Author: mike

Categories
Blog iOS development

WWDC 2012 Sell-Out – sign of platform health, or symptom of bigger issues?

It’s very disappointing that the WWDC announcement occurred the way it did. So far, my developer’s account still hasn’t even received an official announcement from Apple, and being on the West Coast, the conference was sold out before I woke up.

This is more of a problem for Apple than just a few disappointed developers in California, though. Lack of reliable information about iOS slows the adoption of new features, and the biggest value of WWDC is the hands-on labs. While user uptake of 5.0 is very high (over 80% of the install base), developers need time and information to absorb new features. The iOS announcements at WWDC are also largely under NDA, leaving developers no way to share information until the official release.

The model of holding one conference close to Cupertino and driving 1000 engineers to Moscone for a week is not sufficiently scalable for today’s developer demand. In the past, Apple has done some road shows where they send people to major cities to talk up their new technologies, but even that is an unreasonable amount of scarcity. The development forums and Apple’s current paid support structure are very hard to search and navigate, and the forums are very light on things like submission policies, acceptance, etc. The large media company I’m currently working for has dedicated Developer Relations support, and even they have issues getting answers; you can imagine what it’s like for smaller developers who don’t.

I think it’s high time for Apple to build and staff permanent dedicated Developer Relations Centers in key cities. These should be staffed with working software engineers (not just evangelists) who can provide detailed help with tools, libraries, and policies, and escalate tougher problems to Cupertino. These places could also be a great focal point for training classes and other services to developers.

Another way they could mitigate the information gap might be to provide developer services at key Apple Stores, with features like a regular schedule of talks, a showcase of apps developed by local developers, and a Developer’s Genius Bar to help navigate questions about the HIGs, content standards, and other policies. More importantly, it gives Apple a much better way to listen to the community and prioritize new features and policies. This is a very low-cost and low-risk way for Apple to do developer outreach.

Categories
Blog Esoterica

The art of Burning Man – 2011

If you’ve wondered why I go to Burning Man, perhaps this will answer your questions.

Where else do you see technology and industrial equipment bent to the purpose of art in such a harsh environment?

Categories
Blog

Facebook Messenger a disappointment on iPad

The new Facebook Messenger app looks like a nice streamlined UI to Facebook IM, one that uses location and push notifications to provide an alternative to both IM and texting.

However, they dropped the ball when it comes to the iPad. The app is built as an iPhone-only app, which means it appears on the iPad in a little window that you can pixel double up to full-screen size. Yuck.

One wonders why they didn’t at minimum build it as a Universal app, which lets the UI scale up to full screen using the full resolution of the device. This takes literally 5 minutes to implement in Xcode. The ideal solution, however, would be to use the iPad split view, which would show your list of chat buddies on the left, and your conversation thread on the right. This is a bit more work to implement, but still easy to do for an iOS developer with any iPad experience.

Facebook seems to have the opinion that the proper way to use their service is through the iPad web browser, and that certainly works, but having the ability to take advantage of push notifications and all the other native goodies and access your conversations with a couple of pokes would be a better way to exploit the immediacy of the iPad interface.

Categories
Blog

Waiting for Steve

Headed to the WWDC keynote line shortly. Even this year, when there appears to be no large hardware announcement lined up, nobody is taking chances. Macrumors reported 30 people in line 11pm last night.

The WWDC hall makes it obvious what the focus is this year: Lion plus iOS plus iCloud. With emphasis on the plus, I suspect. Much speculation abounds about all of these, but from the conference schedule so far, there seems to be a push to unify interfaces between iOS and Lion above and beyond what we’ve been told so far. Things that used to be presented on separate tracks, like UI design, etc. now are joint iOS/Lion sessions.

The Mac App Store already seems to be pulling developers from iPhone into iOS proper now, so it looks like they are dissolving the walls between the platforms. One dead giveaway is that they appear to be changing the UI layout system to something that will be much more resolution-independent.

There are some 32 sessions scheduled that are TBA, which means they are about stuff that will be announced in the keynote. Some of those sessions are scheduled to be given more than once due to room capacity and scheduling conflicts.

Stuff I’m hoping for:

  • a killer update to Apple’s HTML5 authoring tools — iAd Composer and Dashcode have a lot already, let’s get them unified into something that will really kill Flash.
  • a framework for syncing apps between mobile devices, desktop, etc. using the cloud.
  • Apps on Apple TV.
  • Better notifications on iOS 5, along with some sort of home-screen capability

Anyway, off to brave the cold.

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Categories
iOS development iPhone

Think Alike

Apparently apple has already patented one of the things on my personal wish list for the iPad: a conductive stylus that transmits pressure and or tilt information. This type of a pen would basically turn the iPad into something like a Wacom Cintiq, at a fraction of the cost and with far better portability.

Up to now, drawing on the iPad has basically been fingerpainting, though several of the drawing apps have taken some novel approaches. Sketch Club, for example, can use your drawing velocity to control the line. Though there are styluses which you can use with the iPad now, none can support pressure or tilt sensitivity. Because of the way the iPad handles touch events and gestures, this has to be directly supported in iOS. While many of the drawing programs for the iPad are already pretty good, pressure sensitivity is a must for any serious professional drawing program, especially those that mimic traditional art materials such as charcoal.

This article goes into a lot more detail about their approach. This particular approach requires a special pen with a conductive disk tip that can trigger the touch panel sensors more effectively.

Categories
iOS development iPhone

It’s the little things

Attention to detail is very important in the user experience for mobile apps. Here’s an example (courtesy of Daring Fireball) from the iOS email program. It’s a small thing, but these behaviors add up to a very polished whole.

This blog, ‘The Invisible’ is brand new, with just two postings, but is a very promising look into the little details which drive the fit and finish of user interfaces. The first entry, about tab closing in Google Chrome, is also very enlightening.