Tap Tap Tap likes my iPhone development blog

Last weekend was pretty crazy. Mainly because Tap Tap Tap, one of the most respected iPhone development companies, wrote an entire blog post recommending my iPhone design/marketing blog, Tapity. They essentially said, if your a serious iPhone developer, you need to check out my blog.

The last few days have been pretty cool. Not only has traffic increased but I've gotten to meet a lot of cool iPhone developers through this and my posts have gained a lot more "authority"—increasing the likelihood of being passed on.

Its cool to have your endless hours of research and writing finally start to pay off. So to my fellow bloggers, keep at it!

Must read: 7 Ingredients of successful iPhone apps

Apple has synthesized the seven key characteristics found in successful iPhone apps. Read more on Tapity.com: 7 Ingredients of successful iPhone apps. I plan on posting a series of follow up posts on Tapity.com.

Tapity — two college kids building iPhone apps and yapping about it

So you may have heard I'm building an iPhone app. In fact, its two of us: me and my brother, Josh. We're out to make our mark in the app industry and we're calling ourselves Tapity. I'm now devoting tons of time toward the project and we've decided to blog about every step we take. While great articles about designing, building, and marketing iPhone apps exist, we've found a lack in detailed case studies, with every step (from Twitter activities to design decisions) documented in a fun, colorful way. We want to change that.

Surely, our beginnings are humble but I'm putting my full force behind trying to get a lot of worthwhile discussion going—hope you join us at tapity.com, it should be fun.

By the way, I would really appreciate your input on the custom theme I've been designing for tapity.com (pictured above). Also feel free to follow our new Twitter account: @tapityapps.

Yeah, I'm building an iPhone app

So its been almost a year in college and I'm realizing that right now I am in a position that I will never be in again. These four years are a unique opportunity for me to build useful applications for college students—because I am one. Scratching my own itch is sure to scratch the itches of millions of other college students around the world. Wow.

So my first app is called "Make the Grade" (tentatively) and the inspiration came from an unexpected bombing of my Statistics test. I was quite disoriented (having a keen interest in keeping my 4.0 GPA) and thought: there should be an easy way for me to see exactly what I need to do to get an A in this class, despite this test grade.

So, enough with the boring back-scratching back story, I'm a good ways along in the design and a decent way through development so I will be launching a marketing site within a week. Until then, check out the Facebook fan page that I just created to see development updates.

Unfortunately, I've been working on the app all day and need to get back to that Statistics homework. Passionate application development has a peculiar way of sucking one's time away from one.

Tweetversations

I had a dilemma the other day. Remembering an interesting debate I had with someone on Twitter, I wanted to refer to it, but how? I couldn't. After some (admittedly shallow) research, I couldn't find a website that allowed me to select my conversation and publish it to the interwebs for easy referral.

So... of course I mocked up an app to do this very thing in three easy steps. I'm actually considering building the thing but would really appreciate your input and suggestions.

Publish your Tweetversations in three easy steps (click to enlarge):

1. Define the user who started the conversation and choose which of this user's tweets started it.

2. Now it displays all replies to this user since the conversation started. Choose the tweet that ended the conversation.


3. Throw out the tweets that don't belong in the conversation. And your done. Save it privately or publish it so you can refer to it in your tweets or blog posts. We may also want to have a "copy the text of the conversation" option so that users can easily embed the conversation in their blogs.

I would really like to know what you think: good idea, bad idea? How could it be better? Etc.

By the way, feel free to contact me on Twitter, my username is jerols

Getting myself edumacated about "Web Development"

Above is a slide from my web development class. According to my professor, it is a wonderful example of good web design. That was true... a decade a go.

There's some good discussion going on at the University Web Developers Ning group. The topic? How higher ed web professionals can elevate web design at the university level. I added my 2 cents, effectively using >30 of my time, so why not re-post it here?

As a student who has been building websites from an early age (and now work at a web development firm as a User Experience Designer), I can definitely testify to the inadequacy of the "Web Development" course I'm taking this semester. My professor teaches the basic HTML stuff fine but the class is also supposed to teach "web design". Aside from the fact that attempting to pack HTML/CSS/Javascript/ServerSide/Web Design into one class implies failure, my professor hasn't worked in the field since the early 2000s (that's millenia in web years). It shows. The "Web Wizard's Guide to Web Design", which is our web design textbook, was written in 2002. The slides of "good web design" he uses do indeed provide a neat look back in time, to where web design stood in the early 2000s. There's just one problem: we've learned a lot since then. Needless to say I usually use that class period to network on Twitter and read the latest Smashing Magazine or A List Apart article. I don't fault my professor; he does a good job, its just a bit out of date. Below is another example of good web design from my professors slides.



