Episode 11: Mingle With Sam Ghobril

19 year old self taught developer, Sam Ghobril, joins me to discuss creating his action based contact app Mingle, teaching himself to code and being the only coder he knew growing up around his home in Lebanon. A lucky break in a University CS contest showed Sam his true passion would be in mobile development. In a perfectly timed coincidence with the Hour of Code week, App Story is proud to bring you Sam Ghobril. Sam is a 19 year old, self taught, indie iOS developer in Beirut, Lebanon. He got himself started as a developer at around 12 years old. He was curious about how video games were made, and discovered C++. He started learning that and grasped some programming fundamentals. Shortly after that Sam was inspired by the movie, The Social Network. He shifted gears a little and started learning web development, and built a few hobby websites for himself. Later he got an iPhone and a Mac, and he began learning mobile app development. After he entered a University Computer Science contest with a web development project, a teacher volunteered him in the mobile app contest as well. He didn't win the web entry, but he did win for his mobile app entry and found his true passion for mobile app development. Mingle was built from the ground up to make connecting with your contacts faster, easier, and more enjoyable in every way! Mingle is an app that makes it easy to interact with your contacts in virtually any way possible like calling & messaging contacts, jumping to their Twitter profile on Tweetbot, or even setting up a meeting through Fantastical. You can select four actions from a number of built-in actions or create custom actions using URL schemes and customisable icons. These actions are all easily accessible through a simple swipe of the contact’s photo. You can even use it to add potentially missing info from contact details. For example if you run an action that required the contact’s Twitter username, and that username is not saved, a simple prompt will ask for the username, run the action, and save the username for future use. All prebuilt actions have an ‘info’ button to easily see that action’s URL, icon, etc, to help users get started on custom actions, and see how they’re built.? Mingle was born from a unique perspective of trying to find a practical application for an interesting UI. After winning the University CS contest with his mobile app entry, Sam began playing with lots of app ideas, and built some prototypes. He even made a few he deemed worthy of putting into the App Store, like a an album based music player. Unfortunately some of these apps showed him he still had some things to learn about development and device constraints, and resulted in him pulling the apps. He didn't get discouraged though, he kept his head down in the code and continued learning and prototyping app ideas. Eventually he had an interesting UI idea and animation that he really liked. He began looking for a good practical idea to put it to use and Mingle was born. Sam's interesting UI gestures and animations became the main UI for Mingle. He began learning the C based contact API's and worked it all together in an uncommon UI first direction. Originally Mingle had a hard coded set of actions, but eventually Sam got the idea to incorporate URL Schemes into the app, to increase it's flexibility to be customized. This is the current implementation of Mingle available today and you should definitely check it out! Sam is still actively working on Mingle and brainstorming new ideas all the time. We look forward to seeing his future efforts. Contact Links: Mingle Website Sam on Twitter Mingle on Twitter Vic on Twitter App Story on Twitter Support Sam & the show by using this link to get Mingle on the App Store: Mingle on the iOS App Store Additional links: Sam's Blog A few reviews Sam is particularly proud of: MacStories Review Tech Crunch Review If you're an indie developer and you'd like to tell your app's story on the show, click here. If you are enjoying App Story, please consider reviewing/rating it in iTunes. I'd also love to hear your feedback and to know how you found the show. Please feel free to use the twitter links and let me know! Thanks so much for your support!