San Francisco (WWDC)

Here are some photos of San Francisco on Flickr and WWDC.

Gearing up for WWDC ‘09!

Finally found my passport (just in time). I am curious about the WWDC. Never been there in my life. ‘09 will be my very first Apple Conference. I have been to several Apple Expo (R.I.P) in Paris, an have been kindly invited to the last one to represent Visuamobile but I am sure it doesn’t compare to the WWDC. After all, Apple calls it the “WWDC Experience”.

I have seen a beautiful iPhone mock-up this morning on www.iphone-ticker.de and for the first time, I really hope the mock-up is the real thing. Mock-ups of Apple upcoming products always have something to it that doesn’t sound right. But this one is a spot-on. I am afraid I could be dissapointed by what’s announced if it doesn’t match this:

Fortunately, it is the work of Apple to surprise us in a good way. We’ll see in a few days now.

Prototyping iPhone apps with Fireworks

I have just stumbled upon Unitid blog and found a really cool tool to prototype iPhone applications. Everything is explained on the blog so I just let you go there and make your opinion about it. So far, it is the most useful tool I have found.

Source: Unitid Blog

You can also have a look at Edward Tufte’s video about the iPhone interface design right here.

Objective-C for beginners

It has been a year now that I have been working at Visuamobile (I love every minute of it). I spend most of my days with engineers and before a year ago, I had never seen code, or anyone coding anything except html. I am from a business school and except from some really poor html stuff, I was very unaware of the coding world.

I was amazed by the power of the SDK and the fact that these engineers had almost infinite possibilities when facing their computer. Naive as I was, I tried without any programming background to begin coding at home and learn by myself.

It was harsh but I managed to make my first ‘Hello World’ quite quickly (with Interface Builder (IB)). It was not the same story at all without it and I quickly understood that if IB was indeed a powerful tool, it became obsolete when you were trying to fully customize your interface or really understand what is really going on.

I have spent a lot of time browsing the web to find tutorials and I wanted to share the best sites I have found so far:

• iPhone Dev Central: provides really nice videos with IB and a lot more.
• Cocoa Dev Central: you should have some programming background for this one. The Webdesign of this site is absolutely georgeous and to tell you the truth I would have like this blog to look exactly like this. Scott Stevenson has done a wonderful work on the site.
• Erica Sadun also provides a lot of code along with her iPhone Developer’s CookBook. No IB used, all pure Objective-C but note that Ms. Sadun sometimes uses undocumented APIs (from what I have been told, it’s not as if I had the ability to go check for it) + weekly advice on ArsTechnica from Erica Sadun on some precise subjects
• The “hyper mediatized” Standford iPhone courses, here and there with video podcasts on iTunes U. I haven’t seen the podcasts yet but the first session was exclusively using IB.
• Cocoa is my Girlfriend: to tell you the truth it’s in my Safari bookmarks but I haven’t read or used a thing on this one. Opinion = neutral
• CocoaDev: again, just mentioning it. Haven’t used that one.
• Appsamuck: really nice one for beginners as it provides funny code examples. It really encourages you to code. From what I remember, no IB
• iPhone SDK articles: a blog for intermediate I think.
• TooDarkPark.net: I don’t remember how I found it. It’s more like a course with nice examples. Really interesting stuff.

2 books I would recommend (in addition to Erica Sadun’s CookBook) which are almost always mentioned in forums for beginners :

1. Programming in Objective-C by Stephen Kochan
2. Programming for MacOSX by Aaron Hillegass

With all this, you should be ready for a nice year in front of your computer learning Objective-C. I had to stop because I had no time and also no patience but I would have loved to code and I strongly encourage anyone who is curious about this things to keep digging.

Timing issue

It would be a great thing if Apple took some time to improve the AppStore release process. And more especially the release dates displayed and the way it affects your app promotional advantages.

Today, Apple uses the date you submitted your app as the official release date. If your app is rejected once, and you have to re-submit your binary, you mecanichally miss the spot you deserve on the ‘new releases’ page because your app is stuck in the pipe with a release date still running.

Earth Secrets was posted a month ago and released the 1st of April. On the day it was actually made available to the public, it appeared at the 7th page of the Social networking category :)

The making of Earth Secrets

How an iPhone app is born? And how is it made ?

A PostSecret/Ocarina Mash-Up

I always have been a fan of PostSecret.com. And obviously, not the only one. 228,084,571 people have visited the blog and more than 30k follows PS on Twitter since it has been recently added to the blog. What really amazed me with PostSecret was that it was the first time a website felt so ‘human’.

And recently, I was also fascinated by the Ocarina app from Smule. Not because you can play music with it, but because of the globe. Because of the idea the world could so easily gather on a phone screen.

That’s how the idea of Earth Secret was born.

• Earth

The 3D globe was done first. I wanted it to be brighter than the exising ones. Once it was done, we fine-tunned all the globe prameters: zoom factor, inertia, deceleration, axis and background.

• UI

After this OpenGL ES globe interlude, we designed the UI (back to Objective-C). We wanted it to be ‘dead simple’, letting a maximum space to the globe and the secrets. We tried to get nice and bright colors but also avoid any childish stuff as I wanted the app to feel serious.

• Animations

Then, we had to decide how to animate the secret, how it would pop-up on the screen. It was a difficult choice as it had to be ‘un-computerish’ and smooth. We finally settled on an animation that is the exact opposite the way your secret flies to your GPS location on Earth when you post one.

• The Rules

Finally, we had to set the rules. Obviously, the secrets had to be moderated. It was suggested it could be nice to answer other people secrets or rate them. I felt like secrets didn’t need any answers and that rating was way out of line. So, we created the ‘Hugs’ to allow users to communicate their sympathy and keep track of their favorite secrets.

After many tests and some corrections required by Apple, the app was posted and released on the AppStore. It is available here for free.

This blog is meant for you to point out what could be improved, so don’t hesitate to comment.