Another Cool iPhone App From A Michigan Company

Henry was interviewed on WWJ Newsradio 950 in Michigan. Check out the interview on wwj.com.

We’ll be at 360iDev– will you?

Henry and I are super pumped to both be holding sessions at the upcoming 360iDev conference in Denver next month! Henry will be speaking about iPhone app marketing strategies for developers and I’ll be giving a talk on user experience. The list of presenters is very impressive and I’m sure all of the sessions will be jam packed with valuable info!

You can find more details about the conference at 360idev.com. If you’re planning on going– make sure to drop in and say hi! I’m looking forward to meeting as many fellow iPhone developers as possible! Whoop!

iPhone 2.x SDKs on Snow Leopard

So, it’s been reported extensively on Twitter that the iPhone SDK package for Snow Leopard only includes SDKs for OS 3.0. This causes some problems because the SDK you build with inserts a key into your Info.plist which tells the device/store what SDK you’re targetting. This isn’t modified by the ‘iPhone OS Deployment Target’ build setting, and causes the Store to limit which devices you can install the app on, and causes the device to use 3.0-specific behaviours. This means that you WILL need to tweak coordinates and offsets to match the differences for OS 3.0, while apps build with, say, the 2.0 SDK will cause the device to emulate the behaviour of UIKit on 2.0.

There have been a few attempts to define how to make it work, but ultimately these may only work for Device SDKs, not Simulator ones. And even so, these still fall afoul of the ‘DTSDKName=iphoneos3.0’ setting created by the target SDK, so you still won’t get 2.x behaviour or be able to install on 2.x devices via the App Store.

So, after a LOT of fiddling, I have discovered the following:

1. In the Snow Leopard OS 3.0 SDKs, you have the path usr/gcc/i686-apple-darwin10, which is symlinked to usr/gcc/i686-apple-darwin9.
2. When building things which use and similar compiler-dependent things, the system will look inside gcc/[arch]-[vendor]-[osversion]/include for the compiler-dependent versions of those headers.
3. On Leopard (and for the iPhone, which is based on Leopard) this looked in usr/gcc/i686-apple-darwin9/include.
4. On Snow Leopard, the current system is Darwin version 10, so it will look in usr/gcc/i686-apple-darwin10/include. Hence the symlink.
5. Therefore to get the older SDKs building properly (by getting access to those compiler-specific headers) you need to create the darwin10 symlink.

To do this, you basically do the following commands:

> cd /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneSimulator.platform/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneSimulator2.2.1.sdk/usr/lib/gcc
> sudo ln -s i686-apple-darwin9 i686-apple-darwin10

Now, unless you manually set a specific compiler in your build settings, the default when using the 2.x iPhone SDKs will be gcc 4.0.1, which works fine now. If you want to use gcc 4.2.1, you’ll need to copy[OS3SDK]/usr/lib/i686-apple-darwin9/4.2.1 and[OS3SDK]/usr/lib/gcc/i686-apple-darwin9/4.2.1 into the same places in your 2.x SDKs.

If that sounds a little fiddly, then hang in there. I’ll be distributing an app to do all that for you in a little while.

(via Alan Quatermain)

My Top 5 iPhone App Interfaces

I’ve read through the Apple HI guidelines for iPhone multiple times, gathered a few resources for bickbot’s newsletter and stumbled across a few really great apps with bad ass interfaces. I think one of the main reasons the iPhone’s been so successful, is some of the beautiful UI’s the designers/developers have created. So I decided to share a few of my favorites.

Here’s a list of my top 5–

1. EDGE (developer site)

Edge was by far the best time I’ve had early on with an iPhone game. You could tell Mobigame’s put a lot of thought into control and UX. At the time, it offered a tilt control option and gesture based control– I immediately fell in love with the gesture based controls, they just seemed to make sense while playing. This is in addition to their lovely “8-bit” menu system and sounds.

2. Convertbot/Weightbot (developer site)

Tapbots really, IMHO, are probably the best UI designers in the iPhone app business at the moment– they are who I strive to beat in my designs. Tapbots know that the user experience is just as important as actually getting stuff done with their app– Their apps BLEED UX and gorgeous UI.

3. Eliss (developer site)

Another game. The reason I choose Eliss is– it’s the first time while playing an iPhone game that I actually envisioned myself living in the future. LOL– this is the type of UI I imagined I would be using when I was younger– a simple, natural, multi-touch interface. Check it out– you will be amazed.

Could you imagine manipulating spreadsheet data this way on a larger tablet device or table top? Uh– yes.