A successful web development course should not just teach stuff (whether past or current) because what we learn now will be obsolete in a few years. In addition to teaching the up-to-date knowledge, it should also infuse the students with a passion to immerse themselves in the industry: read the blogs, check out the new technology, get on Twitter and ask questions... but most importantly, build a lot of websites. If you've got an idea for a cool web app, just try building it. Learn as you go along. Unless you have gotten your hands dirty, you won't have the passion to learn more.

Returning to that fine art

The tweetie bird is nearly leaping out of the clock to let me know its about time to wake from my long sleep. In other words, I finally have some good reasons to get back into blogging and have finally allocated some blocks in my schedule for said purpose.

Away too long, lots to talk about

Over the past 6 months or so of non-blogging, I've accumulated some really interesting projects and interests that I'm looking forward to talk about. Namely:

• University. I wrote my last post during the last gasp of high school. I've moved on to greater academic pursuits at the UNCC—or UNC Charlotte, as the community-college-association-phobic marketing people prefer to call it. Majoring in SIS, first semester was terrific. A meeting with the dean of CCI (College of Computing and Informatics) led to some cool follow up meetings and a lot of cool ideas—namely solutions to the college's lack of community and student participation. This semester, some other students and I will be spending a good five hours a week (for credit) to experiment with traditional and custom social media (and other means) to build community among the student body—its going to be really fun and I'm going to blog about it here. Which brings me to my next topic...
• Social Media. A lot of universities are getting into this social media things, experimenting with Facebook, MySpace, and even Twitter in order to build community and get attention among students and prospective students. My perspective in solving this problem is unique in that I not only want to solve the problem, but I myself am the target of these efforts—I'm a student. I'll be blogging a lot about our successes and failures with higher ed social media and I'm looking forward to discussing these issues with students and staff from other universities.
• Twitter. Related to social media, I've recently discovered the power of Twitter. I intend to use it to network with other developers, designers, and social media people to learn and contribute to the community. I also expect Twitter will help me direct people to my blog in order to carry out more substantial discussions.
• Web Development Projects. Lots of ideas for web apps (just recently, a Twitter related one) that I plan to blog about: design decisions, discoveries, observations.
• My new job. I just recently got a part time job at a local web development company called Skookum. I've been enjoying working for them, but I'm under an NDA so I'm going to need permission from da boss before blogging. All I can say now is that we're working on some pretty cool stuff.

It's going to be a great year.

Homeschooling Together: Launched

My big project, Homeschooling Together, has finally launched (actually, it launched a few weeks back; been to busy to post about it). The pitch is to homeschoolers (like my parents): simplifying your curriculum search. I built it with Ruby on Rails and its taken about a year from plan to implementation with about an hour a day of my time. I've learned a lot and I've fallen in love with Ruby on Rails. The response has been great so far but I am expecting it to take a while for homeschoolers to spread the word.

My family will use this free site as a springboard to launch a payed-for homeschool planner, which is my next project. Which reminds me, I'd better get back to developing that.

BETA!

Over the past few months I've been working hard to get the Homeschooling Together private beta out. What a trip it's been! I've learned so much about programming, design, and even homeschooling itself. But it's finally ready. On January 31st at around 10pm, we opened the doors to the people who joined our beta testing team. Finally, we can show people what we've been working on for all these months. It's quite exciting for me.

While I doubt many of this site's visitors are particularly interested in homeschooling (I mainly write about user interface design and technology), if your interested in trying out the website, send me an email and I'll probably get you on the beta team.

Personas, 37Signals, and large organizations

Inspired by Joshua Porter's post, I've been doing a lot of research on personas. Yesterday I posted about it. Today, after some more thought, I left a comment on Joshua's blog. It includes some of the thoughts from the previous post, but I think it's still worth posting here:

"So far I've also been doing what Jake suggests. In doing research on personas I ran across Jason Fried's post. He suggests the same: "So if you can’t design something for yourself, design something for someone you know. Get that person or people involved in your project early on. Basing your decisions on a matrix of personality traits isn’t what I’d recommend if you really want to build a great product."

I haven't used personas, so I'm not really in the position to argue strongly for or against them. I think Terry Bleizeffer's response to Jason's post is interesting. While Terry isn't a big fan of personas, she does clarify some crucial points. To me the most interesting is: "For most organizations, it's just not feasible for every person in the organization to talk to real people and have the skills to successfully interpret what they actually mean and not just what they actually say. For the people who do talk to people and do have those skills, we need a way of communicating the results of those discussions to the rest of the team. Personas are one way to do that."

