May 1, 2009

Review of DevDays Dublin - Apple iPhone Developer Conference

 

On Thursday 23rd April I ventured out to the iPhone developer conference DevDays 2009 which was organised by the Digital Media Forum and Create Ireland. This was to be my first view of Apple from a development viewpoint and wanted to share my musings on the subject.

 

Bear in mind my background approaching this – I am of a vintage to have worked on p.c’s when DOS was the operating system and Windows 3.1 was a mere application running on top of it. My development experience has been almost exclusively on Microsoft technologies so I was arriving as a virtual blank canvas.

 

One theme that ran throughout the day was reasons to develop for the iPhone. Apart from the wow factor of running apps on this very visually appealing device, the business opportunity is immense. There are currently over 37 million devices sold. All marketing, sales, payment processing and distribution is handled automatically via the app store. This leaves developers to do what they do best – develop great applications. For a once off fee of $99 (and the price of a Mac ) all of the business side of things is taken care of. 70% of revenue is retained by the developer.

 

Paul Burford – Apple Developer Relations

One of the first comments from Paul was to reiterate that Apple allow no blogging regarding their speakers! Therefore, I’ll leave it there …

 

Dermot Daly – Tapadoo

Dermot, on the other hand, was more than happy for attendees to blog away! He gave us a great overview of what its like from a developers point of view to work on the toolset and develop for the device. He also had some great tips on how best to work with Apple to ensure you get your app on the store in the shortest time.

His enthusiasm for the platform and its potential was obvious. I must say it was the most interesting build of a “Hello World” app I have ever seen.

Dermot introduced the environment and toolset required to be an iPhone developer, some of which were not as expected. The low down is:

  • You need a Mac!!! Funny as this sounds I didn’t even realise you needed a Mac. I assumed I could run a virtual mac on my VM Ware and have the best of both worlds, but apparently not. Upon further investigation, Apple insist you use their hardware to run their OS.
  • Development language is Objective C. Having dabbled in C# I assumed that this would be intuitive but apparently not so! Its got a steep learning curve and memory management is not taken care of with automatic garbage collection. Thinking about this afterwards, it makes sense given the limited hardware on the iPhone in terms of memory. However its still a bit of a throw back to yonder years! (remember typing mem at a dos prompt to see what was available and worrying about loading HiMem on boot). By all accounts the syntax is a bit funky too.
  • iPhone SDK library. An extensive set of class libraries.
  • Development tools:
    • XCode. This is the IDE. Looks quite nice and is the development environment the Apple developers use themselves for the iPhone.
    • Interface Builder. As the name suggests allows you to design the user interface for the app. It is used for the Cocao touch interface.
    • Simulator. A very cool iphone simulator so you can run your app virtually on your Mac.
    • Instruments. Provides performance data to help optimise your application. If it takes too much memory, Apple won’t even release it!

 

Some resources that Dermot suggested for use are:

 

 

Giacomo Duranti – Keywords International

Giacomo made some interesting points around the area of globalisation and localisation. His advice was that its easier to design for this from the start rather than as an add on. Another interesting fact is that localisation encompases other items over and above mere language translation. There are cultural differences and sensitivities to take into account as well e.g. the use of an owl (you had to be there!). Another tip he had was to allow more space for translation as typically translated text from English to another language expands.

 

Des Traynor – Contrast

By the time Des took to the podium the audience were wilting somewhat. The number of people that had pulled out their Macs and were developing had increased alarmingly! However Des soon shook everyone up. This is the closest I ever got to a boot camp! He is obviously passionate about his chosen field and extremely focused about what does and does not constitute a good app.

Some points from Des:

  • Make one solution for one user base. The app should be focused.
  • Make choices rather than having configuration possibilities in your app. He re-iterated the need to make choices and the fact that we had all made a choice to develop on the iphone (I was a bit nervous that he might find out I actually hadn’t made that choice yet and I was liable to get detention!)
  • Significance of choices decreases over time. This was an excellent point delivered well. The design choices at the start of a project are the big ones. Further down the development path are tweaks rather than major direction changes.
  • Decide on what type of app you want to develop – productivity (business app), utility (weather) or immersive (game).
  • Des suggests sketching out 5 ideas to come to a decision on the final one to accept.
  • Use a sketching tool to do screen mockups.

 

Finally he emphasised the difference between developing for an iPhone and agile web development. Although I’m sure he ruffled a few feathers while doing this I think his point was made well. Agile development methodology with constant revision and refinement will not cut the mustard on the iPhone. This is because without a well polished fully functional version 1, you never get to version 2. There is just too much competition on the platform vying for limited app installs on the device.

 

 

David Doherty - 3G Doctor

Davids presentation was more general in its scope. Rather than focusing on the iPhone he spoke at length regarding the possible application of mobile technology in healthcare. Some of his ideas regarding the interpretation of sensory data by the device were really interesting and the stuff of the not too distant future.

 

Ron Immink – SmallBusinessCan

 

Rons slot was very informative regarding smallbusinesscan.com. This looks to be a great facility for developers to showcase their work and get exposure in the science gallery. The website has a wealth of resources to assist emerging businesses from marketing to general business advice. It was great to have this aspect covered at the conference to assist developers in how to promote their work commercially and enable them to earn a living from their passion and creativity.

 

General Points

 

Overall the following points I took from the conference regarding what ingredients are required for great iPhone apps:

  • Needs to be fast. Average app usage is only 30 seconds.
  • Develop for finger use rather than a mouse.
  • Redesign apps from other environments to take advantage of multi-touch e.g. rather than left and right arrows, the users can merely swipe left or right.
  • Reduce keyboard input as much as possible – virtual keyboard can be tricky to use.
  • Reduce UI clutter to take account of the small screen.
  • Need to optimise your app for memory.
  • Reduce features in the app – make sure it is well focused on one main task.
  • Updates must be substantial rather than mere bug fixes.
  • Localise your app to take into account the global nature of the app store.

 

 

So what now?

 

I’m glad to have had the opportunity to have attended. Congratulations to Matt Johnston of Momentum NI, Fred Herrera of Create Ireland and Anton Mannering of Digital Media Forum for organising this event in Dublin.

 

The question is, am I tempted to become an iPhone developer? It has certainly given me plenty of food for thought. I naively expected the development environment to be a bit slicker than I saw. I was also surprised at the apparent steep learning curve to produce an app. Having said that, the possibilities of a global market on the app store and the direction of technology toward multi-touch screen is compelling. So overall I would say I am definitely considering this as an alternative to pure web development. I’m not convinced the iPhone in its current configuration is powerful enough to support data driven business applications, but this will come in the not too distant future. As multi-touch extends to windows and other operating systems, development in this area will only become more important.

As a final note, the move towards a richer UI that is always connected to the web is one of the most encouraging aspects of this. It seems to me to be the best of both worlds. You get the connectivity of browser based apps with the richer UI and responsiveness of a desktop application. Therefore I expect to be at DevDays 2010. If I will be there as a developer though probably depends on iPhone 3 and what Apple pulls out of the hat before then!

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