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Learn Developers Podcast

Episode 11, Diego Lizarazo

season 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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Episode 6, Samsung Internet

season 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

https://developer.samsung.com/developers-podcast/s02e06-samsung-internet.html

Learn Developers Podcast

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Episode 1, Eric Krause

season 3, 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 eric krause, riot games league of legends, gaming, galaxy store in this episode, not only do we talk about the beginnings of riot games and their award-winning mobile game, league of legends, wild rift, but how riot games has grown to become more than just a gaming company listen download this episode topics covered riot games beginning league of legends franchise best of galaxy store awards, best strategy game wild rift developing for mobile publishing on galaxy store samsung relationship game development and marketing wild rift music esports netflix animated series arcane working at riot games diversity and inclusion helpful links riot games website - riotgames com riot games linkedin - linkedin com/company/riot-games riot games twitter - twitter com/riotgames riot games facebook - facebook com/riotgames riot games instagram - instagram com/riotgames league of legends esports - lolesports com eric krause linkedin - linkedin com/in/erkrause samsung developers homepage - developer samsung com samsung developers newsletter - developer samsung com/newsletter samsung developers blog - developer samsung com/blog samsung developers news - developer samsung com/news samsung developers facebook - facebook com/samsungdev samsung developers instagram - instagram com/samsung_dev samsung developers twitter - twitter com/samsung_dev samsung developers youtube - youtube com/samsungdevelopers samsung developers linkedin - linkedin com/company/samsungdevelopers 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 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 three, episode one on today's show, i'm joined by eric krause, global head of marketing for the league of legends group at riot games not only do we chat about the latest success around wild rift, their award-winning mobile game for the league of legends franchise, but also riot games unique process for game development, and how diversity and inclusion play an important part of riots culture internally and within the gaming and entertainment communities well, yeah, and all of the music you'll hear in today's episode, it's from the wild rift soundtrack enjoy hey, eric, i want to welcome you to the to the podcast eric krause 00 57 thank you for having me it's a pleasure tony morelan 01 00 who is eric krause? eric krause 01 04 good question my wife, i think is asking the same question i am german so by my accent, you might be like, where is he from? so i'm super passionate about gaming you know, we're really trying to be part of, you know, making people feel better to be a gamer all around the world but beyond that really love technology, talking about anything technology so that's why i'm super excited to be here talking about, you know, partnership with samsung, because samsung is known for technology, but also loved cars so i'm very stereotypical german that way, because i also really love football and i mean, real football, not the american football thing tony morelan 01 40 no, i you know, i appreciate that they did bring the mls to the us for all of the soccer fans here but yeah, i can only imagine you're probably a big fan of the european leagues eric krause 01 51 yes, i still wake up early in the morning and watch some of the games the good ones in europe still live? it's an addiction, maybe? i don't know but it's a good one tony morelan 02 02 so what is the what is your team? what team do you follow? eric krause 02 06 being german, i have to go with a german team so that's brucea, dortmund right now a second plays unfortunately right behind bayern munich but maybe this year, maybe we have a chance i'm cheering on i'm going to sit there with my jersey on when they play and i have a small figurine, that is like dressed up as a barista don't want a character and depending on how they play, that the finger is allowed to look into the living room? or if they badly have to turn around and then just stare the wall it's kind of the you don't you didn't do well so go into the tony morelan 02 37 so what is the current state? is he is he looking positive and into the into the future? is he in a timeout? eric krause 02 43 it just turned around? actually, because two matches ago, they last had a turnaround but the last one they actually won so it's allowed to look back into the living room yes tony morelan 02 54 nice so riot games, you are global head of marketing for league of legends tell me what exactly is that role? eric krause 03 01 yeah so in that role? no, i have the pleasure of overseeing all the amazing teams that do all the crazy and awesome marketing work across liga legends on pc, and wildrose, which is the old version of liga legends and we've kind of created this as a group, because it's kind of the core of of league of legends and that's how people perceive it and it's actually very similar in terms of what we're trying to promise to players, right in terms of, hey, if you play this type of game, this is what you will get out of this in the state ultra competition i had and that is kind of the whole purpose of that group to really defining you know, what does that competitive aspects of league of legends look like? what does it mean to, you know, build a platform ecosystem that's built around celebrating mastery? sure but also, through league of legends, a lot of people do get to know our characters, and our champions that they know and love so we're also taking care of that, right, making sure that, you know, as they, as our fans, you know, have their champions that they really cheer on to give them as much love as possible for the champion that they love tony morelan 04 11 so, yeah, yeah, no, i know, it's a huge, huge community how long have you been in that role at riot games? eric krause 04 18 fairly recently, actually, um, you know, i was, i was given that role last summer and before that, i was actually leading up the marketing team that launched all draft, so okay, from that roll into this new role that started to exist as of last summer got it tony morelan 04 38 and you've been at riot games for how long? for eric krause 04 41 over five years, and it's so weird, because i always think of myself as somebody fairly new to riot sure but when i now meet new rioters, they're like, oh, we've been there for five years you're a veteran, and then myself, like, don't say that to me that's not true i feel like i just joined yesterday but yeah, it's over five years tony morelan 05 02 wow, no, but you are originally from germany so there has to be some sort of journey that's led you from your home country of germany, to i understand you now live in southern california eric krause 05 12 yeah, right now i do live in sunny los angeles and the passion for gaming eventually, you know, moved me over here because at the beginning, during college, i started to work for an agency that was working with ea back at the time and through that i became a community manager being coming and kind of the phase and local go to person for various games and franchises that ea had in central europe and eventually, through that work, ea was like, well, can't you just move over to the west coast, because you're working with all these teams already and you're, you're, you're flying over so many times, sure, just move, just come over and i did that and that was more than 10 years ago, at this point, our move to los angeles, and from there kept working for a couple more years, at ea working on things like mass effect, command and conquer and others, and moved on actually to a korean company, also in gaming, which gave me a new side of learning about like free to play and life service operations, which obviously is a big part now of gaming and then eventually, that led me to working at riot which, as we said, it's more than five years ago, which crazy to say, tony morelan 06 32 wow, now riot got their start back in the in the 2000s correct? eric krause 06 36 2006 yeah, as a tiny, tiny startup just with a with an idea and, and now it's like, it's so obvious, but back then it wasn't tony morelan 06 47 yeah, cuz i know, back in the early 2000s, you know, when gaming really started, you know, becoming extremely popular gamers were kind of looked upon as this is just like this, this little hobby, and, you know, go spend your free time but i mean, with esports, it is just blown up over the years eric krause 07 05 yeah, totally and i can proudly say that we're part of that i have because we believe that and we actually spend ridiculous amounts of effort to really promote and build up the professional esports circuit around liga legends and when we did that originally, which is also now more 10 years ago, people laughed up on us i had they're like, what is this? like? this is not a sport, right? like, it's just four people in the basement i had like, doing these things and now we look at it and you're like, yeah, if we look at our world championship i had has more viewers than most sporting events that americans know and love, like nba finals, we have more viewers in the nba finals, right? that's so easy it has come a long, long way since then tony morelan 07 51 so league of legends, they got their start around 2009 set, right, the first eric krause 07 57 version of the game came out 2009 because over the years, it has changed drastically for the better if you look at clips of the original league legends in 2009, it's pretty rough but again, it was 2009 you know, that's the beauty of life services, and also being really player focused, right, is that the game has come a long way not because you know, we necessarily had the most grandest vision for it but because once you put something out there, your players will tell you, well, we like this, we don't like that and we just kept listening and that's kind of our thing and we'll keep listening and evolve the game, you know, based on how our players really think, you know, what they believe is best tony morelan 08 40 league of legends has become a franchise and i know there's a whole bunch of games that have come out of that talk a bit about some of those individual league of legend games, eric krause 08 49 for talking about the games, but and how they've been talking about the ecosystem behind it i think it's important to understand why because most of the time, like yeah, just you know, making more games cool, you're making more money, right? that's, that's the traditional answer, if successful, if he just makes more of it for us, it's a little bit different because what motivates us really, is to create that ecosystem that allows people to express fandom very differently, okay, because right now, you know, as we all human beings, we all have different ways and how we play, right how we consume entertainment so we want it to be built something a large ecosystem that people can be really proud of, because it's not just forcing them to play one game to remain to be a fan of this thing that they might have started playing a 10 years ago but now they all these other different ways that depending on how their life changes, how they interest changes, how the new friends might play, different things are sure want to be entertainment and things we want to build them an ecosystem that it can be proud of and that's how we started to be like, okay, part of that is not only to make music and tv shows and what that's also making more games, right and through that lens, we actually announced a bunch of them doing a 10th year anniversary of league of legends, which was a big surprise for people and a good surprise and there, we announced a bunch of games ranging from like legends from terra, which is, you know, a card game that we made digital card game, then also tft team fight tactics, which is this auto bed law genre, which is a new upcoming one, which is really kind of chess meets, you know, game strategy put on top of it it's really, really weird one, but if you really lost strategy, like that, one is for you but we also announced brand new things through the lens of, you know, working with indie companies to really make games that are go really deep into very specific area that riot probably wouldn't make through our riot forged label and those have been received pretty phenomenal as well and last but not least, we also announced our first new ip, which is valorant, which we've launched now, as well, which is right now, first person, tactical shooter, tony morelan 11 06 it's really interesting so you've got this franchise, and you found all these different ways for different types of personalities to in to engage in the game so you know, from runeterra, being that that collective card game, it's similar to something like magic the gathering, but in a digital format and then what i'd love to hear about is how, you know, you're looking at the mobile space, creating a game to be played on mobile devices and that's where samson kind of comes into play with the game wild riff so i love seeing how you've taken this, this single game league of legends and turned it into a franchise to really expand the community and in the different ways that people can play and interact eric krause 11 43 part of it as we think about all these new games has been mobile, i'm actually pretty committed to mobile, because i'd wildwood is one that is built natively for mobile, which was one of the really big challenges for us but also, as we thought about some of our other games, like legends of runeterra, team fight tactics, they all have a mobile component of it, too so you can actually play it on a mobile phone as well because that's where, right if you think about trying to give players what they want, if you think about even today, right, the way people consume entertainment, which i include gaming in, has changed drastically in the earlier days, people have really made dedicated time for it, either, like, i'm going to be on a pc, thursday night for four hours, you know, i'm going to meet up with all my friends, you know, online, and then we'll just play or spend time on a couch or, you know, really make a block available, where i can just watch movies and whatnot but now, it really changed right now, you know that the trend that we're seeing that we're trying to lean into is, you know, people just whenever live gives them a small sliver of time yeah, in that moment, no matter what the situation is, people want to have the highest quality form of entertainment available to them no matter if it's on pc, tablet, tv, mobile phone, right, truly, wherever it is and that change pushes us as game developers to adopt, and this case to really embrace mobile ai, because it's not just about that trend it's also for a lot of people mobile is kind of the first and maybe only gaming platform they ever own yeah, so for us, it's also so important because they're all these hundreds of millions of people all around the world, that define who they are, as a gamer through the lens of a mobile phone and we want to be there because we want to show them what it could look like to be a gamer through the lens of riot, because we really want to make sure that they get the best possible experience and that's why we've started to embrace mobile and this took as a really long time, arguably too long because it's paired with other beliefs that we have, that we really want to deliver the highest quality form of entertainment and mobile took us a while to get there at the beginning, it was like the technology wasn't really there for us to have the capabilities to create these deep and engaging experiences because we didn't just want to use rip and you know, put something on a phone that when people look at me like right, what you put on a phone has nothing to do with the game or the ip i know and love over here so where’s that game? like the gameplay that made that pc game so special? we wanted to make sure that when people pick it up, and they're like, hey, this is a league of legends game that the mechanics to the quality that they can be like proudly say yes, yeah, this is a league of legends game so it took us a little bit longer to get there but now it's definitely part of how we think about the entertainment world right that mobile is a big part and arguably more growing part compared to pc and console tony morelan 14 50 so last year, riot games won a best of galaxy store award best strategy game for league of legends wild rift, tell me what did it mean to win that award? eric krause 15 01 people can see it right now i'm still smiling just kidding about it, because it's so awesome to see i called validation i because you can say all day long, right? that, hey, we're trying to, you know, really build the best things possible on a device on a platform to make players proud but it's really hard sometimes to quantify that right, as hundreds and hundreds of people are working on this day in day out so when do you know that you're probably on the right track? and one part is, obviously, players will tell you if they're happy or not yeah, but the other one is also, you know, recognition by the industry and that's why this actually means so much to us, as a team that is working on the game because it is that signal, i would like, hey, you know, samsung galaxy said, you know, this is one of the best games of the year and that makes us proud and that's why we should not only share that with, obviously, our fans, to make sure that they're like, hey, you know, we won this thank you guys, all out there yeah, to make it ultimately happen because without players, we wouldn't do these things but there's also now a very important part of, you know, how we think about the game and trying to recruit people because it's also the thing i'd like, as we all recruit for talent, i have so many choices of course, using it like, hey, this is an award-winning team definitely helps riot as well as a company to get more super awesome talent and to make even better experiences down the road so it's a very important thing for us yeah, tony morelan 16 33 i know, i've done a lot of these interviews with past winners this is the first time that i've heard that a company actually uses that award is a way to entice and encourage, you know, talent to come their way so while griff is fairly new, when was it actually released, eric krause 16 50 radware was released or started to release in fall 2020 and as they started to, because what we did is we launched in multiple waves, we started in fall 2020 launching in southeast asia and slowly over the course of time, up to our more recent launch in china, we just did a wave by wave and start to expand the availability of wildlife globally tony morelan 17 17 what's the what's the reason behind that sort of rolling release? eric krause 17 21 it was more of a technical nature, trying to because you find the balance right between when is everything totally ready for a global launch? versus when we have something we believe in? how fast can we deliver player value? yeah so finding a balance, sometimes it's this inner pole between you because one side i really wanted, like, don't do it, don't do it other than that, go push it out, push it out, of course so we decided to do that way to really, you know, get more player feedback along the way earlier, but also still give them experience in the earliest stages of the rollout that we still believe then being a good experience for them tony morelan 17 59 got it so it's almost like doing a beta release for software? pretty much yes so you know, knowing that league of legends was extremely popular on pc, and then you decided to come up with this mobile version wild rift, tell me about what is the process for building a mobile version game? eric krause 18 16 it was a long one you know, we spent several years trying to figure it out, really and what it led to was rebuild everything because the first instinct, right, when you have something that is working on pc is all let's just see what we can port over right? and, sure, we tried, but it didn't feel right when we want to be on a platform, right? when we want to put a name on one of our games, we want to proudly say that this is the best we can do it it's that's the best possible experience you can have right? and but just porting it, that didn't feel right, because a pc game wasn't made for the different screen so we decided we need to rebuild everything, using a different engine, you know, rebuilding all the art assets because when we started that approach, that's when it started to really click in terms of making use of the capabilities that a phone has, and also making sure that it just feels right, because now the thing is with the touchscreen, right? you can almost feel your champions and i obviously say that in a crazy way but if you just think about right like now you drag like an ability of a champion really on the screen, you see exactly what the tell the champion reacts to it it's almost some degree more direct the interaction with your champion, so it needed to feel super crisp so we decided to rebuild everything but it also gave us the opportunity to touch up a few areas of the game that you know, as you can imagine, at that point, you know, the game being more than 10 years old on pc that didn't hold up, you know, as well over the course of time so we actually started to rebuild a bunch of things to even like in terms of what champions look like, visually, to get them kind of on par with a modern for 21st century, it was kind of an opportunity as well and for us tony morelan 20 11 yeah, no, you know, we are really proud and excited that you guys decided to bring your game over to the galaxy store tell me are there any unique aspects or optimizations to the to the game that fans download from galaxy store? eric krause 20 24 yes, i'm not going to voice with the technical details but at the end of it all, is we wanted to make sure that no matter if you have a high end, samsung phone, or if you have, you know, a more entry level one that the game really gets the most out of the phone is that you get the smoothest possible experience and that require actually really working with samsung, they were super open for him to really work with us and help on optimizing the engine, but also working with us on some new sdk functionality that really allowed to make sure that the fight between terminals, like how much heat is being generated on one end, but also, how much power do we really put into all the components like cpu gpu, that we always find the right balance, that no matter, you know, how heated the fight is that your phone doesn't overheat, yet still gives you the smoothest experience, and been working endlessly for a couple of years, you know, with everybody at samsung, and we believe, you know, we achieved what we wanted to achieve, which is really giving you the best possible game experience on a galaxy device tony morelan 21 37 yeah, and knowing that, you know, we have so many different form factors with our traditional phone, as well as the z fold, and the z flip, all of which can be used to play wildlife correct? eric krause 21 48 actually, in fact, i do play wild rifts on my phone tony morelan 21 52 that's great so tell me about this relationship with samsung how did that first start? eric krause 21 58 it's fun sorry, because you know, samsung and right, we're thinking very similarly, about the space and that is really, how can we provide the best possible entertainment experience on the go? i had that is true for samsung, right through their products but it's also true for riot with our games and software so through that those early conversations, we pretty quickly identify like, it's pretty obvious for us to work together on this site and from there, it was all history, i had started to partner and really figuring out the ways on, you know what that means for us as two companies collaborating with the sole purpose of giving gamers the best possible experience on a mobile device and that partnerships now ongoing for like, last two, three years tony morelan 22 47 yeah, that's one thing i do love, you know, working at samsung, they really do push that the partnership side of things i mean, i made myself totally available to the community when it comes to my areas of expertise at samsung and they've really pushed out with a lot of the people here so it's not just that, you know, we're a platform for you to deliver your content but we want to work with you to make the experience truthfully better for all those that are using our devices in your content so with wild ruth being such a new game, i'm sure it is extremely important and challenging to do that, that initial marketing, to promote your game so tell me about some of the tools and techniques that you guys are doing to help let the community know that hey, there is wild riff, and it's time for you to play eric krause 23 28 yeah, absolutely um, so in today's world, but when you think about it, you know, you have to really be where players are, you can't be as selective anymore as you might want it to be 1015 20 years ago, and that really is the guiding thing for us when we thought about, you know, marketing the game and you know, celebrating the launch of it and specifically being a mobile game what does it mean being where players are for us that was, you know, heavy emphasis on social media, on content creators, and just general video platforms, because that is the core circle of you know, how people on mobile phones consume content these days so that was a very big investment of ours, to really lean into that, you know, and work with the right parties but the other thing that's exciting is when you think about mobile is, you know, the capabilities that it brings that you weren't really able to do on a pc, even when it comes to marketing what i mean by that is like, guys, a great example is, you know, using ar and vr technology, you know, on a mobile phone, it's actually pretty straightforward so we played with a bunch actually made microsites for events and launch events we turned them into three dimensional things you can actually walk around in and up there we did 180-degree videos so as you watched it depending on you know, what you were looking you saw a different thing of the scenery and of the story being told that video, and all these fun things i did you can start doing and creatively unlock if you embrace mobile as a platform, not only what the game is app, but also how people consume content, right? and then the other aspect being a mobile game specifically as it sounds, it's mobile, right? it's on the go deck will have it everywhere, even real life so for us, it was also important component to figure out what, how can we promote it, where people are out there when they use a phone, right, so not just being on the phone, but in the actual real-world context so obviously, with the covid, 19 situation happening was a little more tricky for us to do so but we still were able to find, you know, arguably great and yet safe ways to do that in the real world like, for example, in southeast asia, in some markets is all about food, right? like people love food there, they'll go to street vendors, you know, just grab something and even make it a social hangout space, i will just meet around a food cart sure, we really leaned into that aspect in southeast asia and actually created a campaign that celebrated some of the fruit that you find in the game on the map, brought it to real life actually created something that looked like it but felt very specifically, i guess, different, sure, and created an activation around it and we're really proud of that one because again, not only were we able to pull off, despite all the constraints around us but it also was more recently recognized, winning a grand clio, for one of the best marketing experiences over the last couple tony morelan 26 26 of years wow, that's exciting and for those that don't know, the clio awards are basically the oscars when it comes to marketing and design so and i understand you also did something pretty creative with youtube, as far as an event, so yes, eric krause 26 41 we also did something, youtube, which we also want to clear for and that was really the concept of while people are waiting to play the game, because we're doing it in rollout stages, like one wave after the other what can we give people in a cool interactive form, to kind of experience the game without playing it and wanting to come to mind is as part of the game key objective, and the game is bare nasher, which is this massive, giant warm thingy, that that you can slain as a team and we made a game on youtube, about that experience but it was kind of an all versus one kind of experience we're all players watching the stream had to come together, and actually work together to in this case, slay and bear nowshera through various inputs that they could give through chat and whatever the chat inputs were that the community decided something would happen on the screen, in terms of fighting him with a specific attack called