The guys at 37Signals have an ideal situation. They are small. I think more (especially web related) companies should be like them because it gives them the flexibility to do stuff like... design without personas. But for big organizations with lots of stakeholders in a project, the designers need a way to communicate with the rest of the stakeholders why a certain design decision makes sense. The problem is that the engineers say "well, people really want feature x" and the designers argue that "according to our research, people want feature y" but there is no common ground to communicate WHO "people" are. Different "people" want different things and a line has to be drawn about which "people" the product is really for. Not every stakeholder (decision maker) can be in touch with real people , so personas are a way for those who are in touch with real people (and who have the skill required to interpret their research) to communicate to the other stakeholders who these people are, what they want, and why specific decisions should or should not be made. Again, I have no experience with large organizations or personas so I can't say if the above observations are true in practice.

My latest project is great because the target market is a person who is living with me: my mom. I hope the projects I take on in the future will be similar."

Personas vs designing for yourself

Since Alan Cooper wrote about the idea of "Personas" – fictional people designed to represent a product's most important users - the idea has become a core method in the field of "interaction design". But recently a few notable designers have created some controversy by advocating a different approach: designing for your self. A while back, Jason Fried of 37Signals fame gave his opinion on the subject: "We don't use personas. We use ourselves." Recently Joshua Porter of Bokardo wrote a great post on the topic. He recognized the usefulness of personas but he argues that they aren't always needed and, in fact, it is best when you can design something without them. It is best when you can design something that you will use yourself. Not only do you know what you need but you will be passionate to build it. I agree.

But what I find interesting about Jason Fried's post is that he suggests eliminating personas altogether: "So if you can’t design something for yourself, design something for someone you know. Get that person or people involved in your project early on. Basing your decisions on a matrix of personality traits isn’t what I’d recommend if you really want to build a great product." I think it's clear that if you can work on a project that you will use yourself, design it for yourself. But I think the question is, what if you run into a project that you aren't passionate about (like, say, a medical application). Do you use personas? I'm not sure. If you aren't passionate about the medical field, do you make a persona based on user research? Or do you get the surgeon involved, ask him questions, and design it for him?

In designing Homeschooling Together, I've toyed with the idea of personas, but I never used them. For this particular project I've adopted Jason's approach: I'm designing it for my mom. We'll see how it goes when we release the beta but so far we've gotten fairly positive responses from other homeschooling moms.

UPDATE: A few more thoughts. My experience is quite limited so I can't take a solid stance on the issue but I don't think personas should be thrown out altogether. I was looking through the comments on Jason's post and it is evident that many people (such as Cooper) have used personas with great success. Based on this, I think personas can be a powerful tool when used correctly (though I've never used them myself). But I also think there is a good argument for using real people instead. In short, my current opinion on it is, if your designing something that your not passionate about and you think you can use personas effectively, go for it. But designing for yourself is probably the most effective, so do it whenever possible.

UPDATE 2: I've been doing research and came across an interesting response to Jason's post by Terry Bleizeffer. Terry argues that personas are not about getting rid of talking to people, they are the output of talking to people. You can't have the target user with you 24/7, so personas are a way to understand the target user without him being on hand (and they are the result of talking to actual people).

Seeed.org–a new web development community

Why seeed rather than seed–I'm not sure but it sure is memorable (because of the peculiarity). Seeed.org is a new web development community started by the Litmus guys. I've enjoyed talking with fellow web devs and the people behind a lot of web app startups. Issues range from usability to marketing–definitely worth while if your developing a web app.

The Homeschooling Together blog

The end is in sight. The bulk of the functionality is coded. It's time to start marketing Homeschooling Together. We've had a holding page up for a while but nobody knows about it (well, not exactly: one person put in his email address). I've finished developing the blog and I've written a short post to introduce the website (with some screenshots.)

Now we'll start telling people about it.

Apple details all 300+ Leopard features

300+ new features in Apple's new operating system? Unconvinced? Apple has set up a web page that details each feature. While most of the features have already been discovered and previewed on other websites, this is a good way for those of us who haven't been paying a lot of attention to catch up. I found out quite a few useful features that I hadn't heard about before like Automator's UI recording and playback and Spotlight's web history search.

Blogger, why the popups?

I have used Blogger to manage most of my blogs over the years and have been mostly satisfied with the site. For the most part, the site is very easy to use.

Problem
Blogger likes to use pop up windows. For example, when you click the image icon (to upload an image) a pop up window guides you through the process. I generally dislike pop up windows but tolerate them. That all changed today... I decided to put a list of links up on this blog. It was easy enough to figure out–I just go to the template tab and add a new "links" element... Arggh, a pop up window...thats okay, I'll just fill this form out and add the links. 5 minutes later–I'm done! Okay, press "save changes".

Your request could not be processed. Please try again.

No! Seven valuable minutes wasted. [closes window]...Try again, with fewer links. Same error. Try again. And again. Boom! Works. Finally, the popup window says it works. [go back to template section]...

