Subscribe

Salon Queen app reigns supreme

By Gregory Peake
Johannesburg, 12 Jul 2011

ITWeb employee Joe Diedericks has earned first place in SA's first BlackBerry App Master Challenge for his Salon Queen app.

Despite having experimented with app creation for about a year-and-a-half prior to the competition, Diedericks had never felt the need to create his own before, believing most app requirements were already met by the market.

However, when he learnt of the launch of the BlackBerry PlayBook, and its increased potential for versatility and coding power due to its compatibility with more development environments, he decided to give it a try.

Diedericks' winnings include a BlackBerry PlayBook and an all-expenses-paid trip to California, where he will attend the BlackBerry Development Conference, in San Francisco. As a hub of designing talent, the conference offers opportunities to learn from and network with other app designers.

African potential

As the first South African winner, Diedericks serves as an informal representative from African markets.

Southern Africa regional director at Research In Motion Craige Fleischer believes developers like Diedericks have an important role to play.

“Africa is an important part of the expanding BlackBerry ecosystem, and we look forward to bringing more opportunities like these for developers in South Africa and the wider region.”

The BlackBerry PlayBook offers support beyond its core development kit, adds Fleischer.

He notes it is exciting “to see what South African developers could achieve on the BlackBerry PlayBook using the native SDK, as well as industry-standard technologies such as HTML5 and Adobe AIR”.

Winning app

Salon Queen, Diedericks' winning application, was chosen because of the versatility of its core feature ideas. Serving as a digital sales catalogue of sorts, it allows hair salons to capture different hairstyles, and tracks each client's style and treatment history. This allows them to compare their previous hairstyles, as well as examine other styles offered by the salon.

“I am aware of similar applications on other platforms, but personally I think they were created as once-off gimmick apps,” says Diedericks. “The focus should be on creating apps that you can use and benefit from in 24 months' time.”

Much of its potential lies in its ability to complement normal business, recording hairstyles as they are completed, rather than offering a comprehensive catalogue from the get-go. This allows salons to grow their showcased styles gradually, rather than through a costly initial investment in a studio shoot.

Another feature of Salon Queen is the versatility of its concept, as it could be applied to a number of fields. “I have a few ideas to expand the functionality of Salon Queen, but I will only implement them at a later stage once I am happy the base application is stable and providing value to its users,” says Diedericks.