different champions and for help heal yourself and things like that so it's kind of a massive, interactive game, that that people play it and it was really cool to kind of again, test the waters with what's possible, with all the platforms out there tony morelan 27 59 wow, what a great and super creative way to truthfully build a community to, you know, act as one so all total to date, how many downloads? how many users would you say i've played while drift? eric krause 28 11 it's hard to say, but it's definitely high up there to 10s of millions but i think the best number that describes you know, when we think about league of legends, you know how big it is, is a number we just recently announced and that was for the end of last year, we had 180 million people in a given month, play, you know, a league of legends game wow and the majority of that is driven by wild drift actually, i have because, you know, people were waiting for having finally a mobile part of this ecosystem available to them and that that is really, you know, the promise that we delivered upon, giving them something that they could proudly call legal legends is now you know, available on a mobile phone, because it is league of legends, it is the core game and people pay that back to us by coming, downloading and playing the game and we're really proud that we were able to expand the ecosystem for our players the way we did tony morelan 29 15 that's amazing and that is that is huge, especially for a franchise that just shows the longevity of the of the brand, after all these years to still be creating new experiences for the community and seeing the community grow that big eric krause 29 28 it's the proof point that the product lifecycle curves that they teach people during the mba is that they can be defied if you just really have a customer focus, tony morelan 29 38 but how do you guys come up with your ideas for games? the beauty eric krause 29 41 of making video games is really, if you can dream it up, you can make it sure and so that really the creativity in your mind is kind of the limiting factor here and because of that inspiration can truly come from anywhere for making a game and finding like what what's fun about different experience, being it reading a book, you know, watching just our fans talk on youtube about something, right, playing a board game, or just generally just sitting there in a rocking chair and you know, thinking about, like, what could be better in the world, you know, truly, ideas can come from anywhere and that's the exciting thing about gaming as a medium, because it's like creating these things that are interactive, for people to then explore themselves and be surprised and delighted by and because of that, you know, an all push for finding new ways to give players what they would want and that is that more robust ecosystem, we now have invested into a pretty robust pipeline of r&d games so that visit different genres, to really make sure that one day we can give as many players as possible, kind of the ecosystem that they deserve tony morelan 30 54 i love what you said about if you can dream it, you can make it a game and that's true, because i remember the first time i picked up cards against humanity, absolutely love playing the game and as soon as i was done at a notepad, i'm like, okay, how can i make my version of cards against humanity, it just was so simple but so, so much fun and that was true you know, for many years, i've often come up with ideas for, you know, game boards, or collectible, you know, items even going so far to pitch some of these ideas none of them worked out i ended up deciding to go into tech but yeah, i love what you said that if you can dream it, you can make it eric krause 31 33 yeah and that's the thing i had, it's like it all, it doesn't have to always work out, right? even was trying to see if there's something there with your idea as crazy that might be sure there's a high chance it will not work out that's the same for us in our r&d pipeline and just because we're starting to invest into a game, it doesn't mean that we're going to make it ibm has a high chance that as we go down that rabbit hole, and we're like, yeah, we weren't really able to find the fun or like, yeah, i don't really know how to make that game it just possibility i so there are a bunch of things that are being canceled internally or put on a shelf but the things that you learn from it, probably inspire something else and that's something else might become the next big thing it might change humanity forever beyond yeah because a lot of the things that we now take for granted in all worlds, sometimes were accidents, i will people will actually try to invent or find a different solution to different problem and then as a side product, they invented x, right? yes and that is what's always keep trying tony morelan 32 41 so when it comes to like developing a game and pitching that, that that concept i can imagine it must be a little bit like actually pitching a movie i mean, with storyboards, storylines, characters, i mean, games have become so involved that that's how i think it would be but tell me, is it? is it anything like, you know, pitching an idea for a movie? eric krause 33 01 it's, tony, it's definitely a process because a lot of people think about making games, just pay a bunch of people get together and just make a thing, and then they release it right and sure, that could be a way but probably will not give anybody the results they're looking for and players probably would look at me like, what is the scam? is it's not fun, it doesn't feel right so that's why it's really going through that process of multiple stages that kind of really stack on top of each other in a sequential, right, because we want to make sure that first, the core idea of what makes that game fun, potentially, is really thought out i've really thought and it goes through the process and figure out like, hey, do we believe that this will be true? then it kind of when that is happening goes to the next stage of like, can we actually make that game before even really making the game? because that's the other thing you might dream up this crazy idea, but nobody has an idea how to actually make it clear and that will also be problematic so that's really about focusing on all the kinks i'd like so what would an animated character look like? and feel like? how much work? is it actually to make it or whatever it is like, what would this open world feel like? and what's the visual quality target? we're aiming for all these things, trying to figure out these answers to all these questions to before the game actually goes into full production that's when you actually make the game and again, it seems a little counterintuitive, right? because people like well, why waste all the time at the beginning but it's really part of the process for us to make sure that when we release a game as riot, that players can be proud of it yeah, when they pick it up it doesn't just feel awesome but it really changes and provides value to their lives, right as a gamer we want to have that high borns high bar that's why not every game will make it to that pipeline it's okay everybody knows that but that's really important aspects of it tony morelan 34 55 so how long would you say it takes to go from concept to actually a published game? eric krause 35 00 it's really depends on, you know, the genre, the type of game, the scene, the scope of it, either you can see games that are actually done in two years but you can also find games that will take five years plus, i had to go through that pipeline so it's really variable based on kind of the project tony morelan 35 18 and that is quite an investment, you know, to have to forecast out like, hey, this is we're not going to see a return on this for another three to five years that just shows you the commitment that riot has eric krause 35 29 well, i think we're right, it's not it's not even that it's not that we're thinking about, hey, you know, what's, what's the investment for just putting a game through r&d? because the philosophy of riot, it's about that long term value to the player ecosystem? sure that that is kind of our very first way of thinking about it so rather than thinking for us, it's like, okay, it doesn't take two or five years to put it through, it's more like, once it's out, can this be a 10 plus your game that really pushes the genre forward, that really changes the game exchange that really adds to our ecosystem in a long term way, and provides value through that that's how we think about it and that makes it a little bit different in terms of sure how we approach games but again, that that's how the whole belief of the company is built around that and it actually makes for in our eyes for better outcomes for players tony morelan 36 22 sure, sure you know, there's a lot of competition out there with the with gaming, what has been your your strategy for discoverability? eric krause 36 31 it is, obviously, you know, people have choice there's no way around that but there are a couple of things that that we try to do a really put our flag down in terms of making sure that players actively seek out riot games, because obviously, there's the obvious answer of like, hey, you spent all this money on media on user acquisition, right? i mean, that's a fair way of doing it and riot is participating in that way right of pushing discoverability but there's also the other aspect, right? if you do create an environment that people cherish, i've been through a super recognizable ip that has stepped or through really providing highest quality entertainment options available, no matter the platform, all of a sudden, you get players that want to play your games yeah, i had that actively, you know, looking for the next strike game, not only for themselves, but even to the degree to talking to the friends about it and that is kind of the other part to us, either naturally, probably the leading thing, actually, for us to really invest into these high quality, ip driven ecosystems, that gives players the best experience and then through that kind of grow from the inside out what were people who are in within the ecosystem are happy to go out to their friends, you're like, hey, this is an amazing game, you should play it with me and that is the two components for us but as i said, the latter one being the more focus piece of tony morelan 38 01 it yeah and i think in another way, it's also evident how you don't have to pay to play that there is an opportunity for people who just want to pick it up and, and have a little fun with it but yeah, obviously, you know, you can generate revenue through wild rift so what has been your strategy for generating revenue? eric krause 38 20 all goes back to when it comes to how do we make money because yes, we do have to make money one way or the other because our philosophy is we want money to reinvest back into the ecosystem sure for us, we don't want to just do it in a way that feels bad that's like a big thing like, if somebody gives us money, we want a player to feel good about it, because they got great value and that means we don't want to partake in some of the more predatory monetization models that exist out there so as gamers, for example, you know, you hated when there are these energy systems that limit the amount of time you can actually play a game, or you have to like refill your energy or whatever to, you know, play another match or something like that we don't do any of that we don't want to limit how many times you can play we also don't want to sell anything that give somebody an unfair advantage in terms of making them stronger, or having all of a sudden different abilities that you don't have access to so it's really about, you know, allowing people to monetize to do by things that are more appearance based, more vanity based because that way it's about them deepening their almost relationship with their favorite champion with a favorite character and that doesn't have really any impact on somebody else playing with them in the sense of being unfair, but instead gives, you know our players actually more diversity for the champion that they already no love, and more different appeal, and almost celebrating it with them that they have gone so deep, you know, with the champions and that's really the majority of, you know, for us and how we think about monetization yeah and that is really the focus for us tony morelan 40 16 now, you know, the user experience on mobile is different than it is on pc what were some of the challenges that you guys face when, when it came to designing a mobile game? eric krause 40 26 it's, it's very different, right? that's why we really, really had to rebuild it in terms of design as you have a smaller screen, sure, but also completely very different input mechanics and how you steer, i had a champion so really rethinking all of that was a really big part of the prototyping phase of the game, to redo even some of the champion mechanics to better fit the, you know, mobile environment, to again, really make the best out of it or another great example, for the design experiences, you know, average game on pc is probably 30 minutes to play league of legends but nobody wants to spend 30 minutes, you know, into a heated match on a phone, actually, for people that think about phone more so is like, more bite sized experience that they can have on? sure so that was a big thing for us it's also well, from a design perspective, it's like, oh, how do we bring it down to let's say, 15 minutes i to make it more bite sized, without losing the core experience that people know and love from pc so that was like, as an example for, you know, how we thought about the design problems to solve going to mobile, but again, to really make use of mobile, not just a software for the sake of it, but to really leverage, you know, what mobile is giving you then when it comes to publishing is also very different we self-publish, you know, the game, on pc and that obviously, is only means that, you know, we use our own tools, everything sure but if you think about mobile, and we work with great partners like samsung, i had to get the game out to make sure that people have a great convenient and safe environment to get the game from so there, it's actually for us learning all the ins and outs of the tools and the capabilities and even working, you know, with samson to figure out if there's any functionality that might be missing, that would be cool to make it even better experience for players so that was actually also a big switch for us, that we had to learn and really invest into to teach ourselves what that looks like sure and then also the marketing aspects of it all as well you can't just copy whatever you're doing on pc from a marketing front and just call it day i like yeah, we did it cool because it's not only the way again, people consume media slightly different but as far as i can go back to opportunity, because people might notice that, you know, the game is actually called league of legends wall drift it's not just called league of legends or league of legends it also looks slightly different feels slightly different and that was purpose because as we think about wild rifts within the ecosystem that we've built, while two of more so is kind of to inspire the next generation of legal legends fans so what does that mean, for us, as we, as people consider playing us or not? yeah, are the changes that we should be making to be more appealing? and that's what we did because also the game is slightly different in some detail mechanics, we didn't want to mislead our core fans as well, but completely saying hey, they exactly the same because they're not core fans will immediately be like, hey, this ability, eric, that's that one is different so don't call this exactly collections, because, you know, that's slightly off and that's, that's, that's awesome, because our fans are as dedicated so we also didn't want to mislead them hence, also part of the marketing experience being slightly different be like i know, this is league of legends while drift, which still totally deserving of the name league of legends because yeah, it is that core experience, but it's still slightly enough different to give it that different tone tony morelan 44 01 yeah now, you know, one of the things that stood out for me when i first played the game, was the music i mean, it was extremely cinematic so tell me a little bit about the music of league of legends wild rift eric krause 44 13 yeah it's so interesting what music can do to an overall experience i remember, i had to play test at some point and it wasn't a music it was like a bug it was like, pre before release and it was so interesting to me because it felt so wrong but initially, i couldn't pinpoint what's wrong with it, because i actively didn't notice that the music was missing but it really felt i was like, what's going on? is this this doesn't feel right and then eventually, we were like, oh, yeah, the music is not playing any of this i'm like, ah, yeah, that and that now i feel it i and that's the thing it's, you know, most of the time people don't really think actively about music, yet it plays such a big part to connect you better to the experience you're having to how can music be part of that emotional connection to what you're doing so it's not just some fireworks going off on the screen but that also that you feel that if something is on the line, the music should help tell you that at least subconsciously like, hey, something's on the line but the same, so it's like, if you go back to, you know, your home base, your fountain in the game, the music policy tell you like, hey, take a breather, right? it's okay, like, this is a safe space and that's really how to think about music i'd like making that like a way to connect better with the experience, even though people don't actively notice tony morelan 45 35 and all of the music that you're hearing in today's podcast, is from the league of legends wildlife soundtrack so now that you've worked with samsung, so closely on bringing your game to the galaxy store, what advice can you give developers that would like to do the same? yeah, eric krause 45 51 i mean, being on mobile, for me is about reaching massive audiences, massive audiences that use their phone to really define who they are as a gamer and when you think about it that way, samsung is a massive part of it, i had, it's one of the largest phone manufacturers in the world dedicated to creating the best possible experience on the go and that lens, kind of, at least for me, thinks about as like, and it's a no brainer, i had to be on the galaxy store, especially, you know, as we found out through our experience, that the extra work required to do so it's actually very minimal so it's a great value add, add to reaching, you know, more players, and eventually more fans of your products, through again, a lens of quality and pushing experience forward so i guess the short answer is just do it tony morelan 46 51 wonderful that's great so tell me what is in the future for riot games eric krause 46 57 our ceo, nicolo, he just recently actually shared a blog post about that on riot games com that kind of spilled the beans a little bit of our next five plus year journey that we're taking on as riot games and because for us, it's really about that expansion of the ecosystem and how can we, again, make it better to be a player? how can we find better ways for people to express fandom? how can we give them more experiences, beyond the ones that we've already provided to give them a more diverse way of interacting with riot games, league of legends, ip, or maybe even new ips, and says long blog posts, it talks about all these things in detail but that's kind of really what you can expect for us to keep chasing, you know, our players and then needs that will see us invest in our existing games, but also many new ones across many new genres we will really push esports further beyond our games, because we believe that esports is just an integral part of the entertainment environment in the future i had so we'll try to innovate and push forward there but also explore different mediums i mean, we've just done it with arcane, that released on netflix, just several months ago, but expect us to do more things that are not just games again, the pursuit of providing super rich ecosystem that people can be proud of as a fan tony morelan 48 27 yeah, so arcane is the this new animated series on netflix i actually watched a little bit of it, it is hauntingly beautiful tell it tell us a little bit about that eric krause 48 36 you might think about like why is riot making a tv show? right? again, it goes back to you know not everybody has time to play games all the time yet, they're still a fan of thing that that you made many, maybe many years ago so how can we give them like a connection to their fandom back without telling them hey, play this new game or play this old game and that's where it is really about entering different mediums that have different accessibility bars miss case tv so for us though, and through that lens was very important to make arcane as kind of that first statement nardone to expand the universe really beyond just games for people to think about the league of legends, ip and ecosystem as kind of this multimedia experience that you know, crosses all these different mediums and this was the first kind of statement that we made and it goes really into the story of some of our most beloved champions and their background but there was also made in a way that if you are a fan of league of legends, and you couldn't really convince others why you're so crazy about legal legends that you could give them that show i'd be like, hey, let's watch it together it in an attempt for you to explain, hey, this is why league of legends is awesome, because you can watch it without any context of the league of legends world sure and that was also important to us to give our fans kind of an invitation that they could send to their friends and loved ones to be like, hey, you want to share my passion? he has a different way, how we can do that? tony morelan 50 21 yeah, so it really is obvious that riot games has become an entertainment company, not just a gaming company how big how many employees work for riot games eric krause 50 34 at this point, we're well past 3000 and still growing quickly because as you can imagine, right, it's creating all these dreams making them try to reality for our fans, you know, is requires a lot of people and, you know, we're not shy of investing into those impossible dreams come true across all of our offices, right? it's not just you know, here in la i know, we have offices all around the world and as part of our next evolution of riot, you know, we've seen more offices and games being made all around the world, and experiences being made all around the world it's really, you know, also capitalize on, you know, there's not just one type of gamer, depending on where you go around the world what means to be a gamer also does look and feel different so that is also something that we have to really think about, as we expand into, you know, the future of what riot can look like tony morelan 51 33 yeah, so people listening to the podcast if they're interested in working for riot games so what's the best way for them to learn about how to apply for a position at riot games? eric krause 51 43 yeah, i mean, you can find us on almost all the networks you can think of but generally, the two ones i do recommend is either go to riot games comm where you can learn more about riot, but also, you know, what we're up to, and you know, what positions we have open but also like on things like linkedin, where we all have our own presence and you can also check out you know, blog posts there and as well as our openings, and also even connect with writers and ask them about their experiences tony morelan 52 11 that's great and i'll be sharing all of the urls in the in the show notes for not just rankings, but also for wild rift and, and your social handles so with diversity and inclusion being such an important aspect of our of our society, right now, tell me what is riot games doing related to d and i eric krause 52 32 it's a very important question, tony and for riot, you know, the two lenses that that i described to people on how we are thinking about diversity inclusion the first part is obviously the one that people probably think first and foremost off, which is riot as an employer and, you know, me talk about my personal experience here, the way that, you know, riot has invested over the last couple of years into that space in terms of time, but you know, money and just general resourcing has been phenomenal i've never seen, you know, such a heavy investment being made to do the right thing because yes, it did require a wake-up moment for us as a company but that moment was really turned an opportunity, i had to make better to be a writer to work at riot games so now you know, it, there's not just an d and i team that exists, but also, you know, what they do and how they impact the company is part of all the processes all around i to ensure that no matter what might be, that riot is a welcoming, and fair environment for everybody and that is an extremely big investment, and actually really proud to have seen the reaction to arguably, you know, the not-so-great moments that we had in the past so i'm sure that that makes me actually pretty proud, based on my experience but the other part also that sometimes people forget when it comes to diversity and inclusion is right as a game creator, right? because with that, you kind of have a responsibility as creatives to create experiences for millions of millions of players around the world that kind of allowed them to relate or in better set like that, feel seen it through the things that you make sure, because you can quickly fall into a pit trap or, you know, just create the same things over and over again, that fit a worldview of specific group, but makes other people feel left out yeah and that's part of the responsibility that you have as a game creator so as part of the development process, to promote diversity and inclusion through that content that you make and a very recent example actually is valorant our shooter that we have because they're one of the most recent champions that just launched or agents it's called, is actually a female karen actor inspired by filipino culture because we want to make sure that you know, if you are, you know, not just one, but in the philippines, which arguably if you think about gaming, especially, you know, often a completely overseen and overlooked that if you are a filipino gamer, you're like, yeah, i feel seen sure i because there's now this agent in this game that, you know, celebrates my culture and i'm proud of them and that's an example of i had for how we as game makers also have some form of responsibility to promote diversity in our culture tony morelan 55 36 yeah, i love what you said not only about how riot is taking diversity and inclusion within the company, but then you're impacting your influence outside of the company into our society that is absolutely wonderful so tell me, what do you do? outside of all of your work at riot? what do you do for fun? eric krause 55 58 what to do for fun? getting to learn anything about new cars or old cars, so i spent unhealthy amount reading and watching videos about it tony morelan 56 08 so what was your what was your first car and what is your dream car? eric krause 56 15 my first car was, was an older audi a for a vons station wagon because in europe, we love our station wagons, which i know for americans like and don't like, of course, dream car is really hard, because there's so many amazing cars and sometimes actually fantasize about it like, i'll just pick one which one would it be? and, and probably right now, my dream car is a porsche 356 a, which is a very old school, porsche, but in terms of just the body lines, you know, just amazing unfortunate i never had a chance yet to drive one i'd probably drive so amazing tony morelan 56 56 that is so funny you said that because i was waiting for my turn and mine is also the porsche 356 ever since i saw the movie top gun, beautiful porsche just yes into the sunset i've always wanted to get my hands on one funny story my wife, she had asked me when we were dating, where do you see yourself, you know, later on in life when you retire? and i said, i see myself with a porsche 356 so hopefully, when that day comes when i do decide to retire, shall let me get that dream car, eric krause 57 28 if not some amazing fortune i get one i'll call you up and then we can ride together in the sunset tony morelan 57 34 thinking for a swim but hey, let's stay away from that la traffic eric krause 57 37 that's sure yes, that's we'll definitely have to go outside of las tony morelan 57 41 hey, eric, i really appreciate you taking the time to be on the podcast it was wonderful to hear not only about yourself, but the great things that are happening over at riot games eric krause 57 49 thank you it was a pleasure yeah, definitely thank you for having me closing 57 52 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 58 08 the samsung developers podcast is hosted by tony morelan and produced by jeanne hsu

