faster once this all hit yeah you know, when i think of diego, i think of a tech guy like i said, i'm totally impressed with how much knowledge you have, you know, up in your head, where did that start as a child? i mean, were you always like, motivated by technology when you were a little kid? diego lizarazo 17 37 i like technology itself i think it was a little bit of like knowledge i think my entire life i've been quite geeky so there are some people that dad account like find the term offensive like no, i've always kind of like known that i'm geeky and i embraced it so it's like i really have perhaps they have a little bit of ocd and he's like, okay, if i if i get to know something i just really love to learn about it so that helped and, and really, the thing is that for me, most of the programming especially, it comes as a problem you know, it's like you have a problem in some almost like puzzle and then the coding is really the process of solving the puzzle so it gives me a lot of, like, almost personal pleasure, you know, to see like, okay, i want to do x, and i have no idea how to do it, and then start putting it together and solving it the big difference has been an evangelist is that many developers stop there, you know, then you solve the problem, and then perhaps move to the next problem as an evangelist, you're supposed to kind of like take that knowledge and somehow figure out to share it with someone else so it could be a blog post, it could be a podcast, like what we're doing right now, which could be a media bad, but then you have to do that part of sharing what you learn in in that is also kind of like an additional layer of like what i do, and apart from that, like you mentioned about like being a gamer or being a programmer it really, the funny thing is that i actually started learning how to program because i wanted to create games so that was sort of my main motivation back in in colombia, i didn't really have any degree appealable to me, at least on game programming game designing and so i say like, okay, i'm going to the closest thing that he's learned how to program and i started the career there and then the gaming part coming like he pretty much later, but it was kind of like a really roundabout way to get around things better well, it's kind of like the path you sometimes you don't even like have a lot of control on how you end up getting to the place that you want to be in tony morelan 19 44 that's, that's great so let me ask you them what is the perfect game for you? are you into action games role playing games, puzzles, sports? i mean, what is that perfect game for you role playing games, diego lizarazo 19 56 you're playing games, like i mean, i enjoy all kinds i really suck at action games so all shooters i think my brain has kind of like a disconnect on 3d on a screen so i tried to shoot in one direction and i'm kind of like getting killed and the other day i cannot really coordinate that but role playing games it has always been countered me thing because they usually tend to have a story something engaging and at the same time you have the interactive part so to me it feels almost really interactive book and then having like to develop that story and trying to figure out like all like how all the characters interacting and making this story a little bit my own story that's like one of the things that i really like, obviously, like i said, i don't have the time sometimes to kind of go into these deep stories so right now i'm not doing a lot but if you asked me like what are like my, my favorite games, pretty much all of them are role playing games so like, final fantasy six, fable and wonderful latest ones that i didn't play the original one, it was my kid that ended up picking it for switch, sell the breath of the wild and that thing totally blew me away i still haven't finished it because it takes so many hours and they cannot just do like the main, the main path through the game, i have to do all the side quests and that takes forever so if they go into one of these online sites and tells you like, hey, this game is going to be 100 hours if it's sort of a role-playing game for me, that's going to be $300 so i can't know just sue did the main quest so yeah, like i think we're playing games is really the thing that is close to my heart and competitive well, they're complicated to create and there are some that are much more engaging than others but tony morelan 21 49 yeah, that's funny you know, i can tell you, this is what we're the opposite i am not into role playing games i need games simple so i am into racing games so, you know, speed is pretty much it or like, you know, just the simple arcade style games, the, you know, the old retro games, two dots, you know, just using really simple puzzles yeah, that's about as deep as i get when it comes to comes to gaming diego lizarazo 22 18 well, but believe it or not, like when i actually create games, those arcade games are the ones that i really go for because usually, it's about a mechanic, they can have like one or two mechanics that are incredibly polished, and they're repetitive, bad, bad day, and it really gives you the, the satisfaction as a player to accomplish something so like a platformer, or like the typical thing of like, space invaders that you just really get into sown and your brain is not really like thinking much is just kind of reacting those are also great, you know, and especially the old style of the old school games oh man, i don't know how many hours i spent going out like playing dos, an actual arcade but even at home in an arcade? tony morelan 23 05 yes, much of my childhood was spent out it was called merlin's castle, down in saratoga in california that was the place to be every night, we would go down there and drop our quarters in, play asteroids don't kill the plays close up so i'm going to actually date myself here for a moment when i was growing up, one of my friends, his father worked on the very first game, which was pong, very well known that this is the very first you know, computer generated game he actually brought it home before it was publicly released he's like, he got to come over here i've got this game