I believe that’s going to be a great platform for some kinds of uses. Not everyday coding in XCode or Coda, not editing text with Latex, TextMate or another powerful text editor. No, a more casual kind of use.

So I have a project I want to do on the iPad which I think could be both fun and successful. I’ ll let you know later what this project is about. What I’ m about to talk about today is the critical part of the project: design.

You know what they say. In most environments, you want to spend 10% of your project time on design the User Interface (UI) or the User eXperience (UX). Like an afterthought. On the Cocoa Touch platforms, you have to spend over 60% of your time on that part of the whole project.

That’s what I do: before getting really involved in the project, I checked that I could work with a graphic designer to exchange thoughts, detail behaviors, ideas, etc. I’m still the project manager and creator. She gets to play the hard part of being candid about the project.

I made sure she knew well the products on the Cocoa Touch platforms that have reached the level of UI and nice design that I hope to find in my products. I made a list of apps to buy and use, another list of apps to look at. I made sure she got to read the Human Interface Guidelines, and saw the great videos by Apple.

But know comes the hard part: putting the ideas into perspective and moving on from a “application statement” to real screens. And this I am the only one who can do it.

Over the months, I have become quite confident over my ability to do it on the iPhone. My products have not yet reached the level of candy I would hope, but their structure is now well balanced, clean, lean, and I ‘get’ the device.

I have started with all the stencils you could find, and still use some. But for the most part I have a moleskine notebook (before) or a Field Notes notebook. And a pencil: a 0.9mm mitsubishi uni. Allows me to write down the different screens of an app quickly wherever I am, even on a sunday night at 2:00 am. I know the iPhone UI at my disposal, and the screen is the right size for a notebook.

I also use the Sketch book I bought on Amazon several months ago, when I need to explain the UI to someone else. I have plenty of room around the UI to describe the UX. Then I make photos and send them over.

But the iPad is HUGE…

At first, I used the stencil made by Andy Warwick which he showed as a mockup during the most excellent NSConference UK 2010. I made myself the same mockup to try to get a feel of the beast.

Matt Gemmell holding Andy’s mockup

Because it is big, and small at the same time. And the Simulator doesn’t reflect exactly the size of the stuff. Like for the iPhone and the simulator: the density of the screen is not the same on a Mac and an iPad, so the beast appears bigger on a Mac screen.

Like Andy, I taped my cardboards to have a nice back. But I was quite unhappy with it because the damn thing wouldn’t work. Nothing on the screen ever. And it didn’t help me design anything.

I discovered several notepads or stencils for the iPad. I have ordered the stencil from Design Commission, and the notepod. But deliveries from Australia to France are a bit slow.

So this saturday I took the opportunity of some errands to get into a graphic shop, and bought myself a cutting mat, a cardboard, a pvc sheet and some transparent drawing paper (papier calque). I used the pvc sheet for my mockup and now I have a ‘glass screen’. I can put things under that glass screen (it ’s more comfortable and less dangerous than the one nikf did too).

And I cut my cardboard sheet to make myself two small iPads. The screen itself seems to be 20cmx15cm, if you wanna know. the other specs are on Apple’s website. On these cardboard, recto-verso, I made the lines of the status bar, made some lines too for popovers, split views etc. I used screenshots I made from the Simulator to reproduce as well as I could the size, position etc.

I can now use my drawing paper like a (last century’s) cartoon drawer would do: I add levels of UI to my basic view, and put everything in the iPad mockup to ‘feel’ how it is.

Having all these tools and these limits to the UI I want and I know I can make helped me get over the white sheet problem, and I started really designing something real which I can ‘test’.

Total cost must’ve been over 40 euros, but I have many stencils now I even did some more for my iPhone stuff.

Here are some pictures:

I am not totally bad at using my hands, but I am no wizard too, so if I did you can probably do it too.

• Glyphish is probably your first stop. Joesph Wain did a very nice job of creating high quality icons for different uses that are of different sizes and different formats, and it’s free with licence (please read). I was amongst the one who gave him money when he started that collection, and I feel I have a small part in the success and quality of that set. You’re welcome Plus I’m happy to use them in different apps.

• app-bits has another very nice set of free, quality icons. The licence is Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License which makes it easily usable.

• Eddit also has a very nice set of 160 icons. It is 69USD, but this is money well spent. Thanks to Eddy Wilson.

All these resources provide icons for toolbar or tab bar. They are level of gray with an alpha mask resources. If you need colored icons, you should have them hand made.

The three guys up there seem to make custom icons. I don’t know how available they are.

There are other valuable people you could contact, here are their Twitter handles:

• @cocoia (he makes great t-shirts too
• @desaulniers
• @Iconfactory

Don’t forget the number one rule: use system icons when available and stick to their meaning. It will make the user experience easier (”huh what is that icon for?”)

As a general rule, I stopped accepting comments, but if you think I should add a name or resource, please contact me by mail as cyril on this domain.

Update Actually, Stefaan Lesage from devia remembered me last night during the monthly meeting that he had written a similar article back in september. He has different resources to talk about, worth a read.

So I drag the app to iTunes, then back out.

Then on the command line:

zip -u PhotoGeo.ipa iTunesArtwork

where iTunesArtwork is a 512×512 jpeg file.

Now I know where to find that trick.

Credits : epatel @memention

Etant donné que maintenant le développement sur Mac OS et Cocoa Touch est ma principale activité, je me suis inscrit à la complète: workshops le dimanche (avec Matt Gemmell), puis 2 jours de conférence Mac/Cocoa et une journée de conférence iPhone.

