I had an interesting conversation about iPhone and iPad apps development with Marine Leroux, the CEO of San Francisco based Bamboudesign.

Ms Leroux is a French entrepreneur. She worked on desktop application user interface design in France before founding her company here in 2008 to focus just on mobile applications, or specifically, the user interface design of mobile apps, mostly iPhone apps.

Bamboudesign works with large companies on projects where there are resources to finely craft the user interface design of apps in brand building projects.

Here are some notes from our conversation:

- When I was working in France people would tell me I should also work on mobile apps but the tiny screens of Nokia and other handsets didn't interest me much. When the iPhone was introduced I remember seeing the demos, that was when I realized that this was a great mobile platform. There was a large screen and I realized that this was what I wanted to do: design user interfaces for iPhone apps.

- We're very excited abut the iPad because of the larger screen and that means we can build much richer user experiences.

- There are some issues about running iPhone apps on the iPad. Running an existing app on a larger screen could cause problems because the resolution of the graphics may look pixelated. Lots of iPhone apps will have to be redone to look good on the iPad.

- Another issue is the approval process. We don't know if Apple will require a new approval process for iPad versions of existing apps. If that's the case, that will create a very large bottleneck. There are more than 140,000 iPhone apps currently. That's a good reason to have your iPad app ready sooner, to try and get ahead of the queue in the approval process.

- Clearly, not all iPhone apps can be ported to iPad, such as camera or phone based. But it should appeal to publishers of newspapers and books, etc, because it will be a much richer user experience.

- Unlike many other developers, we pay a lot of attention to the user interface design and we have a rigorous methodology to make sure the user has a great experience.

- We are big fans of the Corona software development kit. This is much better than Apple's iPhone SDK. You can write one-tenth of the code, and it has Flash-like features -- useful because Apple does not support Flash and we're not sure if there will be HTML5 support.

- We started a networking community group last July 2009 called "The iPhone Network Lounge" (www.iphonenetworklounge.com) and host monthly events in San Francisco. The community targets iPhone professionals and invites guest speakers in the iPhone industry to talk about iPhone technology, innovation, marketing, design, monetization models, and more.

These events are designed to share industry knowledge and help the developer and design community to better cater to market needs.

The iPhone Network Lounge has over 210 members and is now the leading iPhone networking group in San Francisco. I will be the guest speaker at the next event, this Thursday, February 4, and will present "Design iPhone Apps with Photoshop". 185 people are registered to attend the talk which will take place at the Adobe office in San Francisco.