that you hook up to our television so i actually got to play pong before it was out into the public and let launched obviously this amazing genre of games diego lizarazo 23 58 i would have i would have left in the house of your friend, if, like i would have tried to break him somehow and well, everyone is just leaping, tried to just play into their living room or whatever they have the game so yeah, that that that is a little bit of an addiction that i had growing up but it was kind of like the cool thing it was not the thing that i it was like, let's escape and let's do this really cool thing for a few hours and then let's go back to the ad well, in my case, the ad is reality that it was around me and then well, let's go and check the next game, you know so it was it was really cool and somehow, i think those simpler games in many ways were kind of like, more fun that some of the orders i think people didn't take it didn't take them as seriously, they were just to steal games the it was not kind of like the entire thing like my life revolves only around this game it was like, well, they're incredibly cool, but i know how to count like braid the two so i think the perhaps like the entire thing that you begin to listen that it like simpler times, so perhaps they were in immediate games, at least they were simpler and i think their interaction that he had with the players were simpler to him so i recall, you know, tony morelan 25 16 yeah, definitely so if we could then jump into the future, how do you think or how would you like to see games evolve? diego lizarazo 25 25 now you do see the trend already of the esports so they are going to turn more into kind of like a well i sport so like, global entertainment so just watching the game is going to be part of entertainment, which i don't particularly like because i think one of the coolest things about games is playing the games you know, but well, i've also enjoyed watching some people like it really cool ones really good ones, but they do doing dad but i think you're going to count like how it's kind of weird to say it on one end stream like more complex, more technically advanced games and then on the other hand, you're going to have the hyper casual when you when we start getting like even more and more mainstream technologies like ar and vr, then you're going to start having like more of those games that are going to get to the general public, not just like gamers, but kind of like everyone else, and then more gamified experiences so then you're going to have things that i don't know, you could go to the store, and they directly own the stands, you're going to be able to have like minigames you know, because there's going to be so simple that you could pretty much put a game on anything clicking the wrapping of candy or something like that it's going to be possible and then some of these interactions, at some point is going to be similar to what happened to the two technology in general they're just going to be in so many places that's some point you're not even going to realize that you're just playing a they're going to be just so immersive and so, so commonplace that you're just going to be playing without realizing that you're playing or you're going to be working with some gamified aspects and i think all that obviously has some good aspects to that and some aspects that we should reconsider our society but well, that's not really up to me to decide what's right and what's wrong i think the those who are going to be kind of the main things that we're going to see more and more tony morelan 27 34 yeah, no, i definitely agree you know, my son's a gamer and when he's not gaming, i'm like, okay, cool he's off, you know, the game and he's just chilling out and then i'm like, so what are you doing? he's like, oh, i'm just watching videos of other people gaming that's when i realized that like, oh my gosh, so there's this whole you know, social community around gaming that is more than just individuals playing the game i mean, there's just so much to the community so, yeah, that was that was interesting so let's talk a little bit about building apps you know, i want to know what your approaches when you want to develop an app do you first like outline what the concept is? or do you just start like playing with a code and kind of build out from there? what's your approach to that? diego lizarazo 28 19 usually, for me, it has been, at least have a problem or have a, like, at least the concept, you know, that i build the app around so it could be i'm trying to solve something, or somehow, i was able to, for example, with games that happens a lot that i already have a game mechanic that i really like and he said, like, where is it going to, to fit? so usually, i don't just come and start playing, i usually start playing with the with the code when i already have like a skeleton like a base that is the year and then it's like, okay, let's figure out like all the other aspects, the ones that may not be as important how, how can i do that? obviously, to solve that initial core concept, or that initial problem solving it, you end up calling like trying different approaches but additionally, and that's something that i do in many other many other things, i like to at least have an outline, you know, like a, grab a piece of paper, and say like, i want to do abc, and c, and then try to figure out how to do that and then that mabel, or dan may stay in into those original ideas bad but usually, i like it i prefer it, when there's something that guides me like, in goal, even if i if he didn't stop changing, but at least have a general idea where i'm going tony morelan 29 42 so tell me about some tools or tips that you may have, that you can recommend for someone creating their first game app diego lizarazo 29 49 well for game, so i have a couple of things that that i can share so for games in general, i think one of the things that will people don't realize is that games can be sometimes hard to program so i have like two tools for a person that has no idea how to create games that i recommend and the first one is construct three, i think that we can put the link in the notes so the company