Cette conf est super intéressante, elle mêle les infos techniques et les infos business, ou graphiques, et c’est un moment de rencontres avec un nombre très important d’autres développeurs.

Voici ma liste de conseils pour y aller, en profiter, et les us et coutumes observées:

Le portable est utile mais pas indispensable

Les sessions sont filmées et les invités mettent leurs présentations en ligne. Les vidéos arrivent assez vite et sont de super qualité (et en HD, please). Certains partagent leurs notes avec SubEthaEdit. L’année dernière le wifi était pas mal, mais pas génial, difficile de regarder YouTube pendant ce temps là…

Il faut aller dire bonjour aux gens

Ne pas être timide est une qualité essentielle. Tout le monde est plutôt détendu, l’ambiance est plutôt sympa, pas de sécurité etc. Il faut aller rencontrer les conférenciers et les participants (c’est parfois plus intéressant)

L’essentiel se passe en dehors des confs

Chambre – Salle de conf? Non, ce n’est pas comme ca qu’il faut faire… Il faut plutôt trainouiller, autour du bar, autour des couloirs: c’est l’occasion de rencontrer des personnes que l’on ne connaît pas mais qui en valent le coup. Certains ont des accents écossais, gallois, londoniens, mais d’autres ont des accents allemand, suisse, espagnol.

Je crois que cette année encore, ce sera l’occasion de se montrer ses applications les uns les autres, partager les infos techniques ou non et collaborer, ou en tout cas prévoir de le faire.

La Biere == l’eau

Allez y doucement tout de même. L’intérêt de rester au même endroit, c’est qu’il n’y a pas besoin de prendre la voiture. Chacun paye sa tournée à son tour. Les anglais, c’est service au bar.

Prenez de quoi faire un peu de sport

Il y a de quoi courir, et une piscine etc. Profitez en. Cela compensera la bière, les gâteaux et le reste…

Si vous y allez, le tag est #nsconf

Of course, you know about that old trick that iPhone developers and marketers (I hate that word) used to get back on the first page of their category: create a small update, even once a week, resubmit it, and when the update is done, change the release date to the day it’s done. That allowed your app to come back from the deepness of page 324 of the AppStore to the first page of the category.

Of course, it is still not as good as the very very first page. But it provided a nice bump in sales. You can see that bump thing on this graph of GPSRecorder sales.

I stopped using that trick in a regular way for 321run. I am not making as many updates as used to do. I now test them more thoroughly, and add more features in each update (I almost always added features in updates, except when there is a ridiculously crashing bug). In 321Run, there was a 1.0, a 1.1, a 1.2 and (unfortunately) a 1.2.1. Over the course of 6 months.

All in all, if that change of the publication has such an impact on the review process, I say wonderful. Imagine 100 0000 apps being updated regularly, and picture the army you would need to do it.

My presentation was made using Viewfinder, the great app from ConnectedFlow. That really added content and quality to my presentation, as I decided to go the new way : no content on slides, only ideas. But the bad part is I talked.

If you want to have a peek at the video and read things, head over to CocoaHeads.be.

I take the time also to thank the people who were there, the organiser, Stefaan Lesage and Eric Bariaux who invited us and paid for the room (I did that kind of effort too for fidug).

It is not Apple’s fault. Instead they write long guidelines to explain how to do great apps. They spend some time sending evangelists around the world to provide developers with advanced insight on the platform.

It is usually not the geek’s fault. We don’t use crappy apps. We use nice intelligent apps. We occasionally fuss at nnw and prefer reeder, or we cheat on twitterrific with tweetie. We’re in that level of usage with apps.

Look at the first screens on http://firstand20.com/ and tell me if you see a farting app, or even two useless apps in that catalog. No, there are well done apps for people who care.

But the iPhone is first a phone. And people first see it as a phone, a gadget to show off around them. This is the cultural difference. Most of us see it as an Internet device or a computer device. Most of them see it as a phone, with gizmos to entertain.

Eventually, they will make up their mind, or switch to another platform if they don’t have the time to learn.

We have to be patient. Don’t forget this platform is 16 months old. Yes, 16.

I hope the reviewers will continue to refuse apps that have minimal use. Can we also vote against them?

But with that setting, the volume level of your app and the iPod are paired. If you want to lower the volume of the iPod to give more intensity to your sounds, you actually also reduce your volume. I know, I tried ita lot.

Hidden in the documentation is the setting you are looking for. Its description is self explanatory, so I will just give you the name.

kAudioSessionProperty_OtherMixableAudioShouldDuck

One caveat though: you need to unset it when your app quits. Otherwise it has the same effect on the phone app: the music doesn’t stop.

– Post From My iPhone

Je crois que c’est il y a 6 mois que j’ai commencé cette catégorie. C’est toujours quand on se vante que l’on va faire queque chose que la chût est plus dure. J’aurais donc mieux fait de me taire.

Donc plus de promesses. En tout cas vous pouvez vous rendre compte que je passe plus de temps à imaginer que je fais des applications pour l’iPhone, ou à en faire, qu’à remplir cette catégorie. C’est idiot!

Between my wife, my son and I, we have 6 different devices (I have a lot, because of tests). If you have an iPhone, you want your wife/husband to have one too, but you don’t want to pay twice for apps, so you easily manage to share them among your different devices.

I’d say there are roughly 30 millions discrete buying users out there, which is less than the 50 we heard about last night.

That’s still a lot of people (more thant the workforce in France, for example).