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Whalekit’s George Airiyan Discusses Award-Winning 'Left to Survive' for Samsung

jeanne hsu, senior marketing manager for developer relations at samsung, chatted with george airiyan, the development director of whalekit (part of my.games). his job entails business development and execution of all external partnerships with the help of a small research & innovations department he manages. jeanne hsu (jh): george tell us a little about you. what was your professional journey that led you to whalekit? george airiyan (ga): i’ve been in the mobile games industry for 16 years. my background is it and linguistics. while i was at the university, i started working as a programmer for it companies, leading teams and managing small software projects. then i felt i was ready for my next move and was offered a job as a project manager/producer at a mobile games company. i really loved the people, the atmosphere, and being part of the creative process so i stayed in the gaming industry and have worked with some of my colleagues for more than 15 years. jh: it sounds like the people were an important part in your journey into gaming. ga: yes. some of those people i met in the gaming industry 15 years ago, are now part of the core team at whalekit. jh: tell us about my.games. ga: my.games is an international brand with 13 regional offices in europe, the us and asia, with more than 1,800 staff employees and 14 internal studios including whalekit. my.games develops games for the pc, consoles and mobile devices. the company operates more than 80 titles with a total portfolio count of 150 games, including in-house made hits like war robots, hustle castle, rush royale, left to survive, as well as skyforge and allods online. there are more than 900 million players registered in my.games titles around the world. the company also has its own media portal, the my.games store platform, investment division mgvc, and other assets. jh: tell us about whalekit. whalekit is a team of professionals whose core members started making mobile games in 2004-2005. we have been making 2d and 3d games since the pre-smartphone era. with the adoption of smartphones, our business and operation models changed reflective of the industry: instead of “release and forget” paid titles, we shifted to games as services and free-to-play, regular live operations, social features and much more. we have always aimed at the highest possible quality level, and these days left to survive is also available on pc along with major mobile stores. whalekit is one of my.games’ largest studios with more than 120 employees. it specializes in developing hi-tech 3d-action mobile games. among the games produced by this team over the years, there are hit titles like deer hunter, contract killer, and frontline commando. in 2018, we released zombie apocalypse shooter left to survive, which found millions of mobile fans. whalekit’s vast mobile development experience allows the studio to keep trying something new, train its staff, as well as solve complex creative and technical issues. jh: how did the relationship with samsung first start? ga: we had a meeting with samsung representatives at gdc 2019 where we discussed the opportunities and agreed to work on the partnership. jh: congratulations on winning the 2021 best of galaxy store award-best action game for whalekit left to survive for samsung. what does it mean to win this award? ga: we are happy and honored to win this award. it’s a sign of appreciation for the whole team. our specialty is action games; it's something we think we do the best. we know that the game is interesting, enjoyable, and addictive. but it's always great to be recognized by the industry. jh: how did you come up with the concept for the left to survive game with players fighting the zombies that have overrun the earth? ga: our team has specialized in action and shooting titles, including zombie shooters, for a long time. we were thinking of how to take our games to the next level and realized that players wanted a deeper sense of progression and more variety in the gameplay modes. that’s how the traditional campaign mode got interconnected with base building, pvp and base raids. we noticed interesting demographic trends, with female players showing an inclination in zombie shooters as well. so we decided to take this theme and grow it. [pvp means player versus player, interactive games between human players.] jh: what are future plans for the game? ga: we know that players like our game, with many of them playing for months and even years. we are going to continue providing unique content and engaging mechanics, so more players will stay even longer. left to survive - 2021 best action game game ideas, discoverability, and reach jh: what games from my.games are on galaxy store? ga: we have left to survive and warface: global operations (both from the whalekit studio), american dad! apocalypse soon (from the nord studio), rush royale for samsung (from the itt studio) and storyngton hall (from bit.games). jh: where do you get your game ideas? ga: everybody in the studio can come up with their own ideas. we don’t limit ourselves to a certain genre or theme. naturally the overall potential is estimated by studio experts when we decide to proceed with a new idea. jh: how does it mesh with your motto “free to create and ready to explore”? ga: we sometimes have game jams. it's sort of a standard thing for the gaming industry, when a studio breaks down into several small teams, not the whole studio, just those who want to participate. they’ll spend one day, two days, or a three-day weekend, creating prototypes of the games that they think are fun. then everybody in the studio looks at them, and votes for the top idea for the best implementation. some of them even make it further to prototypes of real games that could be a potential future project. as for the idea of exploration, these game jams aren't limited to any theme or genre or scale. it could be anything. jh: with all the competition for games, what has been your strategy for discoverability? ga: making a great game always comes first. while discoverability isn’t trivial, as long as the game has good metrics, our marketing team will do their best to advertise it on various channels. it's also important to optimize app pages and work closely with the stores. jh: what platform do you use to develop your games? ga: we use unity 3d. it allows us to create high quality visuals on a wide variety of devices. we programmatically detect the hardware in terms of performance. for lower-end devices, we show optimized graphics, switching out some of the visual effects so people can still play it. the game is not as visually rich at the lower end, but it's still playable. but for higher-end devices, we switch on all the bells and whistles. we’re quite happy with what unity allows us to do. jh: on your website, it says my.games has $562m in annual revenue (2020 figures). that’s amazing. what has been your strategy for generating revenue? ga: there are several factors at play here. primarily it’s the company’s diversified portfolio with 150 titles across various genres for different audiences. anyone can find what they’re looking for in the my.games catalog. the second factor is that we are proactively developing our mobile projects as the mobile market is the biggest and fastest-developing sector and therefore more promising. 75% of our revenue accounts for it. finally, the third factor is our global focus. this is why international sales accounted for 77% of my.games revenue in q3 2021, with the u.s., germany and france as the top markets. jh: why is it important to offer your game on galaxy store? ga: galaxy store is a great way to increase the player base in important territories. the biggest territory for gaming companies is the united states, of course. and we see quite good coverage in the u.s. for galaxy store. it’s been a very positive experience for us. marketing and user acquisition jh: what are some of the ways you promote left to survive? ga: here are our websites and channels: my.games: https://my.games/ left to survive: https://lts.my.games/ facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lefttosurvive youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/whalekitgames/featured jh: i noticed you have left to survive video trailers for your active facebook community. ga: we actually use some of these trailers for user acquisition. we have an in-house team to produce these video creatives. some of them are really cool. some of them are quite funny. this is something we pay quite a lot of attention to. because nowadays, most of the user acquisition is done via advertising in other applications. it’s done with videos; every company does that as a standard way of looking for new users. you just show your ads in somebody else's application and people may click on it. jh: i see the trailer for the game like a movie trailer at the theaters or online; if it looks interesting, i will make a mental note to go see it. maybe after watching the trailer for left to survive, i’ll want to learn more about the game and try it. very clever. diversity and inclusion jh: what is my.games doing related to diversity and inclusion? ga:. my.games believes in equal opportunities for everyone. we never look at nationality, race, sex or beliefs. the ratio of women to men, for instance, is around 40% to 60% and growing. it’s quite common to see women in all positions, including management, engineering, marketing, game design, qa. jh: what do you do for fun outside of work? ga: i love playing beach volleyball. even in winter, when there’s snow outside, there are indoor “beaches” where you can play beach volleyball. jh: i’ve never heard of an indoor beach. ga: yeah, they bring in net posts and lots of sand. it’s a lot of fun. jh: what else? ga: i love sports as a whole. i used to play quite a lot of football (soccer). i love travelling with my wife and three-year-old son. we’ll take a car and drive somewhere. of course, with a small kid, it's not as easy. but now he's growing up and can handle longer journeys. we’ll do more of this again. jh: thank you for your time george. it’s been a pleasure getting to know you and whalekit. congratulations again to your team! ga: you’re welcome.