is called sarah and you can create games like javascript games that are going to run on your browser and you don't really need to do a lot of programming so it gives you a good idea of how to start creating games without doing a lot of the understanding what of what goes behind so that's really good if you already have a little bit of experience programming or want to learn how to program a also would recommend something like phaser, but it's also a javascript game, but you do have to write the code so it gives you the idea if you're going to teach a kid perhaps then you can find things like a scratch so those are a little bit more visual programming languages and it helps you to understand, like a lot of the logic on how like, yeah, well eaves, wiles loops, things that you still need in programs and you know, in apps in general, and specifically for games if you're currently trying to create a new app i have, well, the game is a good way to do it but there are like several code several like places that you can learn how to do some programming i think javascript is really great not just because of the language itself bad is because you can find it almost anywhere whenever you visit a website usually it has a little bit of javascript so i know that a lot of people are going to complain and say like new it's better to start with python or is better to start with other programming languages but i think for someone that is starting to learn how to program is really easy to create a piece of code with notepad and then it means run it using a browser so you don't need a lot of tools and you can see results right away and it's so extended a they can find so many resources, look at no free code camp org or w three schools, that they give you a lot of tutorials on how to start creating and those are counting gen now, if you're a little bit more experienced, and perhaps you know how to code and you want to create, let's say, your first like big game, unity is a great way to go about it it could be a little bit hard at the beginning, because it has so many options it has so many buttons, the ui is really complicated so if you open it for the first time, and you don't know what you're doing, just go to youtube, or go to one of the unity pages, because you're going to be overwhelmed so that's why i'm saying like, i think it's a great tool it's just that if it's your first game, you may be a little bit like whoa, whoa so that would be a good thing and if you're going to start creating apps in general well, i would recommend to start creating something with android so it could be android studio or even with tyson or for samsung, it could be like a, you could go to tyson org or the developer something com page and you are going to also have the chance to start creating mobile applications or applications for smartwatches and well even look like if you just want to see something with a smartwatch it's a no that follow tony, because he's going to give you a lot of places where you can go and well, i think i'm going to share with tony like a lot of older things that data developers are counting tips and things that you can use so places like if you are like most developers a little bit design challenged there you could find like cool images like pixels or game art that is open game art or if you want to just kind of like find like colors, the right colors for you ui you could go to places like wireless coolers not colors but cool or schoolers casio and immediately gives you like a palette that you can use in your in your application so you break now there are fortunately, a lot of resources that you can find online and well, quickly we can put some of the links in tony morelan 34 18 yeah, definitely yeah so as you'd mentioned, we'll include everything in the show notes you're giving a lot of great information, a lot of great resources so we will link to all of that down in the show notes so thank you thank you a bunch for that so one thing that's been wonderful, you joining the team is see speak spanish so you've been able to reach out to the spanish speaking community, you've had some very successful live chats and webinars that you conduct all in spanish so and our reach is global so as you know, you know, when we're doing or live chats or videos and whatnot, they are reaching countries all around the world so i want to ask you, how do you think the developer communities differ? around the world, diego lizarazo 35 02 i think it's a little bit of a level of, of engagement, you know, like it in the us in particular, a lot of the technical content is already created an english, you know, so sometimes is really easy for a developer or anyone that wants to be a developer, just go online and search for whatever and you immediately are going to find a response no, like it's right there in other places, especially places that have where english meaning have become like a yeah, kind of like as extended, then then it could be a little bit more of like people that really want to get the answers though sort of ones that somehow or have to learn english or try to kind of like understand more of the content that there is there but also, sometimes even they are the ones that try to translate, you know, they figure out like, hey, i have this i found this awesome video and no one has that in spanish or a translation in english and then be recruited that same content so i think it's a matter of kind of, like availability of tools and resources and sometimes you see a little bit more of those dynamics in in user groups, you know, so a lot of people kind of like, some are more motivated by that and notice, on the other hand, feel a little bit shyer you know, it's kind of like, well, i know that i'm not going to get older with all the responses that i needed so you have to kind of like work around that whenever you're coming, like reaching older countries in and people from other languages, but yeah, it's really interesting and also, you see that sometimes certain technologies are more popular in certain countries and sometimes you don't even understand why he knows like, why that that programming language is so popular in brazil i don't know that it is more popular