4.Birdhouse (developer site)

Adam Lisagor & Cameron Hunt have done a beautiful job creating non-standard UI elements (that look like standard UI elements) and integrating them with their twitter client. Some of their custom stuff really looks like it should be included in the iPhone OS’ standard UI toolkit.

5. Twitteriffic (developer site)

Developed by Iconfactory– isn’t that enough information? They make some of the best Mac OS X applications– and it obviously shows they understand what makes the iPhone platform so important. Again, very clean UI elements that look like they should be part of the standard iPhone UI.

Recording a demo for your iPhone app

I wanted to show off BickBott’s first iPhone app to our community, so the obvious choice was to do a video of me talking about/using the app itself. I could have just pointed my camera at my iPhone’s screen and talked through the app, but I wanted something more professional. Turns out it wasn’t too hard to pull off…

1. Set your desktop on your Mac to something simple (I just used solid gray, but Apple has some nice pre-set colors in system preferences to choose from).
2. Launch XCode and compile your app for the iPhone Simulator.
3. Minimize everything except the iPhone Simulator to the dock.
4. I used ScreenFlow to record my “iPhone” which is $99, but you can also use TechSmith’s free Jing app to accomplish the same basic thing. Jing has less editing capabilities than ScreenFlow, but it still gets your demo across to your users.
5. ScreenFlow has a lot of editing and multi-track layout features (I was able to put our app icon in, my twitter icon, and some basic info about myself into the video).
6. Now, if you want to be one of the cool kids, here’s a ScreenFlow tip! You can change the shape of your cursor AFTER you’ve recorded your demo. I changed mine to the classic iPhone demo circular “finger tap” cursor (you know the one) to polish off the demo and make it look more professional.
7. Choose your favorite video sharing site (we like Vimeo) and publish your app demo.

BickBoxx Beats by Henry

In celebration of the release of our open-source iPhone app project, BickBoxx– Henry has decided to put together some beats for us. Enjoy…

What can you learn from a Palm developer

We had the opportunity to chat with our friend Rob from Hobbyist Software. He’s developed VLC Remote and OFF for the iPhone but he’s also been a mobile app dev for the Palm platform as well.

Where do you think Palm has failed and Apple has succeeded?

1. Failing to promote the benefit of apps. For years, palm has failed to sell the story of apps to consumers when they buy their treo. There should have been leaflets in the boxes, links to the store (and a decent store), etc

Palm produced some research years ago that over 90% of users didn’t have a single app installed. They had the ecosystem and fabulous apps – but they never turned that into a selling point for the everyday user.

2. Uglyness. It was fine to be ugly with the early cheap screens that required it. With the new high res, colour screens, there was a capability to fix that. There were two great third party apps that re-skinned the entire interface and made it look pleasing. Not as good as apple/iPhone, but pretty good. Palm should simply have licenced or replicated this to give an overall facelift to the treo.

Where do you think Apple has failed and Palm has succeeded?

1. Useability. I’m not talking the ‘my grandma can use this’ type of useability now. I’m talking the ‘I can get things done’ type of useability.  Let’s add an item to the calendar for drinks tomorrow at 5pm with bob…

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Use Application Loader Before App Submission

When we submitted Toast Timer to Apple for approval, we ran into a bit of a snag…

A week after we submitted the app, they rejected it for no apparent reason. They asked us to simply resubmit.

I went to the developer site to find out what I can do. And I found it…

Apple had a Mac app called Application Loader that you could install. Once you install it, it analyzes your app’s zip file. It verifies all the certificates, icons, and other things are correct BEFORE submitting to Apple.

Minimize your chances of app rejection and always use the Application Loader.

Here’s a screencast from Henry of where to find Application Loader in iTunes Connect…

Where to find Application Loader from Henry Balanon on Vimeo.

What we use to mockup our iPhone UIs

When creating an interface mockup of your application there are a few resources that are key to streamlining the design the UI in your application. Here’s a few tools we use to mock ours up before coding…

Teehan+Lax iPhone GUI PSD
This contains editable versions of the iPhone OS’ standard interface elements on their own layers.
Learn More

LiveView by Nicholas Zametti
This allows you to “screencast” a view of your interface from Photoshop directly to your iPhone’s screen over your local network.
Learn More

iPhone Mockup by Lukas Mathis
Quickly create sketches online of your ideal app interface.
Learn More

Toast Timer Tour

Hey everyone! Just wanted to show a quick tour of our Toast Timer app for those of you who haven’t had a chance to check it out on the app store. Leave improvement suggestions in the comments!

Toast Timer iPhone App Tour from John Ellenich on Vimeo.