Take a look most of the way down this page. Yes, it’s me, a speaker at a conference. Well, I’m on a couple of panels, and very curious to see how all this is going to go down.
Author: admin-blog
Some of this is a bit hardcore, but I like where he’s coming from.
I have created an iPhone app. It’s not new, though it hadn’t been done when I thought of it and still hasn’t been done in a really elegant way. Right now, I need beta testers. There’s so little to it that I don’t expect it to take you long to test, but test I must. If you have an iPhone and a few minutes, please send me your UDID by following these instructions and I’ll send you back an app for you to test shortly. Email [myfirstname] @ [thiswebsite.com]. Thanks!
I just tried the demo of the game “Braid” on Xbox 360, and my brain exploded with happiness. It’s wonderful, joyous, liberating.
If you download just one iPhone app, make it Stanza. A free book reader, it lets you download hundreds of copyright-free classics and many current Creative-Commons licensed books, such as those by Cory Doctorow. You can customise colour, font, size and more. Perfect when you’re stuck in a car with a sleeping baby, for example. It’s easy to read on the iPhone because the screen is very high resolution, and you can see why printed books will be a niche collectible product in years to come. Great. Now all I need is time to read.
Rant:
Does anyone else cringe a little when they see “iTouch”? There is not and has never been a product called iTouch. iPod touch, yes. iTouch is just another iBlah name, and it’s not even Apple’s fault. Well, not directly, anyway.
Every new iSomething name out there, from web designers to florists, is a little death in our collective imagination.
Well. Google has announced their new browser by launching a comic explaining the whole thing. It uses Webkit, as used and developed by Apple, with a host of great UI and functionality improvements. Available tomorrow but sadly Windows-only at first, I suspect this could be a big deal.
But hey — no problem testing against another browser if it’s another browser based on WebKit. Maybe this will actually wake up all the corporate IT people mandating Internet Explorer.
So you want to mock up an iPhone application design
This may be a cool set of Photoshop widgets, but if you’re considering using them, please consider using the Interface Builder app that comes with the iPhone SDK. All free, and it’s the actual tool that real iPhone developers use to build interfaces.
Extending an element is as easy as dragging it out; adding another icon to a toolbar automatically redistributes the others. Everything auto-snaps to build a GUI that follows Apple guidelines — it’s easier than Photoshop!
Just as designing a website in Photoshop gives you very little insight into how a website is actually built, designing an iPhone app in Photoshop is not going to help you understand how that’s going to work either. Interface Builder can be daunting, but for mockups it’s dead easy:
1. File > New… and make a new Cocoa Touch application.
2. Window > Library and drag objects into the window.
3. Double-click on buttons to change their text.
4. Window > Inspector and use the first section (Attributes) to change colours/styles if needed.
5. When you’re done, File > Simulate Interface and it’ll appear in the iPhone Simulator.
6. Command-shift-4, then press space. Click on the simulator to grab a pixel-accurate screenshot of your iPhone app, with shadow.
Make sure you take some stills next time you’re on a video shoot. In the near future, you might be able to use photographs to enhance your videos out of sight. Some fantastic, gobsmacking work here. Automatic retouching, resolution enhancement and high dynamic range for video.