in brazil, you know, or websites and things like that, because well, they'll be communities evolved differently tony morelan 37 01 sure, you know so my specialty is design so i help a lot of developers from the design aspect for their apps and i'm always amazed at how many russian watch face designers there are so when i've been communicating with them, you know, exchanging emails, or responding to different posts and whatnot, you know, i'm conducting all this in english, and we're having these great conversations well, i reached out to a couple of them the other day to invite them onto a phone call, and came to find out that they don't speak english they've just been using google translate in their comments exactly it just hit me and i'm like, so for all these months that we've been carrying these conversations, this is all just been russian translated using google translate though exactly pretty neat to see the board is really, you know, taken down diego lizarazo 37 50 yeah, and exactly so sometimes, certain content like videos i personally prefer videos, but then in order to places they may prefer the text, you know, or code, because it's something that you can easily copy paste somewhere else and get a translation so in a video, you may not get the accent, or you your understanding of the language is not as great so then you still can have like a barrier there but it well, people, if they really want to do it, if they really want to, like get to the content, they figure it out it's just like the how, like how the solve that problem could add like a couple of steps there in the process tony morelan 38 32 so we've talked a lot about conferences, you know, we used to do a lot of outreach in person so can you tell me about some of the experiences you've had at these conferences? have you had great experiences? have you had any challenging experiences? tell me about maybe unique people that you might have met at some of these conferences? diego lizarazo 38 52 yeah so i'll tell you one, like that it was challenging that was not what samsung but i was going to man booth in a conference for another company and we had a product and a like, this is called like the entire thing about demos, whenever you have some product, if you don't pay attention, or if you don't cross your fingers long enough at sometimes a demo is going to fail and they told me like, okay with the confidence, let's say start tuesday, 9am and i came there early, set up everything, everything's ready to go and they put my computer there to show the product everything's working, and it suddenly stopped working so i had like half an hour before people who started coming to the floor, and they had to show things and i literally had to call like go outside of the of the conference floor, and start pretty much figured out what was the error and at some point, it was called, like calling someone from the team and trying to figure out it was of course the most stupid thing like a package got updated last minute automatically and then bad one had a company with something else, and then you just can't change one file and magically everything is working but it is incredibly stressful to try to solve something like right before you have to show it and i have had some things like that, even in webinars and things are dead and you're like, what do i do now? and you have to figure out like the solution right in but that one was, like really stressful for me a really cool one on the other hand, for example, in adobe max, which you were last year, so like a good portion of our team was there last year, i had the chance to talk with a really cool developer so his name is derek miller and he went back and talk with us and what really blew me away for ones is that well, he's a teacher i have his video that's something we did we never really just share outside of our team, because we wanted to really give it the promotion that we wanted, but it was a little bit hard sometimes to promote some of these things but the thing is that he had a real-life problem sometimes we're talking about apps and, and games and, and really well if a game does work or doesn't work usually doesn't change anyone's life but in his case, he was dealing with diabetes and he wanted to be to have well pretty much a regular life in and figure out how to do it use technology because he knows how to use technology he lived he teaches a lot of like, maker things who are things with raspberry pi's and things like that and pretty much he designed and implemented a full system to be able to check his level, his blood level, you know, like glucose and everything in in to be coming in that regular stable state, regardless if he was on the road or if he was changing his diet, etc , etc so he kind of like told us all about that and he was using something technologies and i was blown away again because at the time it's one of those things since i don't have dad disease, i don't have that problem, that health problem i never thought about that, like how to solve it and then he was already explaining, like, hey, i did this and i can't create the keys for him for my sensor and this is how it connected my phone and i was asking, like, how long do you meditate? he was like, oh, well, like one or two days and was like, really, it would take me forever for me to do that, you know, and it is because obviously, he had a personal need and he had a personal problem, a real-life problem and he really wanted to put his knowledge into something that that could be used by him or by anyone else and he figured it out without even having can like a commercial solution for that and he was still able to figure it out so that was one of the times that i felt good at that i get kind of like a personal satisfaction to see someone using their knowledge to solve a real problem and it was amazing and he was, again randomly we were in a design conference that is adobe max last year it wasn't even about guest programming, he was more towards like the design part and he just came to our booth, you know, to be able to talk with us and show us the kind of things that he was doing so, so that wouldn't really blow me away tony morelan 43 16 that's, that's