UI Prototyping iPhone Apps

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Before flying off to WWDC last month, I watched a whole bunch of sessions from 2009. Among others a session on "Prototyping iPhone User Interfaces" by Bret Victor. If you haven't watched it and you've got access to the WWDC videos - stop right here and watch the video!

In his session, Bret shows how to prototype an interface only by interacting with screenshots! It's amazing that a simple screenshot on the device can show you so much more than by just looking at it in a document or print out. It inspired me to use his framework and the whole process for our own development.

Unfortunately, the code for the session isn't available and neither Bret nor the frameworks evangelist, mentioned in the presentation, got back to me about the code. After some digging, I found Michael Fey's blog, who was able to successfully reverse engineer the missing parts of source code, which were not shown in the presentation.

Michael's UIViewAdditions basically allow easy access to frame properties and give you a neat init method, which adds the passed UIView as a parent:



There wasn't much left to do for me. I only coded the class Root, which is the parent of all UIImageView instances. It provides a couple of methods to slide images back and forth:



With those two classes and a couple of screenshots, it is fairly easy to create an App that looks and feels almost real. I created a short demo video, which shows how easy it is to get a good feeling if your App is going to work or not:



Now don't forget those are only screenshots and the App might need to load stuff over the network or do some animation, hence it might not feel the same. However, this process of prototyping an UI is powerful enough to give you an idea, whether the workflow or the UI in general is going to "work" or needs some tweaking.

You can download the source code for the two classes, along with a sample project from github.

WWDC10

It was my first WWDC this year and I'm blown away in any aspect! In order to not sound like an Apple fan boy, I'll highlight 3 aspects, which every conference has and compare them to my previous developer conference experiences.

The speakers were all Apple engineers. They knew how to present and almost all of them were very entertaining and fun to listen to. Most important of all - they knew what they were talking about! This is something no conference I've ever been to can compete with - not even the Spring Source conferences! They were close, but mostly featured some pretty bad talks from none Spring Source consultants, which kind of ruined the experience!

This is one aspect that makes the conference worth attending. I could simply go up to the Core Animations guy and ask him why the stuff is not working as I expect it to. The best thing was, I got and answer that actually solved my problem!

Another aspect is the choice of topics and the quality of the presentations! Everything kind of fits in nicely to the whole App theme. You could listen to talks on Interface Design, followed by an in depth session on Core Animation and finish off with listening to the latest innovations on the new iPhone 4. The quality of each talk was amazing! This is the first conference ever, where I wasn't close to dozing off once! Every session was interesting and inspiring, although they sometimes overlapped in terms of content!

To be fair, I'm kind of new to the iPhone platform, so if everything was interesting for me. I don't know how that holds true for fellow developers working on iPhone Apps for a couple of years. Other conferences I attended had quality talks, too - no doubt! Devoxx, e.g. always had great talks, but there was mostly one or two a day and the rest was mostly boring.

Third and last is the organizational aspect of the conference. It's amazing how Apple manages to keep 5000 developers under control. The food, although not extensive, was very good. Soft drinks all through the day, as well as breakfast and lunch. Another thing that I was blown away is the Wifi. Apple managed to provide a fairly stable internet connection for 5000 developers with probably more than 10000 devices. It didn't always work, as you could see in Steve's keynote, but most of the time it was stable and fast.

Even though I had to travel almost a day, going back and forth to San Francisco and the conference tickets are super expensive, it's definitely worth it. So WWDC11, here I come!

Book Review: The Business of iPhone App Development

Apress was kind enough to pass me a copy of this book, which I agreed to review in return.After the last book I reviewed, which was rather technical, I decided to go for a book with a tad more business angle. Personally, I was disappointed by this book, but that might not be the case for you.

Business of iPhone App Development covers exactly what the title promises: the whole process, beginning with the idea of an App over development to submitting it to the store. It's chopped up in 10 chapter, covering various steps of the process.

I'm not going into great detail explaining the content of the book. Instead, I'll write about what I didn't like. I think that should help you make a decision whether to get the book or not.

The reason why I didn't like this book is very simple: most of the information in this book can be obtained from the net or using common sense!

Let me elaborate: I think being able to obtain any information on the net these days is quite obvious. That doesn't mean you shouldn't buy this book. If you need a compact resource on topics like "Setting Up Xcode" or "Submission to the App Store", this book is definitely worth getting. If you have done this before, like me, you will be disappointed, because there's nothing new! If you are looking into more business-related topics, there's definitely topics worth reading. However, most of the technical content can be found in Apple's documentation or on stackoverflow.com. Since the book has a lot of technical chapters, I was a little bored revisiting information I already knew.

The more business-like chapters are definitely worth reading, especially if you are new to the whole App Store game. However, in my opinion a huge portion of the presented information are simple common sense! Using marketing channels like Twitter or Social Media like Facebook is standard these days and I believe there are no developers out there not knowing about those. However, some of the information seem like common sense, but it's great to have a resource to revisit from time to time, like e.g. App Store Rejection reasons. Another great chapter is "Protecting Your Intellectual Property", which you probably can't find anywhere else. It covers EULAs, licensing and trademarks.

Overall, Business of iPhone App Development encompasses a lot of information and the authors did a great job, trying to cover a lot of ground. However, I can only fully recommend this book to you, if you are new to the world of iPhone development. Otherwise, you might want to think about it twice.