Designing for the iPhone is like a hybrid of print and web design.
-37 Signals
Some great resources for designing and developing for the iPhone here.
I may be jaded when it comes to Apple and their elitist platform, but I still plan on staying up on what’s going on with it.
Ok… so today’s announcements about revamping the iPod line was underwhelming to say the least, but something really struck another nerve with me.
I’ve been patiently awaiting the Nike+ announcement for the iPhone… Several times I’ve considered trading my new iPod Classic for my girlfriends iPod Nano just to use Nike+. I’m the kind of person that finds motivation to work out in graphs and charts of my progress… yea… I’m that kind of nerd…
So - the announcement that the new version of Nike+ only works with the second generation iPod Touch is immensely disappointing. Way to go Apple… make a product that is damn near mutually exclusive to the expensive iPhone that I own have one single feature I care about in an attempt to differentiate the two products enough so that everyone walks around with two nearly identical products… one in each pocket I guess…
I understand the reasoning behind not pushing a fitness app for the non-solid state hard drive based classics. That would be a genius bar nightmare… lots of fat nerds with their sweaty iPods that have been shaken to death from a few rounds around a track… but c’mon Apple… hook us iPhone users up. There is absolutely no reason to keep Nike+ away from us other to try to cash in on us double.
So, instead of the sweetness of being able to go out for a jog and, all out of breath, chime in on a conference call to tell some IT guy he’s an idiot while the latest Jack Johnson song is spinning in the background we’re left with the frustration of having to try to remember which iPhone looking thing to pick up to answer the phone call from work saying we’re late… again… hopefully we get it right this time…
Thanks for keeping us fat, Apple.
Brit ran across something huge yesterday - PhoneGap
The idea behind PhoneGap is basically to allow developers to create a native iPhone application that pushes thru to the web application of their choice… some of the iPhone SDK is available via javascript.
This is a great way to get an iPhone app developed without having reinvent the wheel in Objective-C. Who want’s to write 30 lines of code just to display a map anyway?
Useful tools for designing elements for iPhone applications:
A couple of things to note - the Icon template is setup to just give you an idea of how your icon design will look once the SDK adds all of the highlights/bevel/rounded corners - once you have a design you need to crop the image so that your icon fills the entire canvas and turn off all of the highlight effects/drop shadows.
Inserting a custom icon in an iPhone Application (XCode)
To add a custom icon to your application open your project in XCode and add your icon file (saved as a png file) to your resources folder. Then open the Info.plist file and change the line for you Icon File to the name of your icon (in my case outbreakIcon.png).
Now run the iPhone simulator (build & go) and you’ll see your custom app icon. If you need to tweak it just go back to photoshop and tweak away and save over the original png file - when you relaunch your app it the icon will update automatically.
Anyone else out there looking for good iPhone tutorials? Apple has some decent stuff but you have to wade through a lot of it.
Jai over at iPhoneSDKArticles is beginning to post some pretty solid and well structured tutorials that I’ve found pretty useful. This is my first exposure to Objective C and so far I’m not a big fan, but I guess it’s the poison I’ll have to deal with if I want to scratch the iPhone development itch I seem to have developed.
I’ve got a couple of small freebie apps in the works and right now at Figaro Interactive we’re starting to push a couple of our clients towards iPhone apps - for the sexieness and for the usefullness. We keep struggling with trying to define the iPhone demographic though - we want to beleive that all of the iPhone’s out there are in 20-something macgeeks hands but judging from the last time I took a ride with Southwest Airlines I think everyone out there has one. And Karl Rove? Really? Do I have to have something in common with that guy?!?
Karl Rove uses an iPhone... sigh...