Jeanne Hsu

https://developer.samsung.com/sdp/blog/en-us/2022/08/02/whalekits-george-airiyan-discusses-award-winning-left-to-survive-for-samsung

success story game, mobile, marketplace

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Snowprint Studios' CEO Alexander Ekvall Discusses Award-Winning Games and Success with Galaxy Store

jeanne hsu, senior marketing manager for developer relations at samsung, chatted with alexander ekvall, co-founder, ceo at snowprint studios about their award-winning game rivengard. jeanne hsu (jh): alexander tell us a little about yourself. alexander ekvall (ae): i’m a lifelong gamer and game maker who has been lucky enough to be able to combine my passion with my career. growing up, games had a profound impact on my life and continue to play an important role now that i have a family of my own. experiencing firsthand how games can provide meaning gave me an incredible source of inspiration and motivation. i hope to be part of developing games and communities that can be meaningful for everyday gamers. jh: what is your role at snowprint studios? ae: i am a co-founder, ceo, and game director which means i have many roles. my main responsibility is to make sure every snowprinter has the best possible environment and conditions to deliver great gaming experiences and the foundations for communities to grow, while also nurturing our company culture/ethos. jh: what was your professional journey that lead you to snowprint studios? ae: since my early teenage years i've been taking every chance i could to develop games, which also heavily influenced my choices in terms of education. during my studies for a msc in computer science, i teamed up with a group of fellow students and we started our own company creating games for palm os, nintendo ds, j2me etc. this was a great team. i have had the pleasure and honor to work with several of the team members since then, some as i started my second company. we had a great run and i got the opportunity to work with an amazing team which led to us being acquired by king. eight months after joining king we had developed and released candy crush, which was followed by another 2.5 fantastic years at king. king is a brilliant game developer, and i learned and grew a lot during my time there. i am forever grateful for being part of the journey at king, and that the stars aligned for my next opportunity. teaming up and reuniting with old colleagues, and new colleagues from their networks, we ventured into mid-core gaming to create new genre-defining experiences in turn-based-battle as snowprint studios. jh: where is snowprint studios located and where do you live? ae: snowprint has offices in stockholm and berlin. we also have people working with us in the u.s. i live in stockholm. jh: how many employees work at snowprint studios? ae: there are 38 total. there are 35 across our two locations: 20 are based in södermalm, the creative heart of stockholm, and another 15 are based in berlin. three snowprinters work remotely from the u.s. jh: so it’s still a small company. sounds like you have some really dedicated people who follow their passion as well. ae: yeah. it’s also one of the cornerstones of what we believe in. our vision is to deliver genre defining turn-based tactic experiences. in order to get there, we have small highly talented and autonomous teams where everyone has a significant and important impact on what reaches our players. this is a great way for us to always keep the player in focus during high level prioritization all the way to the smallest details. jh: how did the relationship with samsung first start? ae: we are constantly looking for the best ways to reach players and we were thrilled when we got the chance to collaborate via an introduction from a mutual friend. for me it is quite simple, galaxy store wants to provide their users with high quality content and we want our games to appear in high quality contexts such as the galaxy store. and it is a huge plus to be working with the talented folks looking after games at samsung! snowprint studios rivengard samsung award jh: congratulations on winning the 2021 best of galaxy store award - best role-playing game for rivengard from snowprint studios. what does it mean to win this award? ae: one does not make games for the awards, but it is a wonderful feeling to have your efforts acknowledged and celebrated. it was definitely a special moment for everyone who worked so hard to bring the game to market. it's also an opportunity for us to show players, who haven't gotten to experience rivengard yet, that this is the best role-playing game (rpg) experience released in 2021! which, in turn, will help bring more players in to join our great community! jh: in what ways have you promoted winning the award? ae: we proudly shared the award with our community, in discord and on social media. and of course, it’s featured on our websites for the game and on our snowprint site. jh: what is the history of the snowprint studios franchise? ae: we first opened our doors in stockholm on april 20, 2015, with a team of old friends and colleagues who had amassed great experiences from all different parts of the industry, including key positions on the largest franchises ranging from casual mobile to aaa pc/console and game engines. we united around the idea that with the unique set of combined experiences within this team, we were in a strong position to bring genre defining turn-based battle games to a massive audience on mobile. this is a genre we've loved playing and see as underserved in the market. since our founding, we've developed two games based on the above idea. the first is legend of solgard with a puzzle-tactic core mechanic that goes beyond the traditional match-3. our second title, rivengard, tailors and evolves the classic hex-based tactic core mechanics for a premium mobile gaming experience. both games feature intense tactical battles and slick ui set in fantastical worlds inhabited by extraordinary characters. our games let players progress through story driven campaigns, partake in events, battle each other and collaborate in guilds to take down massive bosses; all of which are enhanced by the communities being an integral part of the experience. we have been lucky to be able to continue to grow the team with amazing talent and open our second studio in berlin, which is where rivengard is developed. in addition to the continued development of legend of solgard and rivengard, we are now developing our third game, warhammer 40,000: tacticus. we are working hard to live up to, and go beyond, the expectations of such a beloved ip and deliver a premiere warhammer 40,000 experience. jh: how did you come up with the concept of the war of the five gods for rivengard? ae: we were looking for a good way to divide up our heroes and factions and get an understandable system for how they might relate to each other gameplay-wise. we also wanted to go beyond simple good vs. evil, especially since rivengard is a game where players would collect all kinds of heroes, from all factions, rather than picking a side. with five heroes being the standard lineup in our core game and five being a magic number mechanically (rock, paper, scissors, lizard, spock) this was a good place to start. structuring the world and the factions around five different world views or philosophies that also inform their relationship with each other felt like a perfect fit. jh: it’s amazing that rivengard launched back in jan 21, 2021, and has grown so quickly. what do you attribute to the game’s success? ae: gamers appreciate new experiences and new challenges to overcome, and they know when a development team appreciates their feedback. we have a very active community and dedicated players that bring their friends to the game, along with marvelous player ambassadors who help us improve the game with every update. jh: what made the game unique from other rpgs? ae: the unique aspect of rivengard comes from our mission of perfecting turn-based tactics for mobile, achieving real tactical gameplay through swift and snappy battles with an exceptional level of polish. this allows for challenging and rewarding battles that can be completed in minutes instead of half an hour or more, delivering an approachable experience with depth to last for years. jh: snowprint studios wants to “create rich experiences for the everyday gamer!” how has that guided the execution of your games? ae: first, it’s about knowing your audience. we make games for people like ourselves, people who play games every day as part of our lives. we love to talk about games, dissect them, discuss and argue over them, and play them with our friends. games are a passion and a part of our identity, so we want to do amazing things for people who feel the same way. next, we want to make games that fit into busy lives, but can also be enjoyed for a few hours while sitting on the couch with a cup of coffee. we all remember marathon gaming sessions with our friends and we still enjoy that, but it’s good to have something with the same energy that fits in our pockets. that’s why we aim to bring real depth and richness to the mobile platform. we can’t count on big cinematics to impress people, not on a screen that you hold in your hand. so while we pride ourselves on making gorgeously detailed art and design, the big thing we try to do is to create the opportunities to have experiences. real wow moments, where you were down to your last hit points but had the chance to pull off a clever strategy. or chances to work with your friends and execute a plan that couldn’t have succeeded without everyone’s efforts. and we always want there to be a feeling of discovery, the sense that there’s something new around every corner. game ideas, discoverability, and reach jh: how many games has snowprint studios published on galaxy store? ae: legend of solgard and rivengard are the two games available around the world on galaxy store. jh: where do you get game ideas? ae: everywhere! as with other art forms, inspiration is not in short supply. our experiences, our friends and family, our cultures, other games, and our player communities all have something to add. jh: how long does it take to go from concept to published? ae: how long is a piece of string? 😉 it really depends on how much iteration the basic concept needs, and then much depends on the early testing. sometimes it can be quite quick, a matter of months. other games take years to come to fruition. for the types of games we are focusing on, the development time until global launch tends to be at least 18 months. jh: with all the competition for games, what has been your strategy for discoverability? ae: we work very hard on performance-based marketing, but grass roots development is very important to us. if someone who loves the game brings a friend to the table, their friend is a lot more likely to love the game than someone who saw an ad. jh: what platform do you use to develop your games? ae: we develop our games using the unity game engine. jh: what has been your strategy for generating revenue? ae: first, make sure that we have an amazing game that continuously keeps providing new and valuable experiences; by focusing on this, we deliver experiences that players will want to pay for. jh: what challenges have you faced when it comes to designing, publishing or marketing? ae: we are in a highly competitive part of the market, competing with companies sitting on huge marketing budgets where breaking through requires much more than a great game. but it’s not a bad thing that we need to be as creative in our marketing as in our game development! we need to leverage the design, publishing and marketing all together. in the early days we were very focused on the design of the game and worked with partners for some of the areas of publishing and marketing. we have since then transitioned into an independent studio working on all three of these areas in unison and we are now getting closer to having the stars aligned. a related challenge is to find the best way to operate our games in regions that are outside of our area of expertise. jh: how do you source your music? ae: everything in rivengard and legend of solgard has been made in-house. but we also work together with partners for some of the sound effects and might look to them for music too. jh: why is it important to offer your game on galaxy store? ae: we want to go wherever players are, and we’ve seen more and more samsung players joining our communities. we’re delighted to have them. feedback and advice jh: you mentioned you’re in touch with the players. how do they give you feedback? is there a regular channel? ae: we have the usual forums and facebook groups for the social aspects of it. but we also have a very active group on more direct chats such as discord. we also invite our more engaged players into our ambassador program; we stay in close touch with the players, have them play test builds and test out new features to obtain input before we go live to the larger population. jh: what advice would you give developers looking to bring their games to galaxy store? ae: that's a good question. we want our games to be where players are. we want to be associated with high quality standards. and we want as many opportunities as possible to reach players to give them great experiences. the samsung store is a good fit for all of those things. and it's not that big of an extra effort to get on galaxy store. all our interactions with the team at galaxy store have been great as well. we are there and we think you should be there too. jh: what is in the future for snowprint studios? ae: we’ll continue to operate and develop innovative, interesting, deep turn-based tactics for as long as people want to play them. and continue to develop or games in a direction where the players are a more integral part of the experiences, there is a lot of interesting opportunities here! jh: what are some of the ways you promote rivengard? ae: here are our websites and channels: website: https://snowprintstudios.com/ website: https://snowprintstudios.com/rivengard/ facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rivengard.game/ discord: https://discord.gg/tnneu3mn2x youtube & videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0fenioojmo company culture and fun jh: what is snowprint studios doing related to diversity and inclusion? ae: we find a lot of value in having a diverse team to get as many different kinds of inputs and angles that influence the gaming experience. we are also very focused on kind of getting the best functional teams together. so in our hiring, we work on being as inclusive and open as possible when we create the job listings, our postings, and design our ads. jh: how do you promote fun with your teams? ae: the main thing is we have our snow day where we get together and combine work and fun. it's basically like our conference. we look at the big picture and ask where are we heading? are we going in the right direction? we take a look at our ethos, we discuss our ethos, and we refine it. and we also kind of just have fun together, do a bunch of different activities that we plan out each year. so it's new activities for each snow day, including escape rooms, vr, or gaming competitions. jh: escape rooms? that sounds really fun. is it virtual? ae: no, we’ve done real escape rooms. and also the kind where there was a big hall where you could go on a vr adventure. although, this was before the pandemic. jh: sounds like you’re keeping the team together. ae: yes, we try. it’s definitely a challenge during covid. before covid, we used to do spontaneous gaming get-togethers at the office. “who wants to stick around for this gaming session or board game?” that’s hard to replicate during covid. jh: what do you do for fun outside of work? ae: besides playing games? 😀 i love seeking out new types of experiences that i can grow from. in more recent years that has included jet skiing (wave runner) and fpv [first person view] drones. finding opportunities to enjoy new experiences with family and friends is the best combination. jh: thank you for your time alexander. congratulations again to your team! ae: you’re welcome and thank you! be sure to also follow us on @samsung_dev to keep up-to-date on the latest developer news, and keep an eye on our blogs for other helpful resources. you can also sign up for the samsung developer program to take advantage of exclusive benefits and access helpful developer resources.

Jeanne Hsu

https://developer.samsung.com/sdp/blog/en-us/2022/04/19/snowprint-studios-ceo-alexander-ekvall-discusses-award-winning-games-and-success-with-galaxy-store