???

There are three link elements. The first list was gone but the second, third, and fourth lists all went through (even though the pop up window said "try again"). Why all the confusion? Because of the pop up window. Popups provide desynchronization, interface disconnect (what if I close the "templates" window?), and usually a slower interface. Blogger, could you quit using them so extensively?

Apologies for the rant.

UPDATE: Solution

Since Blogger has already committed to javascript, why not go all the way and let me edit my link list inline in the template window? Why not let me add elements right there on the page instead of opening up an unreliable popup window? Blogger devs, if you want a mock up of what I'm talking about, I'd be obliged. There may be something I am overlooking here but it just doesn't make sense to use popups in the way Blogger is using them and it seems old fashioned and sluggish in this ajaxy age that we live in.

I'm going to contact Blogger and let them know about my problems with popups (I know they care what their users think). If enough people contact them, maybe they'll do something about it.

Starting up a start up

My family has been working on a Homeschooling related startup for a few months now. We are getting semi-close to launch time so we are about to begin telling people about the website publicly. I've been working on the blog and teaser page for the last two days (I'll post the links here very soon).

I recently re-read 37 Signal's Getting Real book (a great read) which inspired me to do a "hollywood" launch (with a teaser site, then a preview site before launch so that when launch comes, you have a database of email addresses to which you can announce the site's launch). So I've been scouring the web for experiences and techniques from people who have actually used this tactic (most "web 2.0" websites). I could barely find anything. Maybe I just need to learn what key words to use, but any how, I'll do my best to blog the my experiences (from developing the pre-launch site to what the reaction is like).

Sketchcast.com – "a new way to express yourself"

This via TechCrunch. Sketchcast.com, a tool that allows users to make "sketchcasts", just went live. A sketch cast is like a digital whiteboard presentation with optional audio commentary. Aside from the obvious limitations of using a mouse for sketching, the tool worked very well. Its actually a lot of fun. I'm pretty sure I'll find some practical use for it in the future.

I've embedded the sketchcast of the sketchcast.com founder explaining what sketchast.com is and how it can help.

UPDATE: [Removed embedded sketchcast. It was causing flash to run slowly.]

Yeah, I'm still here

I've been so busy with school and my latest web application that I've found it hard to justify blogging time. I hope to post more once I'm able to speak more freely about my latest web application.

What I've been working on is for a very specific market. As the teaser below makes pretty clear, the market is parents who homeschool. My family happens to know quite a bit about that market because we happen to be a homeschooling family. We've had a lot of ups and downs. A lot of success and some failure. But we've recognized a need and we are working on meeting the need in a way that will help homeschooling families in general as well as provide a nice family business for us. The cost to us is mainly time as we are designing and developing the app completely in house... Literally. The main cost to us will be hosting and that is relatively cheap.

Progress? We are getting fairly close to being able to show what we've been working on. I expect to launch something publically before the year is out (no promises).

Below is a little teaser. It is a snapshot of one of the later mockups I've been working on.

iPhone Cream, success?

I never formally announced it on this site but if you go to iPhone Cream you will notice that I have announced that I am not going to continue to develop the site and have put the source code up for grabs. The reason? Time mainly. I have been working on a cool new project and I just don't have a lot of time. If I did, I think I could have made iPhone Cream one of the best iPhone app sites out there (I had some pretty cool ideas for future development). But I noticed that the iPhone app site market is saturated. If I was going to compete at all I would need to spend a lot of time. And what with the school year starting in a few weeks, there is just no way I could compete. But I invested a lot of time in the code so I decided to open the code to others so those who think the general concept is cool can continue the concept in their own venture.

So was it a success? Judging by the number of users, no. I didn't really actively market it and it shows. The user count is less than 100. But was the idea a good one? I think so. After opening the code up I've had 3 requests so far. At least one from a man who is the leading innovator in his field. So I'm looking forward to see what these people do with the source.

Yet another project

Wow. There's just not enough time before the school year starts. My goal was to finish LearnIt, iPhone Cream, and the site for my dad's company... I finished the first version of iPhone Cream but there are plenty of things I still need to do with it like finish the iPhone version (no small task). I've been working on LearnIt; recently I got pretty excited about it because I finally narrowed down exactly what the first version will be. I have made progress of the design of my dad's website but I haven't even touched the coding.

Now... Yet another project. My mom had a great idea for a web app and I've got to get the first version done before summers out. Yikes. I can't tell you much about it but the target users probably aren't those reading this blog... Sorry guys. But that doesn't mean it's not going to be cool. I'll post more about it as I get further along. In the mean time I'll tease you with a screenshot of one of the first mockups of the interface.

If I'm going to get this stuff done I'm going to have to be extremely focused.