great you know, i think that for me, i've had a few of those experiences where i've met some really unique people from the design community since that's been my primary focus, whether it's meeting individuals that are just happen to be coming by our booth, or meeting some of the other people who are at the conference to present i've met some of what i call like my rock star designers in the community out there andrew kramer, who's done a lot of work with motion graphics he worked a lot on star wars i follow him he was the one who truthfully his tutorial videos are what inspired me to get into motion graphics many years ago and here i was at a conference right next to him and next thing you know, we're starting to open a conversation and we must have chatted for about 30 minutes, just the two of us chatting away and i just still couldn't believe it that i was, you know, next to him, mr doodle who's an amazing artist, he was at adobe max so just being able to see these people in person was just so rewarding i can't wait for us to get back out into conferences to get back into that environment diego lizarazo 44 28 yeah, absolutely and, and, and we think that's one of the cool things that are, you asked me before about this kind of rolls, sometimes we end up talking with some people that eat or know, that have such an amazing experience so personally, for me, like and well, you can share this one i have always kind of like beanie to, like you say to the role-playing games that are also games are not just like the video games, you know, like, also tabletop games and there is this one that that is numbered masquerade so it's called dungeons and dragons but couldn't like darker green here because it was the 90s and i was a real fan and i came here to georgia i had the bugs i played that and they didn't know that that game actually started here in atlanta and at some point, someone told me like, hey, you should come and talk with andrew sure and his name is andrew greenberg and right now he's the president of the georgia game developer association so he helps like videogame developers, but also tabletop game developers, and a lot of people in the gaming industry and entertainment industry and he started talking with him and then later, i found out that he was one of the original developers, not the creator, but one of the original developers of this game so it's one game that have been kind of like fanning out for i don't know how many years since i was a teenager and then i was able to, like meet someone that literally was in the offices creating the content that i was reading and all that and you don't know in these conferences or like when you go to use groups who you're going to be able to find me, it could be like someone that already has a lot of expense or it could be someone that 15 years from now could be the next you know, maybe the next genius, game creator or app creator, and you don't know, you don't know and that's why i really love to talk with people, because that's when you make these connections tony morelan 46 21 yeah, no, definitely which then leads me to hackathons in game jam so we've talked a lot about conferences and some of our outreach let's get specific and talk about hackathons what's your involvement around that? diego lizarazo 46 34 yeah, so well, a hackathon is pretty much usually they have this format of let's get doing a weekend or let's get for a few days and let's put together like an application or a system, or do some coding to create something cool sometimes the hackathon could have like a theme so let's create something around a specific technology or like any api, or let's create something to solve this problem, or it could be something more specific, which it would be like a game jam, where it would be a game jeremy's car, like, let's get together and instead of having a music jam, where we're creating cool things that sound cool, it would be let's create some games that look cool and play cool so sometimes they end up creating like a small game sort of times they are a little bit more polished, but usually that everything is created in that span of 4872 hours sometimes there's orders a little bit longer, like half a week or something but there's always this entire element of pressure of let's be creative, like pretty much on the moment and let's meet people that we haven't met before so sometimes some teams can like form right there on the spot, and have been able to kind of like it participate in many of those some are a little bit more professional, more enterprise sort of thing, or is mean in universities or game associations for example, usually around the end of january they have the global game jam so i had the chance to go there and sometimes a sponsor and sometimes, like talk with people i always go like in depth like not participating myself creating that i always click start creating like a concept that i'm going to end up doing and i end up doing something else so it doesn't work out but he's really great to go and see the results of the apps that people created hackathons or the games and the people are game jams and it's something that brings a lot of energy from young people creating cool things together tony morelan 48 28 yeah and i think that probably what i enjoyed the most around that is, everybody there is they're all there for like the same reason you know what i mean? it's to be creative i one time participate in a 48-hour film project so this is where different teams break up and you have 48 hours to put together a film and you know, so you're writing your script, you're filming it here, you're editing it, you're doing everything all within 48 hours, and just being around you know, like minded people so i can totally understand that when you're at a game jam or at a hackathon, just being around the energy of all those people i mean, that's got to be pretty, pretty exciting diego lizarazo 49 11 yeah, yeah and sometimes people come up with, like some things that you were like, how did you even come up with that idea? you know, and it's really cool so and last year with something we had one in washington dc, that one was created in conjunction with mit, and it was around health