Learn Developers Podcast

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Episode 5, Aurelien Lavaud

season 1, episode 5 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 aurelien lavaud global associate director of business development, gameloft / asphalt 9 linkedin david bitton, senior global account manager, samsung linkedin in this episode of pow, special guest host david bitton, senior global account manager at samsung, interviews aurelien lavaud, global associate director of business development at gameloft david and aurelien not only talk about the amazing success of the asphalt franchise racing game, but also the partnership between samsung, gameloft and the vivendi group, the global entertainment and media company that owns gameloft listen download this episode topics covered gameloft history samsung partnership the vivendi group asphalt 9 licensing best of galaxy store awards 2019 more about gameloft & asphalt 9 gameloft is a french video game publisher based in paris the company operates 19 development studios worldwide, and publishes games with a special focus on the mobile games market try asphalt 9 for a spin on your samsung device! go to galaxy store to download, drive your favorite hyper-car and become a racing legend today! helpful links gameloft com asphaltlegends com facebook content creators 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! podcast of wisdom from the samsung developer program, where we talk about the latest tech new trends and give insight into all the opportunities available for developers looking to create for samsung on today's show, we're doing something a little different our interview is with gameloft, the french gaming company that won the 2019 best of galaxy store award for best racing game asphalt 9 david bitton, senior global account manager at samsung sat in as a guest host to chat with aurelien lavaud, global associate director of business development at gameloft david and aurelien not only talk about the amazing success of the asphalt franchise, but also the partnership between samsung, gameloft and the vendee group, the global entertainment and media company that owns gameloft and what else is unique about this interview, both david and aurelien are originally from france, but david currently lives in korea and aurelien lives in vietnam and the music that you're going to hear in this podcast? well that's all the official music from the soundtrack from asphalt 9 enjoy david bitton 01 12 hello, welcome to this session so i'm david bitton, senior business development manager at samsung and based in korea today i'm very excited to have a volunteer from gameloft, the game company behind the asphalt franchise so olivia, welcome hello, david, aurelien lavaud 01 31 how are you? david bitton 01 32 good thank you let me start by asking a basic question who is okay yeah aurelien lavaud 01 38 level i'm already a level global by director of business development gambler so my daily routine consists in creating and deploying public partnerships with manufacturers all around the world and what i love in this in this job is such gives me the chance to be at the front line of innovation, discovering new technological trends that i can then use to provide insight to a developer on teams and improve, keep improving your games so i also used to be on vr on the sides two years ago, you aflac i took part in the development of some iconic titles, such as the revamped versions of snake or tea trees so i try to always have this double heart with the understanding of technical feasibility within the business model, the business directions we want to implement on a more personal level, i'm fortunate to be based in vietnam, in southeast asia, very beautiful new age, and i will i highly recommend to visit if you're into hiking, or kayaking me to an amazing wildlife so that's what i'm trying to do enjoy as much as i can on my feet hi david bitton 02 48 yeah, that sounds exciting, especially because i'm based in korea so that's not that that's far so yeah, that could be a great a great opportunity can you talk a little bit more about the history of gameloft? aurelien lavaud 03 04 certainly so gamma was created in 2000, with a patient for games and the desire to bring them to even more pay on the war by bringing the wonders of games to mobile devices, we have creating a one new market that became 20 years later, the biggest market in gaming so what we did over the years was shipping companies to be able to deliver this vision and today we are 4600 employees, over 17 developers to throw the war and where people are working hard to bring new games to a wide range of devices with ad hoc or patient david bitton 03 46 that that's great you said that you have 17 development studios around the world so that's quite big, more than 4000 employees and you also have a very large game portfolio so, again last is it like the more games, the better? aurelien lavaud 04 04 well, i talk all we want everyone to play and we believe there's a different game for everyone so no matter the device, language, the region or the general, we try to make it available so having a very powerful you come with logic and we provide for brain wide range of different experiences for a wide range of people preferences david bitton 04 30 okay just to dive a little bit more into your, into this samsung partnership out of curiosity, how long have you been working with samsung as a partner? and how did that start? because i guess, from what i know, that's, that's quite a long-time partnership here that we are talking about aurelien lavaud 04 51 yes, we have been working with them for more than 15 years wow so we started on the feature phones at the time java devices were king dennis pink starting to pick up on truth 2010 with project on the first something series, and we had the asphalt wcag series that we signed that was memorable, made a lot of noise and later on in 2019, we are refreshed and we started our collaboration with another big name game of catalog with yes one nine on the galaxy app store that was off a long list of games coming david bitton 05 34 as we as we know game lost is also a part of the of the vivendi group which is a global entertainment and media company so how do you see opportunities and synergies not only internally within your different business units and sister companies but also externally with your partnership with samsung aurelien lavaud 05 59 we have already been developing great synergies, especially with kind of priests we developed by putting on a run and we walked into with universal music on the fallout by integrating in as well i, i see on some of the older partnerships like disney, we were working with them before prior to the acquisition david bitton 06 20 and speaking of these of these games, you mentioned that disney for example what are the games currently included in the in the partnership does the first question and second question for you would be what were the criteria to include them in the in the partnership? aurelien lavaud 06 39 usually we started with asphalt 9 games it was perfect timing because we are now celebrating the 15th birthday of our series happy birthday thank you so i will introduce later you can reach asphalt 9 facebook page or we also have a dedicated website as www asphalt9 com where you can discover everything about just full series along these 15 years and you can enjoy some, some gift that can take part to some to some get involved into the hype game and david bitton 07 23 i will certainly do that yeah, aurelien lavaud 07 24 thank you for furthering the discussion after asphalt nine we started working on dragon manual agents together at disney magic kingdom and legally it wasn't necessary great now we are also working on some stuff too and we are planning to release in next month on the samsung galaxy app store david bitton 07 46 great, great so more and more games are coming but if we if we want to get a little bit more specifics on the asphalt 9 because there was a second of the aurelien lavaud 07 58 game here asphalt 9 offers like a fully licensed cars so initially how much time did it take for us for asphalt nine to team to convince the most prestigious brands to join the game to create enough momentum to stop the engine? no pun intended so yeah, we've been working with car manufacturer for more than 15 years now so the process was asphalt nine was actually quite smooth, because we had already a lot of a lot of partners on board what happened is that we present into game to twitch partner and we are all very excited to be part of the adventure so we got already all most of most of all, car manufacturers david bitton 08 48 some early discussion to launching a model from a new car manufacturer earlier, how long does it usually take to incorporate this discard into the into the game aurelien lavaud 09 00 while dvd it will already depend licensor for the partners we already work with, it's pretty fast, it's a human but on the partner we want the new partners that we want to integrate into games to work with us we need to pitch the game first and then create some legal contracts and we are more on we own a few months up to one year david bitton 09 29 and now that asphault nine is celebrating its 15th birthday so that's kind of nice teenager and is getting also more popular do car manufacturers also promote a sold night in their own channels? aurelien lavaud 09 45 yeah, i put is a very interesting that they do we recently launched into the coming season and license or use these two promos, every kid on their social network oh great great on top of that, with longtime relationship with bree to them we are often walking in close partnership to have some unique experience to our users so as an example, we collaborated recently with lamborghini so top players could be invited in lamborghini hq in italy david bitton 10 20 i think there was a mistake here because i didn't get invited so i would love to maybe to play a little bit more on the on assaulter so, aurelien lavaud 10 31 yes, train a train half an hour and you may be the next one david bitton 10 35 okay, okay so i will play and repeat just for a forum actually, the samsung ran many asphault nine tournaments included, including in the netherlands, korea, the us at our annual developer conference in south africa as well when usually trying to promote the launch of new devices like galaxy note 10, for example, or when running some events like galaxy studio around the world so thanks to them to the customization of this publicly available ap can gain we could we could offer a unique experience to our users so i guess that the different teams involved the there must have had some extra hours of developing testing and as we said, playing as well right in the tribe we have been putting a lot of work on this live demo units, give you some numbers we are looking at around 300 hours of testing wow so that was heavy, but i needed to make sure all the products were top notch yeah and our latest developer conference in the in the us, you went on stage to receive a best of a world in the in the racing category for us asphalt 9 so what was your feeling regarding this, this event aurelien lavaud 12 16 that we're feeling was amazing i mean from via reception or via word to the game booth that was welcoming a huge crowd of people eager to play asphault nine on the lattice samsung galaxy fold it was three more i believe in david bitton 12 33 and in speaking of galaxy fold, actually, you also on book two to create a customized version of the game for galaxy fold that that would support app continuity so from your side, partner perspective, what were the lessons learned there during this, this approach and the development? aurelien lavaud 12 57 i think this project was particular interesting because quilted was new for the team they had never been walking on, on this feature so what they were discovering, and they were eating, they were eating some wood blocks so at some points, they weren't progressing anymore and that's where they started, we started to connect or different developers seem together with your ui on the team at samsung and we were able to overcome to overcome the difficulties that both teams were working together to deliver our very nice products and to make sure that we can keep this continuity and move from one screen to another two tablets off when we opened it to the device, without any interruption without any change so it was quite collaboration and we learned a lot from this david bitton 13 52 let's switch gears here and admit and let's talk about the future if i if i may so 90s is right now in full, full speed again, happy birthday assault without revealing any trade secrets, i was wondering what would trigger the release of assault then? would that be like a new game engine on which you're working on or some kind of revolutionary user experience? could you could you share a little bit more about that? aurelien lavaud 14 26 should they so i will probably disappoint everybody but at the moment we are not planning to release something yet there's a reason behind is that there are a lot of work to do on asphault nine so as for nine i've never been so successful there are plenty of new features and contents we are planning to offer on asphault nine so objective is really to prove us on nine first, to focus on innovation to make sure we can integrate new features new contents, new cars, new tracks to deliver perfect and expanse of course will promote ensuring new technologies as well and there will be integrated into us online but no vision at the moment for us have felt any relief because we still have so much work to do and david bitton 15 14 understood so, as you as you mentioned, you said that you regularly add content you features so, would you have any exciting location coming up soon for as for nine aurelien lavaud 15 28 bring a new location is always a very important part of the game because it helps us to rediscover the game unfortunately, i will not be able to deliver any information in wales next tracks will be what i can do is to invite user to general on a facebook page where we are trying to keep the hype to make the user guess what is the next track so you can take parts to the discussion, you can get involved on the facebook page you will get more insights step by step on the new tracks we are planning to release okay? okay the other thing i can tell is that we also have this this content creator opportunity so you can go on www asphaultnine com/creators and he, you can take part into the content creation show interested so you can get more insight on where the game is heading you can get more involved into the game okay, okay, a way to keep the hype going david bitton 16 30 your team i mean, the asphalt 19 aurelien lavaud 16 34 as a unique expertise in racing, modeling cause even experiencing crashes, for example so, actually, i have two questions here is their first any plan to leverage this expertise for a new racing game from the same team does the first question and second question more generally, how much of transferable skills feels a dedicated studio team can have when it comes to creating games indeed, we have some studios that are specialized in different games but overall, there's a lot of shared knowledge and synergies between the different teams so, our promise to you is the same for you or at company level we work on different types of titles, different types of channels and different for different audiences but based on the resources leads based on the experience of the team, we will be able to be flexible and to bring people to support us our team to allocate resources differently on the project that we need needs to last so we always try to develop or games or team and grow people to make sure they can, they can move to a different type of projects to a difference a different type of develop different type of skills and they can yeah david bitton 18 01 okay, okay great, great going back to this partnership with samsung, any exciting plan you would like to develop in the, in the future with a samsung any, any specific any specific ideas that you that you would have to grow to grow the business aurelien lavaud 18 18 actually we are very open and now since we started with the partnership we were really impressed with all the innovations you guys we are bringing so we could be looking at other new technologies from artificial intelligence to augmented reality virtual reality cloud gaming we are going to explore it a bit everything and we just probably need the time to see what kind of walk and how we can do this together david bitton 18 54 exciting just between you and me if you will to own one of these hyper cars that that are available in asphalt nine if you if you don't have the already, which one? would it be? would you have any preference for a specific hyper car? and second question, where would you drive this car? aurelien lavaud 19 17 unfortunately, i do not have any of these cats i wish i did i wish i do but no, i have a sweet spot for the cats sharon i would i think it would be quite nice to drive it on the italian coast so we could have a clever, nice, nice view on the mediterranean sea and enjoy the ride david bitton 19 44 okay, this this sounds nice yeah just to just to finish here with a last question we do have any closing comments for developers out there? aurelien lavaud 19 57 yes as a matter of fact i have so we were very happy with sort of the experience we do guys is i think it's a very good experience to walk with samsung in the way that you've always been super supportive so i was about studying when we were developing dual screen, the team was the wizard team was hitting some roadblocks and, and in both for the teams working together, to fix everything, and to bring things forward we were also quite impressed with all those new features and new technologies you are developing on your recent models and for us, give us a way to improve the game experience for the user to provide to users new features, and to deliver a more memorable game experience david bitton 20 48 okay, yeah so, two things that are here for to do thank you first happy birthday again to the asphalt franchise and second, thanks thank you for your time again i hope we could we could shed some light on our partnership between samsung and again last and also get developers excited so earlier thank you thank you again for your time aurelien lavaud 21 16 thank you very much for the invitation on this podcast was very, very interesting and i really hope we can develop new technologies and develop organs further on samsung devices outro 21 30 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 www developersamsung 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

https://developer.samsung.com/developers-podcast/s01e05-aurelien-lavaud.html

tutorials mobile

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Seamlessly Integrate “Add to Wallet” for Samsung Wallet

samsung wallet enables users to easily access various digital content, such as boarding passes, tickets, and coupons, on their samsung device. users can save the content to their samsung wallet by clicking an “add to wallet” button or link. this article describes how to integrate your digital content with samsung wallet. each piece of digital content is represented by a wallet card which you must create and launch within the samsung wallet portal. after successfully launching the card, you can create an “add to wallet” link for it. prerequisites before you can create wallet cards for samsung wallet, complete the samsung wallet partner registration and onboarding process, including encryption setup. after onboarding, you receive an email with your public key and signed security certificate. keep this information in a safe place. important your company can only obtain partnership for a single samsung account. store your private key securely, as it is needed for wallet card management. your encryption settings cannot be modified without administrator approval. creating wallet cards samsung wallet supports the following wallet card types: boarding pass event ticket coupon gift card loyalty card id card create your wallet card at the samsung wallet portal. you can create as many cards as you need. the samsung wallet portal also allows you to manage your cards and monitor their performance. testing wallet cards use the “add to wallet” test tool to test the card at any time, before or after launching it: in the samsung wallet portal, enable testing mode for the card you want to test. skip this step if you have already launched the card. on your samsung device, go to the “add to wallet” test tool and sign in with your samsung account. select the card from the list and provide test data in the appropriate fields. in the “partner’s private key” field, paste your decrypted private key. this must be the same private key that was used during onboarding. noteif your private key is encrypted, you must first decode it with the ssl command. an encrypted key starts with the following text: -----begin encrypted private key----- once decoded, the key starts with the following text: -----begin private key----- 5. tap the “add to samsung wallet” button to add the card to samsung wallet on your device. for more information about testing wallet cards, see “add to wallet” test tool. launching wallet cards when you are ready to make the wallet card accessible to users, click “launch” to start the verification process. launching a card cannot be canceled. figure 1: wallet card launched the samsung wallet administrator reviews the card and approves or rejects it. if your card is rejected, check the rejection email for the reason. modify the card to address the issue and launch it again. for more information about wallet card verification, see launch wallet cards (verifying status) and launch wallet cards (rejected status). implementing “add to wallet” links after launching your wallet card, create a link that users can click to add the content to their samsung wallet. to include the card data in tokenized form, use the following url format: https://a.swallet.link/atw/v1/{card id}#clip?cdata={cdata token} where: {card id} path parameter is the unique identifier for the wallet card in the samsung wallet portal. #clip hash parameter is case-sensitive. cdata query parameter contains the encrypted card data in jwt format. for more information, see the "cdata token generation" section below. if the encrypted card data is longer than 2048 bytes, or you do not want to include the tokenized data in the url, store and reference the card data on your server. create the url in the following format: https://a.swallet.link/atw/v1/{card id}#clip?pdata={reference id} where: {card id} path parameter is the unique identifier for the wallet card in the samsung wallet portal. #clip hash parameter is case-sensitive. pdata query parameter is the unique identifier for the card data stored on your server. for more information on “add to wallet” links, see add to wallet interface. cdata token generation the card data in basic json format must be provided as a jwt (json web token). for token generation details, see security. you can also study the cdata generation sample code. to ensure your cdata token is valid, keep the following requirements in mind: pay attention to the mandatory fields in the card object. all timestamps are utc epoch time in milliseconds. card data attributes vary based on the card type. for detailed card data specifications, see wallet cards. your private key must match the key used for the security certificate signed by samsung. if you are using the correct private key, the following commands generate the same hash: $ openssl rsa -noout -modulus -in partner.key | openssl md5 $ openssl x509 -noout -modulus -in partner.crt | openssl md5 generated jwt tokens expire in 30 seconds. the “add to wallet” link must be used within this time. otherwise, you must generate a new token and new link. next steps to integrate the “add to wallet” feature as a button in your application or website, see implement the button. you can update the information on a card that has been stored in a user’s samsung wallet by communicating between your server and the samsung server. for information, see server interaction. if you have any questions or face difficulties implementing the content in this article, you can contact samsung developer support. related resources samsung wallet documentation integrate “add to samsung wallet” button into partner services code lab

M. A. Hasan Molla

https://developer.samsung.com/sdp/blog/en-us/2023/10/26/seamlessly-integrate-add-to-wallet-for-samsung-wallet

