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Learning iOS: Helpful Links

No, I haven’t given up on iOS after only a single blog post and a Hello World app.  I’ve got a couple of links today that I thought were extremely will done and way more detailed than anything I’m prepared to offer yet:

Anatomy of an Xcode project: This link is great if you’ve never really poked around in Xcode before. It’s a full preview of chapter 6 from Programming iOS 5, by Matt Neuburg, with links to some additional content from the book.  Unfortunately I’ve learned a lot of this the hard way already, but it’s a great reference

and…

Creating a Navigation Based iOS5 iPhone Application Using Table Views:  Another book chapter, this time from iPhone iOS 5 Development Essentials by Neil Smith.  Easy to follow along and gives you a good understanding of the UITableView and UINavigationBar items.  This site has some other book content available as well, and more demo material that I plan on working through in the near future.

Obviously I have not read either of these books in their entirety, but from what I’ve seen they’ve impressed me!

Learning iOS Front End Development as a Designer

I decided over the Holidays that I really need, at a minimum, to learn enough iOS development to support a dev team.  I think the imperative first steps are to get to the same level of competency that I have with XAML (WPF/Silverlight) and HTML/CSS/JS front end dev.  How long will that take?   I have no idea.

For the sake of full disclosure I took classes in college in C++ and Visual Basic and I developed a blog engine in php a few years back so the concepts of app dev are not totally foreign to me.

This weekend I finished the “Hello World” demo in the xCode documentation in about half an hour.  Everything made sense, a few things shocked me.  For example, you have to release objects when you’re done or you create memory leaks.  Really? Maybe I’m being naive but I thought we’d moved beyond that sometime in the late 90s.

My Next Plan is to dig into an RSS Display Tutorial… As soon as I find one that’s in a relatively recent version of iOS :)

Announcing Chicago SilverLight!

In the past 18 months, the Chicago Designers and Developers User Group has sought to walk the lines between design and development while remaining platform agnostic. We’ve had some great presentations and speakers in the past; however, it has become increasingly difficult to find and schedule topics that appeal to designers and developers in both the Adobe and Microsoft worlds. After careful introspection and evaluation, the CD2 leadership team have chosen to clarify our place in the community and focus on Microsoft Silverlight & WPF.

And so, we’re extremely excited to announce the creation of The Chicago Silverlight User Group. The core purpose of the group (better designer/developer collaboration) hasn’t changed, but includes a renewed focus as we concentrate on all that Silverlight and WPF have to offer as a rich platform. We invite all of CD2′s members to continue to join us in this new and excited SIG in the coming months.

In effect, this is the sunset of CD2 as we know it today. We realize that some of the content we sought to bring to CD2 is already capably provided by the likes of IxDA and the Chicago Area Adobe User Groups. We believe these groups also add value to the designer and developer communities.

The new user group’s inaugural meeting will be at 6PM on Wednesday, March 3rd at The Illinois Technology Association (ITA) 200 S. Wacker Drive, 15th Floor | Chicago, IL 60606

We will be launching a new registration website in the coming weeks, please stay tuned!

Twitter: http://twitter.com/ChiSilverlight
Eventbrite: http://chicagosilverlight.eventbrite.com/

In Search of a Devigner

I end up spending a lot of time talking about the relationships between designers and developers; how to help them work together and also how to survive on your own when you (the designer or the developer) is left alone to cover both bases.  Lately a number of people have pointed out how both of these topics would be moot if a single person could actually fill both roles – to steal a friend’s term, A Devigner.  Then it seems like the next step in that conversation is always either “so.. where do we get one?” or “how do I become one?”

devignergraphI don’t mean to paint a bleak picture here, but the population of people on the dev/design graph is basically the opposite of a bell curve.  Typically a person is really good at one or the other skillset and may have interest in moving towards the other end.  If you’re one of those people, that’s fantastic!  The development world wants you probably more than you’ve guessed and just by having the inclination you’ve already taken a healthy step towards the middle.

So how do you take more steps to the middle? To the designers in the audience, I’m taking these steps myself and will hold my judgement of my path for when I get somewhere.  For developers, I know you have resources on the design side (myself included) who want to help you come our way a little.  First I would suggest discovering what it is about the design side that interests you.  If we assume I meant “UX Design” up above every time I wrote just “design” then you have more options than the dreaded “Make it pretty” – visual design is, of course, a fascet of what we do, but there’s more to making an application enjoyable to use than what it looks like and any effort put toward that goal is never wasted.

Any successful UX designer is going to be at least familiar with each of the following fields of study:

  • usability
  • information architecture
  • interaction design
  • graphic design

Anything a developer can learn about these topics will take them closer and closer to being the elusive “devigner,” and a passion for making your user’s task easier and more enjoyable is certainly a leap in the right direction.

A new home

If you’ve ever visited my site before you’re probably wondering if this is the same place.  Well, it is.  I’m in the middle of migrating to a new blogging platform & still working out the kinks, so please be patient.  Especially with my downloaded, designed-by-someone-I-don’t-know-template.  Ugh.  (Nothing against the person who made this, I just like to do my own ;) )

Unfortunately, I had to abandon blogengine.net as my ….blog engine today.  Even bigger unfortunately, blogengine.net does NOT support any sort of migration.  I managed to salvage my posts, but I have lost all the comments people had left.  Needless to say I am annoyed.  The other thing of note is that if anyone had left a comment and was then email-spammed by what appeared to be me I am extremely sorry.  That was the original catalyst that got me off of blogengine & I am hoping that the problem will not persist now.

Thanks for stopping by & don’t mind the mess!

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