and coming up with liquid use to help people in the health industry and the health sector to well help people that will have actual diseases or health problems, etc , etc and we were able to talk with some teams that were coming up with so many incredible solutions so one of them and one team was kind of like chicken india, the smartwatches, the samsung smartwatches and have to do with elderly care so like, trying to check things around the gap, how it could take someone falling, you know, someone that is older and could be falling and maybe the gyroscope he did watch could help with that detection, or how they could collect information like i don't know, like the heartbeats or their sleep patterns, things like that so they were calling and saying like, we already have this awesome house record, how do we do? how do we use that to help others? and i thought that it was incredibly interesting, and usually don't do anything that has to do with health so that particular hackathon was kind of like, oh, that's, that's different than that yeah, that's the entire point, to bring some creativity and bring, like, two different things that sometimes don't go along and put them to work together tony morelan 50 51 yeah, no, that's, that's so true i once went to a meetup group, where people were presenting their apps and somebody had created app for the elderly, the chance of them falling down and this person who had worked their way through this app, not realizing that when people fall, they don't fall like a tree falling in the forest, they crumble so this app developer hadn't really thought of that, that the motion is not, you know, a tree falling it's just someone kind of collapsing down and that was because of the, you know, the people that attended that meetup group that then helped this app developer, you know, understand kind of, you know, a basic thing that it was just an oversight diego lizarazo 51 35 yeah, but i don't think you'd seen a bit of an oversight is that sometimes that happens a lot with developers, and you can see it with a lot of technologies that didn't have to be adopted and it has to be that way sometimes, developers end up solving problems that don't really exist, what are the problems, something different? tony morelan 51 53 so you've done a great job on reaching out to the community and sharing your knowledge and no one of yours a very popular series is the tyson tidbits yet you've been publishing on youtube can you tell us are there any other upcoming topics that that you have planned? diego lizarazo 52 10 yeah, actually, i it's kind of fun like how these things work and coming back a little bit more to towards the gaming side of things so i'm going to be putting a little bit more like short videos on showing how to create games with samsung technologies and in general, i'll try to put like different technology so right now we have so many technologies that you can use so many platforms like apple face or construct two dimensions before and unity and so it would be cool to solve the specific things that have to do with games and did help to publish them because i think, i think sometimes when you are creating a game or an app, if you are not forced to share with others, then it can stall otherwise, if you know that you want to publish it in the app, regardless if it's successful or not you still have kind of liquidity that a goal to achieve that is shared, like that game so, so that's where quite likely i'm going to start creating and you actually have to finish a video in the next couple of days around that so we'll see how that goes so i already have like a few that i need to record well, i have to start one by one so we'll see how long it takes me to create him and publish them tony morelan 53 24 so if developers want to get in contact with you, what is the best way? diego lizarazo 53 29 well, they can go directly if it's especially something technical, it's great to send me an email and you can use my samsung email so you're going to see it on the notes that's diegorivera@partner samsung com so like we'd like it's better that you check the notes so you can send me an email there and specifically we are talking about an error it's great that you send me like a screenshot sometimes people describe their and like, well, it's given me a lot of information, screenshots sometimes works best if not the still can find me online so the best thing that usually i go by helo777 so that would be like the translation of ice in spanish so that's h e l o 777 and you can find me like that on twitter, in our instagram, etc , etc so twitter, i receive a lot of messages so i can respond directly there leave dog, like i say to my email, that's a good way to get in contact with me tony morelan 54 28 when you're not coding when you're not working, what do you do for fun? diego lizarazo 54 32 spending time with my family, have a big family so literally get some popcorn, get in front of the tv and watch an animated movie i have still like little kids so we were still not at the age where we can all just watch like people on the screen they still have to be cartoons at some point we will graduate to real people and live action bad in the meantime is dad or going on some road trips so i'm kind of fortunate did an around the area, we have many other smaller cities and towns that we can visit and every other month we are currently going somewhere so that with my family that's its own adventure just like taking them one hour down the road that that's still interesting tony morelan 55 15 excellent well, hey diego, absolutely appreciate you taking the time to join me on the podcast this has been a ton of fun i am glad to even get to know you better than i knew you before so thank you again oh, thank you, tony outro 55 25 looking to start creating for samsung, download the latest tools to code your next app, or get software for designing apps without coding it all sell your apps to the world on the samsung galaxy store check out developer samsung com today and start your journey with samsung the pow! podcast is brought to you by the samsung developer program and produced by tony morelan
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