Learn Developers Podcast

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Episode 10, Chris Shomo

season 1, episode 10 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 chris shomo infinity watchfaces in this episode of pow, i interview chris shomo from infinity watchfaces chris was one of the first designers to start selling watch faces on galaxy store and has become a very successful app designer along the way he has inspired many other designers to start creating for samsung with his willingness to share his knowledge and expertise listen download this episode topics covered galaxy watch studio for tizen galaxy themes studio galaxy store galaxy store badges social promotion jibber jab reviews jibber jab reviews live chat iot gadgets samsung galaxy watch facebook group tap reveal galaxy watch3 asset creator lifestyle photos chris shomo sdc17 video presentation 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 0 02 hey, i'm tony morelan and this is pow! podcast of wisdom from the samsung developer program where we talk about the latest tech, trends and give insight into all of the opportunities available for developers looking to create for samsung on today's show, i interview chris shomo from infinity watch faces chris was one of the first designers to start selling watch faces on the galaxy store and has become one of the most successful along the way he's inspired many other designers to start creating for samsung with his willingness to share his knowledge and expertise in fact, it was a video i saw of chris who inspired me to start designing watch faces, which eventually led me to my gig at samsung so it is an absolute honor to bring him on to the podcast and let me warn you chris, and i'd love to talk and sometimes we go off on a few tangents, talking about how his house was not only featured in an episode of ghost hunters, but was also used in a big time hollywood movie and of course we talk a lot about designing and marketing apps for samsung enjoy tony morelan 0 58 i am super excited to have on the podcast today chris shomo from infinity watch faces so let me first actually start by asking who is chris shomo? chris shomo 1 05 hey, tony, thank you so much for having me on the show who is chris sharma i'm, i'm a lot of things i am a designer, which you know, initially, you know, when someone is a designer, they can be quirky, they can be geeky, sometimes they can be introverted sometimes or they can be outgoing it depends on my mood and the time of day, i can be a little bit of everything so, but you know, i can be the shy person in the room, but you get me talking about something that i'm interested in, and then sometimes you can't get me to shut up so i can absolutely relate to that, that you've pretty much have described my personality definitely, you know, being a fellow designer, and that's why i'm really excited about this podcast is that we can kind of geek out a bit as we're talking design cool so how did you first get your start in graphic design? oh, geez well, i guess it goes all the way back to when i was a little kid my mom always had me doing artistic projects for school actually, i would always find a way to make some sort of artistic project if i could for homework, i would always go to the art route it was a lot more fun and then in high school, i did a project it was a pennant drawing of the shakespeare globe theater and i did it for an english class and i decided to take an art class as an elective and mrs martin, my art teacher in high school, she asked for some examples of my previous work and out of my bookbag, i took out a folded piece of paper and then i just like unfolded it to this, this gigantic poster size of the shakespeare globe theater it was that that artistic drawing i did, and then she said, okay, lesson number one, do not fold up your artwork so, that's how i kind of got started and that drawing was pretty awesome and she kind of excelled me through she put me into the higher level art classes real quick they kind of skipped me a couple classes and i want a lot of awards against other students and some regional awards in the area and then afterwards, i decided to go to art school and my brother discovered the savannah college of art and design down savannah, georgia and yes, so yeah, i attended there wow so for a good while to almost like a van wilder experience but multiple degrees tony morelan 3 33 wonderful again, i could relate to that i definitely took the long route through college so straight out of college, then did you work for a large company? did you start your own your own gig? what did you what was your first step coming out of college? chris shomo 3 46 okay, well, i graduated with my undergrad in computer art with a focus on 3d animation and that was in 2005 and right after the i interviewed for some companies, and i just really did not want to be stuck in a cubicle, just you know, for the jobs that i was offered so i ended up taking a job for a contractor and helping build a house from ground up oh, wow and after that, i decided i was interested in architecture and i put together a portfolio and scad gave me a portfolio scholarship to come back and they paid for the masters and i got my masters in architecture tony morelan 4 21 wow i did not know that chris shomo 4 23 yeah so and of many secrets, i guess, some hidden talents there but i did graduate after the economy crashed, and it was really hard to find a job in architecture so i started a website design company and from there, i just kind of, you know, word of mouth i just kept on gaining clients until eventually i had clients all across the east coast so you went to school in savannah, georgia are you currently in savannah? is that where your offices based out of? yes, savannah is where my heart is i love the city and i'm actually president of the neighborhood association for the neighborhood that i'm in, and it's one of the largest neighborhoods in savannah okay and southern living magazine actually ranked the number one neighborhood to live in in the south as well right before all the craziness this year, we got that nation sure so it is quite interesting because it there's so many local businesses and residential neighborhoods in this neighborhood so just dealing with everything from alcohol licenses and giving our blessing and, you know, zoning issues and, you know, just figuring out what's going on with crosswalks and trash cans and all that kind of stuff you know, it's interesting tony morelan 5 40 so i actually heard a very interesting note about not just the neighborhood but the house that you live in yes, you once told me that it is actually haunted chris shomo 5 50 it is haunted and it's documented on a ghost hunters’ episode i believe it's 2010 home is where the heart is okay yeah, it's all about the current a family that was living there and their experiences with a ghost they say they've seen this ghost this little girl apparently, her name is tony clark and she's been appearing i guess for the past hour well, the previous owner salt or 200 times that's what they said 200 or more times, and ghost hunters did believe that there were dual entities in the house as well think okay, well, monique clark she is the daughter of the guy who built the house back in 1896 and he owned a lumber mill and he inherited this lumber mill from his father when he was 26 years old and he built a house known he was one of his daughters and apparently, she was one of the first women to receive a pacemaker for her heart and that led to her dying somehow i don't know what happened to it but she died when she was in her 50s but supposedly she's coming back is like a 12 year old girl i've never seen i've had some strange things happen in the house door slamming things disappearing from one place appearing in another place not my imagination other people have experienced things too but how she was identified is that the lady across the street had apparently, i recognize the description of the nightgown that she appeared in because she had made that night gown for her when she was young so getting a little cold chills thinking about it right now but it is interesting, but yeah, i don't feel scared in the house i think the house accepts me i have never had to smudge it or whatever you call it or you know, try to clear spirits out of there but it's an interesting story and it's always fun when somebody else experiences something tony morelan 7 46 oh, that is absolutely wild to hear you know, and we'll circle back to the whole aspect of design in this podcast i will note before i'm going to jump ahead just a little bit your designs have a little bit of a quirkiness to it and sometimes i'm seeing, you know, ghosts and aliens and the crazy thing so i think that may be where you're getting some of your inspiration chris shomo 8 08 yeah well, i mean, you live in a dynamic city, it's actually one of the most haunted cities in america sure you know, and it's one of the most wild cities in america too i mean, you have this, this local field, but then, at the same time, you know, it's one of the few places in america where you have an open cup, and, you know, take a drink from one bar to another downtown so it leads to a little bit of craziness but i myself pride myself in being a little crazy, you know, you have to be in this crazy world and i love surprising people with designs to light like one second yeah, you'll have a butterfly that looks realistic landing on your, on your watch and then the next moment, you know, you have some zombies that are appearing with your step, go biohazard z tony morelan 8 57 that's a great one yeah, definitely so we were fortunate actually to come out and visit you at savannah college of art and design where we came in hosted a session with your students, teaching them all about theme designing for phones and watch faces and that connection actually came through you so that was my opportunity to come out to savannah and get to meet you in person what a beautiful city i mean, it really in the campus itself to is pretty unique because from what i understand savannah college of art and design, they're like the number one occupancy of buildings in downtown is that correct? i mean, as far as the campuses is put together, chris shomo 9 32 yeah, it seems like it's every other building and it's really amazing what they've done for savannah they encouraged a lot of businesses to move in as well to cater to the students and they really played a huge role in where savannah is today you know, we get millions and millions of visitors every single year and schools to thank for a lot of that, you know, just the restoration projects and encouraging restoration and then of course, we have a great hit preservation society alone just in savannah being the oldest plant city in america, and in a genius plan to just how it integrates with all the giant oak trees that are in all the squares and people are really jealous of those, those oak trees and, you know, as a person living there, i always try to make sure that i go out and i do what the visitors do, just to remind myself, you know, what a beautiful city it is and then, you know, just going to school in those historic buildings as well it just it helps with the creativity and yeah, the location definitely helps with the whole artistic side of things tony morelan 10 39 yes, and for those who don't know, savannah is actually the city where they filmed the scene of forrest gump on the bench yep, that iconic moment in forrest gump where he's sitting on that bench that was in savannah at one of the squares i actually walked by that to take a look at that for myself just an amazing city chris shomo 11 00 and it's actually known for a lot of movies as well like the lady in the tramp that's on disney plus that was filmed they actually looked at my house to potentially film it there but they said that the lot was too big so they actually filmed it a few blocks down and yeah, and then also, my house is where the movie legend of bagger vance was filmed there's a scene where it's where the little kid lives the caddy and there's a whole scene at the dinner table where they're, they're talking and stuff that's my dining room oh, wow it was one of the houses the few houses around there that had a dining room with a view to the kitchen as well and they needed that for the scene so robert redford picked out the wallpaper it's kind of cool tony morelan 11 47 absolutely crazy yeah oh, wow i knew this podcast would be fun, but i have no idea so let's circle back around and let's talk a little bit about design okay, tell me how you first heard about the sample galaxy watch chris shomo 12 00 okay, well, i'm a tech geek i love any type of mobile tech, especially before the watches came out on i was like a cell phone fanatic like, you know, first we wanted them to get small and now they're getting bigger yes now we need the biggest phone ever, which i absolutely love but i was eyeing smartwatches for a while and finally i was like, okay, i'm getting one at the time i'm like, i couldn't really afford it but you know, i don't care i'm getting one so i went down to the best buy and i got the first gear s to sport i just loved it it was great but there was one thing that bothered me i needed more watch faces i was bored with the watch faces that were available and went on the it was galaxy apps before but now the galaxy store and you know, i even paid like i think it was like five or $10 for a watch face it looked like the coolest one out there then like, alright, how do i make my own? so that's when i just googled and i found it was the galaxy watch designer well, at the time, it was the gear watch designer 1 0 wow and, like, right when it first came out, i mean, i think i might have actually caught it within days of it coming out and i downloaded it, and i just started playing around with it and i never even planned on releasing any of them for anybody else i just, you know, wanted to make some for me and then i'm like, alright, look, i can, i can load some and see if i can make a few dollars let's do it so i think i made like $17 off of two watch faces the first day and then i'm just thinking to myself, like, you know, what if i have like 300 watch faces on there, you know, how much how much can i make her? so i mean, sure enough now gosh, i have about 394 watch faces and themes published wow, that's amazing and how long would you say this has been? oh gosh i started in i think it was february, early february of 2016 okay, so when i started, and you can actually kind of look back at some of my very early designs, and see how the design has improved over time sure the very first one that i did, i just called it gear spin and i didn't really know much about the designer, the software and everything i was just getting into, it didn't really think that i could even put a graphic on, you know, a watch hand and use it other than a watch hand at the time so i even animated a gear using adobe flash exported the frame animations out and threw it in there just to get a gear spinning sure now, i'll just put it on a second hand but i'm thinking coming from a designing standpoint, not a watch standpoint and, and that's something that you that you really have to start doing it start thinking, you know, i'm also a watchmaker in a way exactly, you know, so you got to start thinking, that language and that starts you know, meshing with the creative ideas and then you start, you know, you got to focus on functionality at the same time that you're trying to focus on dynamics and what it looks like, that sort of thing so tony morelan 15 11 that's true and you know, i do a lot of teaching to students just learning how to watch design and the challenges are that they've got this tool that can allow them to just do amazing graphics and amazing animations and then they forget that really, this is a time piece where people need to quickly tell what time it is so even though you can have a lot of fun with your graphics in your animation, you still need to make it where you know on quick notice, you can actually tell what time it is i mean, that's the whole the function of the watch and that's what i love with your designs as well i mean, you've got some amazing, fun, quirky, crazy designs i mean, everything from dogs and butterflies to spooky, eyeballs and reapers so let's talk a little bit about your approach to design and some of the tools you're using you had mentioned adobe flash so we're going back in the day oh gosh, yeah chris shomo 16 03 well, i don't use that anymore but i used to use that all the time tony morelan 16 07 so tell me kind of that your workflow, you know, when you know, from concept, your tools, are you sketching on pencil and paper when you have an idea, or do you just dive right into a software program? chris shomo 16 18 well, i guess this is where professors are going to want to smack me and i should be sketching more than that you know, scat always says, you start with the basics, and you start sketching, and i need to carry around a sketchbook but no, i kind of jump into the software first but in a way, i kind of sketch digitally i'll start with a program like adobe illustrator, just to get the basic shapes done and i'll move them into photoshop, of course, to get the nice effects to get the textures, some of the shadows or to create the shadow layers that you'll export separately later you know, those are our two the main tools of getting i guess, the framework of the of the watch, but of course, i like to do animations, so using a lot of after effects and premiere, and sometimes when i have to maya and all that kind of stuff, and then you know, getting it out to the, the frames, and also being very cautious about file size as well you know, we are dealing essentially with an app, even though it's very focused around design, which i'm very thankful thank you samsung for giving me awesome design software, where i don't have to code everything but, but you do have to remember that, you know, people will get frustrated if you have a, you know, a 50 megabyte watch face, which i mean, i could easily make one that large but it's all about understanding the compression and understanding your tools to make sure that when you deliver that watch face, it's fine, it's dynamic, it has all the effects but it doesn't take forever to install or it doesn't, you know, someone doesn't have an issue with it so understanding the technical side but really understand or design software tony morelan 18 02 that helps, you know, and you had mentioned a little trick that i may have actually learned from you in that where you had said that you know, your first animation was done using flash and bringing those in as animated gifs but you then said, hey, i could have just made this a watch hand and that's one of those tricks that when you realize that watch hands don't actually have to be watch hands it's the watch and feature is basically just a rotating graphic that you can then set its direction that it rotates, you can set the you know, the time that it rotates so again, another tip that came from chris that helped me in my, in my success as a watch face designer and i'm actually going to take this moment to thank you again, because it was your you had mentioned, you started in 2016 i think it was at the developer conference in 2017 that samsung invited you out to actually speak at the event was that correct? yes, that's right so tell me a little bit about that that experience, because it was after that conference, they posted the video online and that's how i first learned about designing for samsung it was finding this video of chris shomo from infinity watch faces speaking at the conference, that then got me excited so tell me a little about that chris shomo 19 20 uh, that moment, the whole experience was awesome at first late, like when you get an email saying, hey, would you like to come to the samsung developers conference? i'm like, what, at first, i'm just kind of like, samsung sees me this is cool you know how to play i'm getting so excited the experience was great meeting the team was wonderful and just, you know, the team itself were, you know, the designers of the software, the galaxy watch designer, and all that they were so embracing of everybody that came it was such a wonderful experience and then also talking with them and understanding, you know, their process and what goes into creating the software that was amazing too but i guess one of the, the most awesome and rewarding parts of this is all the designers led you, to me that have come to me, it's just like, just been like, thank you for giving that presentation because you guys showed me that, you know, anybody can do this and, and, you know, and then if you have some fun and, you know, wonderful designs that people like then then you can really succeed at it as well and i just i love that yeah, that i could influence someone to start a watch face design career there's another one in particular, that is with usa design he started a little bit later he was doing some games for the watch and he was there at the presentation as well and now he's like one of the top sellers it's amazing he jumped into it he founded as a design formula that works really great with the active two, especially when that came out without the bezel at the time, and is doing phenomenal and i just absolutely love to see that and the fact that i might have played a part in pushing him in that direction is just, it's rewarding it's humbling it's, it's cool tony morelan 21 28 yeah, no, that's, that's great it was you know, when i watched that video of your presentation, and you had mentioned, the first thing was that you can create these watch faces without coding you know, i've done a little bit of coding, but my experience is a lot like yours i mean, i had my own freelance design company i did a lot of website designing but when i learned that you could create these watch faces, really without doing any coding so it's just such an extension of photoshop or illustrator in using like after effects with the timeline you can have so much fun doing it you had mentioned earlier little secret again, just like the watch hands rotating how you could actually have buttons that you could tap and reveal things by using a transparent png that didn't have any pixels in it, you use that as sort of like a cover button well, when i learned about that, i then dove into this whole idea of being able to tap certain areas of the watch and have it reveal new things like, you know, if you wanted to show your step counter, you could tap an icon and it would then show the numbers so you could customize the look of the watch face, cleaning it up by not having all the graphics show, but tapping to reveal whatever sort of data you wanted to see your heart rate beats per minute, i mean, all sorts of different elements and it was from you the that i learned about that i then have totally expanded on that creating videos on tap reveal, that are shown on youtube and doing a whole thing around that and i've seen that a lot of people really enjoy, you know, learning about that and that again, came from you in that presentation so thank you a big thank you from the crowd of designers that really appreciate what you've what you've inspired chris shomo 23 09 thanks yeah, i mean, it's fun and that all kind of spawned from figuring out a solution to putting all this information on a watch face, but not making it look too busy and so kind of hiding it and revealing it there, it kind of making use with the tools that are given to you, and how can you make it work to simulate something when you when you don't have all the code underneath it so tony morelan 23 35 that's great so we've talked a lot about watch faces i know you also are doing theme designing so what was that progression? you first were designing for watches and then learn that you could actually do something very similar with theme studio and creating themes for our phone devices chris shomo 23 52 yeah, no, the whole idea is matching your watch face to your theme and having total continuity between the two and for example, the shock theme that one's actually a free one just called shock, you can look it up that's the most downloaded theme that i have and it has a matching much face called shock as well so you just be shocking everybody with the shock but, but yeah, in those i also like to i like to make fun and exciting something that you wouldn't expect from dancing frogs to lightning bolts to oh gosh, and i got so many more that are just about to come out i'm not going to ruin the surprise, but y'all are gonna love them tony morelan 24 34 wonderful i'm looking at your website and the one that jumps out to me is martian bash i know it's a great dancing alien you know, how is that is there been a lot of success behind some of these quirky dancing cuz i've seen like santas dancing and you've got a lot of fun ones chris shomo 24 48 well, yeah, because i want to reward people for taking some steps a lot of these characters that are on there, they change what they're doing based upon step gold percentage so if you want the aliens dance you're going to have to meet your step goal so in the morning, he might, you know, he's standing there, he's waving at you and then as you proceed during the day, he's running one direction and towards you that another direction and then finally, yeah, he's dancing whoo, you just read your step goal one of the points of these watches is for health and to encourage people to, you know, get out of the chair and you know, move around, and so why not make something that's fun and exciting and encourages that at the same time? that's great so even the one called bolt that has lightning bolts that go across it starts as like a tiny little bolt and as you proceed through the day with your step, go, more electricity comes out and i'm getting ready to release another one with a fun little loving alien that does a lot of other stuff to your step goal as well so that should be fun tony morelan 25 45 super excited about that tell me watch face designing and theme designing is this your full-time gig or do you actually still go back and do some of your website designing or anything beyond design? chris shomo 25 55 oh, this is actually full part time gig chris shomo 26 00 between that and website design and i'm also the cto and creative director of the picker joe's brand you probably heard of antique pickers, vintage pickers, they go around and find really cool stuff and bring it to people yes so yeah, there's a store in savannah, georgia called picker joe's antique mall and it's 10,000 square feet 25,000 items that change daily, about 65 antique pickers that go out and find all this stuff we like to say that it's an experience like no other because it really is we have people that come in from different parts of the world, from across the country, and they go, wow, this is the best antique mall experience that i've ever had and we've also been on oh gosh, i don't know how many interviews so far with the same production company that does american pickers and so they are still considering us possibly for that show oh, wow but, but i designed the branding and do all the advertising and we do crazy videos usually filmed with the latest samsung phone as well and if you go to our instagram if you look at our youtube and stuff, you'll see some of the, the wild and insane advertisements that we do all the time and that's one of the things that really sets it apart from other stores i mean, if you ever heard of an antique store that you know for halloween has monsters invading us and appearing everywhere and like all sorts of things, no, probably not but i encourage everybody to check it out and if you're in savannah, you've got to experience it you really did tony morelan 27 31 definitely in i can see in your designs you definitely have a lot of fun humor happening i'm looking at the watch face for joe, joe's, your character of the dog that seems like his tongue is actually bigger, bigger and then his head and wagging more than his tail yep, chris shomo 27 53 yep and i actually have a dog named joe and that's actually what picker joe's is named after do oh, that's great figure so he's a jack russell and he actually looks very similar to joe and he likes all the time he's always happy and always mischievous as well, too so, again, he'll react to your step go, he'll, he'll do some fun stuff at 50% as well so definitely check that out tony morelan 28 18 so, are you doing all this design work yourself? or do you have a team of designers that work with you in producing watch faces and themes? chris shomo 28 25 most of this stuff is just me but i do have a another a friend and fellow colleague that graduated with me, jonathan maillard he's over in denver right now so i do pull him in on tons of different projects we're working on some right now some interesting apps and hopefully in the very near future, some game designs as well oh, that's great that's great yeah, games are a big push for samsung so super excited to hear that you're going to bring your brand over to that side and let's produce some amazing games it's going to be fine do you work out of your house? do you actually have an office space? okay, i have multiple locations that i can work out of i definitely have the house set up and with the cool gaming computer and all that kind of stuff and then we have the office which is actually right above a florist it's really cool you can walk up the stairs and you smell roses love it always say i always get to stop and smell the roses every day and, and then also working out of picker joe's as well in the side office there tony morelan 29 26 so we talk a lot about savannah is that where you were born, or were you born and raised somewhere else? chris shomo 29 33 born and raised in the mountains of virginia and pulaski, virginia? oh, wow yeah so a little town called pulaski it's in the middle of the blue ridge mountains and it's your cool i guess mainstreet hometown recently it's been hit kind of a little hard from the economy my master's thesis in school for architecture was actually called the polanski institute of art design, which was taking the million square feet of the pulaski furniture plant and change it into a design school, which would in turn, hopefully help the economy and encourage businesses to open up to cater to students and yeah, that's pretty much what my master's thesis was first seen on my hometown but then, of course, i moved to savannah in 2000 and i've been there ever since tony morelan 30 29 so let's talk a little bit about marketing i mean, you are definitely one of the most successful designers for samsung tell me some of your tips and tricks when it comes to actually marketing your watch faces in your themes are you using social media? are you doing any additional advertising? what's your what's your approach to marketing? chris shomo 30 49 okay, so first off, i started out with the website, and just really making sure that it crawled on google so i'm always getting some sort of traffic and so either way website at any given moment can get like 200 to 500 hits a day, which, you know, that really helps just get the brand out there tony morelan 31 08 and share the url chris shomo 31 10 oh, it's www infinitywatchfaces com, and also social media, instagram and facebook we used to use google plus a lot it was a big designer community, but of course that's gone but that has shifted over to the facebook groups now and like the facebook group, that ash with iot gadgets, runs, it's one of the largest facebook groups out there and they have great moderation some good people are definitely running it and it's a great place to really show off your designs and spread the word to everybody and it has just a great following so i always recommend you know, get on social media and you just scream out your brand's everybody i actually tony morelan 31 55 interviewed ash iot gadgets on the podcast nice if you haven't listened to that yet, go back a few episodes it was a great, great time he's an excellent interview, great person doing amazing things and yeah, that facebook group is huge it's crazy chris shomo 32 11 yeah, it's crazy it's got to take a lot of time to moderate i'm sure it does but um, oh, and also on youtube we got our favorite watch face reviewer andrew tony morelan 32 22 jibber jab reviews yes and again, that came out of your presentation when you spoke at the conference you'd mentioned jibber jabber, and first thing i did when i became a watch-based designer was track jibber jabber reviews down on youtube and get him to review some of my watch faces i have just done a live chat with andrew, that we published last week great interview, he talks a lot about strategies, not only using youtube, but even beyond youtube for marketing your app so and i know you've got a great relationship with andrew, can i say this? can i share this? you're helping him with a new website that he's launching is that correct? chris shomo 32 59 yeah as the website is in the very beginning stages, it's going to grow over time doing some interesting work on pulling his youtube channel and all over the place and yeah, it's going to be something you're going to want to visit very often cause he's going to have some cool giveaways and a bunch of other stuff so, yeah, andrew is great to work with and it's interesting, because, you know, in the very beginning, he's tracking down watch face designers to do a review, and now everybody's tracking him down, of course, which is wonderful but, um, but yeah, he's done a phenomenal job and he's just, he's very vital to the community i totally agree i mean, andrew is a great guy and a lot of watch face designers owe their success to, to andrew so your watch faces and themes have a lot of animation so i want to ask about instagram a lot of times people just post pictures on instagram are you utilizing videos on instagram? oh, probably more video than anything else and a lot of that video is just taking my galaxy phone and just reading according the watch on my wrist, this is the first thing i want to do actually, as soon as i have a design, like even almost done, it's a work in progress and it's fun sometimes for your customers to see works in progress to see the early stage and, and all the work that goes into it as well and you'll find that you'll get a lot of a lot of following on there, which is great and, and a lot of times customers will, will critique it and you'll end up getting a better design in the very end because they kind of helped with the design process ah, that's awesome i think the first thing i do, of course, is i post on instagram and then the next thing i do is i head on over to that large facebook group and i started announcing there and, you know, i'll do some, you know, some works in progress, like post and that sort of thing you know, making sure that i replace that post as opposed to adding another one with, you know, the final, you know, work and just, you know, keep on updating that that sort of thing because you know, everybody's notified at the end another picture to a post they like so, yeah, just knowing these little tricks with social media and with instagram, knowing how to use your hashtags, it's all about hashtags on instagram, yeah, then you don't have to, to pay essentially, we're on facebook, you know, you might want to, you know, every once in a while, on paid advertise a little bit, sometimes it works but the main thing is being active with those groups, getting people to recognize your brand and getting repeat customers that also want to share your stuff, too tony morelan 35 30 and glad you mentioned the hashtags, we actually posted on our site, which is developer samsung com if you go to the galaxy store page, we actually posted a long list of valuable hashtags that you can use, whether your marketing your watch faces or your themes or apps or games so it's a great place to start to go take a look at some really good hashtags that could work chris shomo 35 52 nice and i just need to give a huge shout out and thank you to everybody with the samsung developers program because like i've also seen that grow over time and the resources available are just amazing and it's so helpful and you guys have yeah, even great every step along the way thank you tony morelan 36 13 yeah, no, you're welcome you're welcome you know, one of the things that we've done to try and help designers like yourself promote their apps is galaxy store badges, which i know that you use so a little bit about your experience with that, and where are you using those galaxy store badges? chris shomo 36 31 well, these badges are great because first they make you look legit they make you look professional, because they know, you know, it's 100% hey, this is available on the galaxy store and also being able to track the clicks and where people are coming from you can you can make a link specifically for a facebook promotion and you know, how many people you know clicked on that to participate in that so how do you know how where to grow unless you know where you stand and that helps you understand this statistics and where people are coming from so it's a valuable resource tony morelan 37 03 what about banner promotions? i love chris shomo 37 06 banner promotions you will see your best downloads during then that when you have one of those and ron is great yes, yeah, he helps guide you along just making sure that the banner looks great definitely everybody needs to take in his comments, everything that he tells you because i mean he, he's saying him for a reason so he will help your sales tony morelan 37 29 my biggest success came from a watch face that i had done that was featured on a banner promotion and it was crazy the amount of downloads and sales that were generated by having that banner promotion so for designers out there, once you've got a collection of strong designs, then you can approach samsung about being featured on a banner there is no cost to the banner, but there are a lot of people requesting it you have to be approved proved to actually have your designs featured on a banner but definitely worthwhile pursuing for sure chris shomo 38 07 and make sure that you have your social presence as well and all your facebook page and instagram page and all that when you submit for the banner because you know it's going to make you a better candidate for one tony morelan 38 18 yes, definitely they actually look at that they want to see previous downloads how much success you've already had so once you've got some experience, it's definitely worthwhile to at that point to reach out and then apply for a band promotion going back to your video, so you do have a lot of animation in your watch faces and your themes and i know you leverage video so talk a bit about youtube are you taking like all of these designs each time and posting them on youtube creating videos to expand your reach? chris shomo 38 44 most of them the main reason to do the video for me on youtube is to really have something dynamic to show on the galaxy store when someone sees that video after they land on your listing it really can be the difference as to whether they're going to buy it or not, and since most of mine offer animations to them, it makes sense to have a video to, to show it off one thing that i, i wish that the galaxy store had was an animated preview, like on like where the icon is, that was really cool because then everybody would be gravitating towards mine and other animated faces instantly but, but yeah, the youtube video is what really makes a difference and there are some watch faces that need to actually go back and make some videos for sometimes you finish the face and then of course, you're like, oh, now i have this whole production i got to make tony morelan 39 35 sure i totally agree with that and let me explain a little bit further about what you were talking about creating the video so that people can see it when they're viewing your galaxy store page so on the galaxy store page for a watch app, you have what are called screenshots and these screenshots show still images of your graphics that you use your marketing graphics however, there's also a way for you to include a little link to a video on youtube so you grab your youtube url, place it into your, your application for the, for this app and the very first screenshot will actually show your youtube video instead of the still image so it's a great way for users like you had mentioned, that want to see the motion, they can actually click on that screenshot, and it will launch the youtube video so it's a great way to market, you know, motion in your graphics so you had mentioned that your top theme is a free download so let's talk a little bit about the approach of offering apps for free because i know a lot of designers utilize the ability to you know, give away their apps and some designers are a little tight with that and they hold on to them and they don't do it where do you stand? i mean, are you using this as a marketing tool? do you just want to like get your brand out there? chris shomo 40 43 well, it started as a marketing tool, because you know, there's also a free section on the store, and if you don't exist on it, then well, it's just another avenue that people are not going to find you so you definitely need to make a free one and a good free one too just don't pick your worst design and be like, oh, i'm just going to make it free no, no, not at all it's not going to do any good so, for example, actually i did a watch face for jibber jabber reviews for andrew and that turned into my top downloading free watch face and that one at one time oh my goodness i think it was downloading like one to 3000 times a day tony morelan 41 22 wow so this is a branded jibber jabber reviews watch face yes so you so i actually remember when he posted his review of that i didn't realize that you were the designer behind that that's awesome yeah, chris shomo 41 35 but my name snuck on there like a little bit, but i wanted that to be mainly about him sure but yeah, not that one still gets downloaded like hundreds of times a day and stuff that very solid one and it gets reviews every single day to love it so having some free faces you can get discovered from people that you would have never discovered you before as well if you can get your watch face up to, you know, a certain section of the free section, which means it has to be good, essentially so, having done this now for several years, i'm sure you could face some challenges will first has been just the challenges of, you know, just growing with the software and understanding what you can do and taking advantage of updates to the software, like when the gyroscope became available and you could use that, oh my gosh, i was so happy when we could do that because that just adds a whole new level of dynamics to the watch faces and so it's really just, you know, learning your tools, but then also encountering that the watch face market has gotten a little bit congested with you know, there's a lot of people, you know, so you definitely have a lot more competition than when i first started out and, you know, i was just thinking the other day, i was like, wow, if i knew what i knew now, right in the very beginning, would i've been designing more sophisticated watch faces and have like a whole monopoly in the market or something like that, you know, you always think back like, oh my gosh, but no, no, i grew at a great rate with the software with the other designers you'll find that a lot of the other designers have become, you know, friends we all talk with each other yeah, we help out each other but yeah, it's a great community it really is tony morelan 43 22 talking about some of your favorite designers and who are the designers that you follow that you're inspired by? chris shomo 43 27 oh gosh, like jeweler broda like oh my gosh bergen of course like, those are great such clean watch faces i love those chris shomo 43 41 md matteo dini oh my gosh, like a little jealous there we'll have to say, but, but yeah, he's, um, the those are just a few of some of the amazing designers out there and a lot of great designers and, and again, the main thing is you know, everybody communicating and kind of working with each other? you feel like you are part of the community regularly tony morelan 44 07 yeah, that's what i've noticed i'm not too long ago actually did a podcast interview with tomas yes check from vienna studios yes yes great person yeah and he's done some amazing designs yeah, he's taken a different approach to watch face descending, where he designs extremely high end, very expensive watch faces that are in the hundreds of dollars and he is one of our top whitespace designers i mean, he has found a way to you know, make amazing revenue off of these high-end watch faces so yeah, i love the community it's been a lot of fun for me to not only be inspired by them when i was a watch face designer, but now being fortunate to be in a position working at samsung, i now get to have these conversations and then help out where i can with some of these you know, the rock stars of the watch facing design community chris shomo 45 04 that's awesome and i promise you that we all appreciate you too thank you so much tony morelan 45 09 thank you tony morelan 45 11 you've used galaxy watch studio for some time now, i'm going to ask you, what sort of features would you like to see added to it? so you'd mentioned about adding animations, maybe as a preview in the galaxy store but what other features would you like to see added to the galaxy watch studio, chris shomo 45 26 probably some little nitpicky things like being able to start and stop an animation with a click of a button that would be great to be able to have an animation react while your mobile for example, if i could have a guy that starts to run while i'm running, that would be cool to sure that would even take that joe watch face to another level, which would be awesome and then maybe in the future, and i think that someone was talking to me about this, but having the ability to do 3d and be able to put like a 3d mesh in there and have real shadows and that sort of thing who knows that that's really thinking into the future, that sort of thing sure and then if we look over to the theme side of things to my main one that i want right now is to have gyroscope action to have parallax effects i think that would add another dynamic to the theme designs tony morelan 46 25 yeah, i love that suggestion chris shomo 46 27 yeah so just, you know, just having like, you know, three to five layers that you could work with that could react with the gyroscope to mess with for like the regular background image people are looking at their phones, i don't even know how many times a day so let's make it like the best, most awesome dynamic experience ever and that would just be great tony morelan 46 48 that's what i mean wishes for that you know, and you were the first designer that i saw that truly leverage the gyroscope on the watch, where i can't remember the name of the watch face you had but as you rotated your wrist because of the gyro functionality these like metallic, big doors just like opened up to then show you know, the like data, you know whether it's the digital clock or heart rate, but it was so cool i could rotate my wrist and have these metal doors on my watch, paste, you know, collapse or open so that's how i first learned about the gyro is from your from your watch face design chris shomo 47 26 yeah, that as soon as they came out with the gyro is just like, oh, how can i use this to do like, tons of different things and i was thinking like a cuckoo clock, you know, when it opens up and that sort of thing so that kind of started at all and trying to think what the first one that i did using that is think it might have been digit glow spark tony morelan 47 45 that sounds right yeah so do you have any tips for designers when publishing on the galaxy store? i mean, we've mentioned a lot about marketing, but when it actually comes to, you know, creating the graphics behind their apps, what sort of tips could you give people and publishing on the galaxy store? chris shomo 48 05 definitely bone up on your photoshop skills, you got to design those thumbnails, don't just throw, you know, watch on a white background with the watch face on it because you really have to grab someone's attention talking from my website design experience, on average, you have about three seconds before someone clicks the back button or continues to read on the website it's kind of the same thing with watch face listing you know that you can have written information, everything, people aren't going to read it they're their visual, they want to look at the thumbnails and it starts with the icon as well make sure that icons looking good tony morelan 48 40 that's great are you familiar with the tool that i created called the asset creator? chris shomo 48 45 yes and i've actually been through it and i've used some of it to create some of my thumbnails and, you know, pulled some stuff out of it and threw some stuff in and that sort of thing so tony morelan 48 54 that's awesome yeah so super excited you know, we just announced galaxy watch three yes and so i spent a bit of time recently updating the asset creator to include all of the new watches for the galaxy watch three i just checked, you can actually go download the new updated version of the asset crater that includes all that that was just published recently so, in addition to that, i also have created what we call lifestyle photo packs, using the same tools within photoshop that allow you to use smart objects to quickly copy paste your design into a watch and have the perspective change and have the blurred change so that it truly just simply photoshopped right onto the watch i am madly working on new photos that show the galaxy watch three i will be publishing those very, very soon so super excited those have been a big success, a lot of help for people because it's not just showing your watch face on the watch just on a simple straight, you know, top down picture we're actually taking the watch and putting it into a scene so whether it is, you know, sitting on water drops, or it's on a slab of granite, or you know, some high-tech texture, these are great pictures to help using your screenshots when you're publishing your app so, look for those new galaxy watch three lifestyle photo packs coming out very, very cool chris shomo 50 22 i'm excited and one thing that's cool about that is it allows the customer to relate to the watch and wearing that watch face more by having photos like that so that that's great you can get your customer to relate to your product, you're golden, an architecture professor actually told me one time that a building or a product, any type of product, it is 10% your ideas and 90% the way you present them so if you can't present it right then your product is not going to mean anything tony morelan 50 55 so what is in the future for infinity watch face design tell me what can we get excited about? what's happening? chris shomo 51 02 oh gosh, what is in the future? we got so many things in the future, we're going to have some games come out, you know, break into the, the other part of the app world still continues with wearables of course, we're going to expand our video production as well working on that and infinity watch faces is going to be getting really involved with local businesses really soon, and helping promote their businesses to other local people and visitors ever since this whole pandemic, things going on local businesses have been hit so hard, we've lost a few in our neighborhood i just don't want to lose any more so i'll be going out and you know, just really doing what i can to tony morelan 51 49 help that's wonderful yeah, these are definitely challenging times you know, it's been a while now that we've all kind of been in this sort of lockdown and we've realized the effects that this has really had on our economy, it's also been an opportunity for us to try and find new ways to, you know, to still do the work that we do and in the reach that we do so it's nice to hear that you're, you know, finding ways to sort of help out in all of that aspect so, going back to the fun designs that you create, i need to ask you right now, which if you have to pick one, and then you've got 390 plus, i want you to pick one design, what is your current favorite? chris shomo 52 36 i know this is going to sound a little goofy, maybe a little girly the butterfly named fred love it's not very i think because the way the flowers interact with your wrist and then that that butterfly just landing perfectly right there on it every single time it makes me happy and the dude's name is fred come like fred butterfly tony morelan 52 59 how did you come up? fred for the butterfly, chris shomo 53 02 i don't know i was just kind of looking at an insect one day and i named an insect fred and then i was like, ah, this butterfly should be named fred now, i mean, i could have called it something like beautiful butterfly or blue butterfly or you know, just some sort of whatever name but let's give him an actual name and let's make a character out of this yeah wow, that is a great story i'm going to close this podcast though by asking what does chris sharma do for fun when you're not designing these wild themes and wild watch faces? oh, i live in the city of fun i mean, just going around and you know, going to experience the different restaurants and just the atmosphere in the summertime, i guess staying indoors more because it's so hot and humid down there someone asked me one time what's it like living in the south during all this heat because like just the other day that heat index was like 105 degrees that's of course, when you combine the humidity and the actual temperature, that's what it feels like and i told him when i was like, alright, take the hottest shower that you can now get out of the shower, do not dry off and put your clothes on that's what it feels like oh, so it's a sauna out there tony morelan 54 22 that's crazy you know, and i will say i have to share we've had to reschedule this interview numerous times, because there was a hurricane going through savannah and you were losing your internet connection so yeah, living in the south, i think definitely has a lot of excitement chris shomo 54 37 well, the hurricane is actually one of the normal things for 2020 chris shomo 54 43 we were very fortunate that the hurricane mainly missed us we got some wind from the outer bands and locally, my internet was like, it was all over the place we didn't have it and we had a flood yeah, it's just something that we got to deal with but i'm glad we were fine hazleton connect and get this interview done tony morelan 55 03 yeah, this is great this has been a lot of fun so chris, thank you very much for joining the podcast much access to you at infinity watch faces and looking forward to all the great new designs i know they're going to be coming down the road for us so thanks again chris shomo 55 15 thank you, tony and thank you, samsung, you guys are awesome outro 55 18 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

https://developer.samsung.com/developers-podcast/s01e10-chris-shomo.html

Develop Galaxy Watch for Tizen

doc

Native App

create your first tizen wearable native application welcome to tizen wearable native application development! a wearable native application is created using the c language, and can be run on tizen wearable devices the application uses the native api, which provides various interfaces to the device hardware allowing you to take advantage of numerous capabilities tailored to run with limited device resources study the following instructions to help familiarize yourself with the tizen native application development process as well as using the tizen studio and installing the created application on the emulator or target device with the instructions, you can create and run a basic wearable native application, which displays some text on the screen with no user interaction before you get started with developing tizen applications, download and install the tizen studio for more information on the installation process, see the installation guide create a wearable native project using the tizen studio this step shows how you can use a predesigned project template that creates all the basic files and folders required for your project build the application after you have implemented code for the features you want, this step shows how you can build the application to validate and compile the code run the application this step shows how you can run the application on the emulator or a real target device design a ui this step shows how you can create the application ui and make small alterations to it to improve the usability of your application when you are developing a more complex application, you can take advantage of the native tools included in the tizen studio to ease the tasks of creating functionality and designing the application ui creating a project the following example shows you how to create and configure a basic wearable native application project in the tizen studio an application project contains all the files that make up an application the following figure illustrates the application to be created the application screen displays the hello tizen text and no user interaction is provided if you click the back key on the device, the application moves to the background figure wearable native basic ui application to create the application project launch the tizen studio in the tizen studio menu, select file > new > tizen project the project wizard opens in the project wizard, define the project details the project wizard is used to create the basic application skeleton with the required folder structure and mandatory files you can easily create different applications by selecting an applicable template or sample for the project wizard to use select the template project type and click next select the profile wearable and version from a drop-down list and click next the version depends on the platform version you have installed and with which you are developing the application select the native application application type and click next select the basic ui template and click next define the project properties and click finish you can enter the project name 3-50 characters and the unique package id you can also select the location and working sets by clicking more properties the project wizard sets up the project, creates the application files using the default content from the template, and closes for more information on the project wizard and the available templates, see creating tizen projects with tizen project wizard you can see the created project in the project explorer view the most important files and folders include inc default folder for included source files res folder for resource files used by the application only shared folder for resource files to be shared with other applications src folder for source code files lib folder for external library files tizen-manifest xml manifest file used by the platform to install and launch the application figure application in the project explorer note you can view and modify the application configuration in the manifest editor in this example, no configuration changes are required your application project is now ready for further actions next, build the application managing the application configuration to view and modify the application configuration in the project explorer view, double-click the tizen-manifest xml file of the application the tizen studio opens the file in the manifest editor in the manifest editor, view and modify the configuration details using the various tabs overview define general information, such as the package, label, and icon of the application features define required software and hardware features this information is used for application filtering in the tizen store privileges define the security-sensitive apis or api groups accessed and used by the application localization define localized values for the application label, description, and icon advanced define advanced features, such as application metadata, data control for services, application control functionalities, and account details source view and edit the source code of the tizen-manifest xml file changes made and saved on the other tabs are reflected in the source code and vice versa note the tizen-manifest xml file must conform to both the xml file format and the tizen native application specification requirements editing the file in the source tab is intended for advanced users only to save any changes, in the tizen studio menu, select file > save all for more information on configuring the application, see setting the application manifest understanding the source code pay attention to the life-cycle callbacks in the application source code, to understand how the application works for source code details related to the ui, see designing a simple ui the main function in the src/basicui c file is used to register callbacks that manage specific parts of the application life-cycle app_create called when the application process starts used to create ui components app_terminate called while the application process is terminating called after the main loop quits app_resume ui applications only called when the application window is shown app_pause ui applications only called when the application window is totally hidden app_control called after the app_create callback when the process starts called when a launch request is received while the process is running can receive app_control data parameters for launching the application used to implement parameter-specific actions of the application int main int argc, char *argv[] { appdata_s ad = {0,}; int ret = 0; ui_app_lifecycle_callback_s event_callback = {0,}; app_event_handler_h handlers[5] = {null,}; event_callback create = app_create; event_callback terminate = app_terminate; event_callback pause = app_pause; event_callback resume = app_resume; event_callback app_control = app_control; ret = ui_app_main argc, argv, &event_callback, &ad ; if ret != app_error_none dlog_print dlog_error, log_tag, "app_main failed err = %d", ret ; return ret; } building your application after you have created the application project, you can implement the required features in this example, only the default features from the project template are used, and no code changes are required when your application code is ready, you must build the application the building process performs a validation check and compiles your files you can build the application in the following ways automatically the automatic build means that the tizen studio automatically rebuilds the application whenever you change a source or resource file and save the application project to use the automatic build select the project in the project explorer view in the tizen studio menu, select project > build automatically a check mark appears next to the menu option you can toggle the automatic build on and off by reselecting project > build automatically manually the manual build means that you determine yourself when the application is built to manually build the application, right-click the project in the project explorer view and select build project figure manually building the application alternatively, you can also select the project in the project explorer view and do one of the following in the tizen studio menu, select project > build project press the f10 key you can have more than one build configuration to see the current active configuration or change it, right-click the project in the project explorer view and select build configurations > set active the default configuration is debug for more information, see building applications after you have built the application, run it running your application you can run the application on the emulator or a real target device running on the emulator to run the application on the emulator launch an emulator instance in the emulator manager in the tizen studio menu, select tools > emulator manager in the emulator manager, select a wearable emulator from the list and click launch if no applicable emulator instance exists, create a new one the emulator is launched in its own window you can also see the new emulator instance and its folder structure in the device manager generate a security profile before you run the application, you must sign your application package with a certificate profile in the tizen studio run the application in the project explorer view, right-click the project and select run as > tizen native application alternatively, you can also select the project in the project explorer view and do one of the following press the ctrl + f11 key click the run icon in the toolbar if you have created multiple emulator instances, select the instance you want from the combo box in the toolbar before selecting to run the application if you select an offline emulator, it is automatically launched when you select to run the application confirm that the application launches on the emulator note if the emulator display has switched off, you cannot see the application launch to switch the display on, click the power key in the lower-right corner of the emulator while the application is running, the **log** view in the tizen studio shows the log, debug, and exception messages from the methods defined in the log macros to see the view, in the tizen studio menu, go to **window \> show view \> log** for more information on using the emulator features, see using emulator control keys, menu, and panel and using extended emulator features running on a target device to run the application on a target device connect the wearable target device to your computer define settings on the device go to settings > connections, and switch on wi-fi the device and the computer must be connected to the same wi-fi network note the ip address the device is using go to settings > gear info, and switch on the debugging mode use the remote device manager to connect the wearable device in the device manager, launch the remote device manager by clicking the related icon in the remote device manager window, click + in the add device window, enter the device and network details use the ip address you noted before , and click add in the remote device manager window, switch the new device on by clicking the switch under connect the device asks for user confirmation to allow gear to read log data, copy files to and from your computer, and install the application manually, click the accept mark in the device manager, confirm that the device is connected shown in the device list generate an author certificate before you run the application, you must sign your application package with a certificate profile in the tizen studio run the application in the device manager, select the device in project explorer view, right-click the project and select run as > tizen native application alternatively, you can also select the project in the project explorer view and do one of the following press the ctrl + f11 key click the run icon in the toolbar if you have both a connected device and existing emulator instances, select the device from the combo box in the toolbar before selecting to run the application confirm that the application launches on the target device note the application is launched using the default debug run configuration to create and use another configuration in the project explorer view, right-click the project and select run as > run configurations in the run configurations window, click the new launch configuration icon , define the configuration details, and launch the application by clicking run designing a simple ui the wearable application created with the basic ui template has a simple user interface with a label component showing the hello tizen text at the top of the screen the ui is created using efl figure user interface in the basic ui template creating the basic ui the ui in the basic ui template contains the following components the efl ui always contains a window component, which is the root component of the entire ui since the application has the indicator bar at the top of the screen, it requires the conformant component the text label is implemented with a label component the ui is created in the basicui c file data structure a pointer to the ui components is stored in the appdata_s data structure struct appdata { /* window */ evas_object *win; /* conformant */ evas_object *conform; /* label */ evas_object *label; }; typedef struct appdata appdata_s; ui creation the app_create life-cycle callback is called when the application main loop starts, and it calls the create_base_gui function to create the ui static bool app_create void *data { /* hook to take necessary actions before the main event loop starts initialize ui resources and application data if this function returns true, the application main loop starts if this function returns false, the application is terminated */ appdata_s *ad = data; create_base_gui ad ; return true; } ui components the create_base_gui function creates the ui components window, conformant, and label the function receives a pointer to fill in the appdata_s structure static void create_base_gui appdata_s *ad { the window component is created with the elm_win_util_standard_add function callbacks are also added for the window one of the callbacks handles the delete,request event when the window is to be closed, and the other handles the eext_callback_back event when the hardware back key is pressed /* window create and initialize elm_win, which is mandatory to manipulate a window */ ad->win = elm_win_util_standard_add package, package ; elm_win_autodel_set ad->win, eina_true ; if elm_win_wm_rotation_supported_get ad->win { int rots[4] = {0, 90, 180, 270}; elm_win_wm_rotation_available_rotations_set ad->win, const int * &rots , 4 ; } evas_object_smart_callback_add ad->win, "delete,request", win_delete_request_cb, null ; eext_object_event_callback_add ad->win, eext_callback_back, win_back_cb, ad ; the conformant component is needed to show the indicator bar at the top of the screen the component is the first object added inside the window with the elm_conformant_add function the elm_win_indicator_mode_set function decides whether the indicator is visible, and the elm_win_indicator_opacity_set function sets the indicator opacity mode the conformant component is set as a resize object of the window by using the elm_win_resize_object_add function it means that the conformant size and position are controlled by the window component directly the evas_object_show function makes the conformant component visible /* conformant create and initialize elm_conformant, which is mandatory for the base gui to have a proper size when an indicator or virtual keypad is visible */ ad->conform = elm_conformant_add ad->win ; elm_win_indicator_mode_set ad->win, elm_win_indicator_show ; elm_win_indicator_opacity_set ad->win, elm_win_indicator_opaque ; evas_object_size_hint_weight_set ad->conform, evas_hint_expand, evas_hint_expand ; elm_win_resize_object_add ad->win, ad->conform ; evas_object_show ad->conform ; the label component for the text is added with the elm_label_add function the label is added inside the conformant component, which is the label's parent the label text is set with the elm_object_text_set function /* label create an actual view of the base gui modify this part to change the view */ ad->label = elm_label_add ad->conform ; elm_object_text_set ad->label, "<align=center>hello tizen</align>" ; evas_object_size_hint_weight_set ad->label, evas_hint_expand, evas_hint_expand ; elm_object_content_set ad->conform, ad->label ; when all the ui components are ready, the evas_object_show function makes the window component visible this means that the window displays everything on the screen at once /* show the window after the base gui is set up */ evas_object_show ad->win ; } modifying existing components when the basic ui exists, you can easily modify the components in the ui by using the component-specific functions, or more general evas object functions for example, the following modifications to the label component change the label style to a marker making the text bold and increase the font size to 50 /* label */ ad->label = elm_label_add ad->conform ; elm_object_text_set ad->label, "<align=center><font_size=50>hello tizen</font/></align>" ; elm_object_style_set ad->label, "marker" ; evas_object_size_hint_weight_set ad->label, evas_hint_expand, evas_hint_expand ; elm_object_content_set ad->conform, ad->label ; figure modified label component adding more components and functionality the basic ui only contains one visible label component you can use it as a basis to design a more elaborate ui with more components, screens, and functionality the following example shows how to add a list to the existing view screen , and how to create a second view and move between the 2 views all the code changes in this section are made within the create_base_gui function, unless stated otherwise to add more content to the ui modify the existing label view to contain a list too to add more components, first create a container that can hold all the various components in one view in this example, the box container is used it is created and added to the conformant the new list is created, and then the new list and the existing label component are both added to the box add the box and list objects to the appdata_s data structure struct appdata { evas_object *win; evas_object *conform; evas_object *label; /* box */ evas_object *box; /* list */ evas_object *list; }; typedef struct appdata appdata_s; create the box component using the conformant as the parent, and set the box as the conformant content ad->box = elm_box_add ad->conform ; evas_object_size_hint_weight_set ad->box, evas_hint_expand, evas_hint_expand ; evas_object_show ad->box ; elm_object_content_set ad->conform, ad->box ; modify the existing label component to use box as a parent, and add it to the box /* modify the label code */ ad->label = elm_label_add ad->box ; elm_object_text_set ad->label, "<align=center>hello tizen</align>" ; evas_object_size_hint_weight_set ad->label, 0 0, 0 0 ; /* comment out the elm_object_content_set function */ /* elm_object_content_set ad->conform, ad->label ; */ evas_object_size_hint_align_set ad->label, evas_hint_fill, evas_hint_fill ; evas_object_size_hint_min_set ad->label, 50, 50 ; /* show and add to box */ evas_object_show ad->label ; elm_box_pack_end ad->box, ad->label ; create the list and add it to the box create a list component with the elm_list_add function the box component is the parent of the new list component add items to the list with the elm_list_item_append function int i; /* create the list */ ad->list = elm_list_add ad->box ; /* set the list size */ evas_object_size_hint_weight_set ad->list, evas_hint_expand, evas_hint_expand ; evas_object_size_hint_align_set ad->list, evas_hint_fill, evas_hint_fill ; for i = 0; i < 4; i++ { char tmp[8]; snprintf tmp, sizeof tmp , "item %d", i + 1 ; /* add an item to the list */ elm_list_item_append ad->list, tmp, null, null, null, null ; } /* show and add to box */ evas_object_show ad->list ; elm_box_pack_end ad->box, ad->list ; when you run the application, the screen now shows the label at the top and the list in the middle create another view and navigate between the views the previous step created a view that contained a box component with a list component in the box to create an application with multiple views, you need to add a naviframe component to the application add the naviframe and naviframe item objects to the appdata_s data structure struct appdata { evas_object *win; evas_object *conform; evas_object *label; evas_object *box; evas_object *list; /* naviframe */ evas_object *navi; /* item */ elm_object_item *navi_item; }; typedef struct appdata appdata_s; create the naviframe using the conformant as the parent ad->navi = elm_naviframe_add ad->conform ; evas_object_show ad->navi ; elm_object_content_set ad->conform, ad->navi ; modify the box component to have the naviframe as a parent ad->box = elm_box_add ad->navi ; evas_object_size_hint_weight_set ad->box, evas_hint_expand, evas_hint_expand ; evas_object_show ad->box ; elm_object_content_set ad->navi, ad->box ; push the box to the naviframe as a top item to create the first view the second parameter defines a title text for the view each application view is a separate item in the naviframe, and the top item is always displayed ad->navi_item = elm_naviframe_item_push ad->navi, "first view", null, null, ad->box, null ; create the navigation between the views by adding a clicked,double event callback to the list when the user double-clicks the item, the second view opens for clarity, change the first list item text to go to second /* change the first list item text */ elm_object_item *it; it = elm_list_first_item_get ad->list ; elm_object_item_text_set it, "go to second" ; /* add a callback */ evas_object_smart_callback_add ad->list, "clicked,double", list_item_doubleclicked_cb, ad->navi ; in the list item double-click event callback, define the content for the second view create a prev button to return to the first view, and push the button to the naviframe as a new top item also create the prev button callback for popping the top item from the naviframe, and consequently displaying the first view add both the new functions before the create_base_gui function static void prev_btn_clicked_cb void *data, evas_object *obj, void *event_info { evas_object *nf = data; elm_naviframe_item_pop nf ; } static void list_item_doubleclicked_cb void *data, evas_object *obj, void *event_info { evas_object *navi_button; evas_object *nf = data; elm_object_item *nf_it; navi_button = elm_button_add nf ; elm_object_text_set navi_button, "prev" ; elm_object_style_set navi_button, "bottom" ; evas_object_smart_callback_add navi_button, "clicked", prev_btn_clicked_cb, nf ; nf_it = elm_naviframe_item_push nf, "second view", null, null, navi_button, null ; }

https://developer.samsung.com/galaxy-watch-tizen/creating-your-first-app/native.html

Learn Developers Podcast

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Episode 7, Tomas Joscak

season 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

https://developer.samsung.com/developers-podcast/s01e07-tomas-joscak.html

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