2012-05-14T13:42:26+00:00 http://shinydevelopment.com/ Dave Verwer, Shiny Development dave.verwer@shinydevelopment.com 2011-12-09T00:00:00+00:00 http://shinydevelopment.com/blog/we-are-hiring-again I am really happy to announce that we are again looking to expand and hire two more people to join us in changing the world, one iOS app at a time! We are looking for a Senior Ruby/Rails Developer and also a Visual and Interaction Designer. <br /><br /> <a href="/blog/we-are-hiring-again">Read the rest of this article…</a> 2011-09-02T00:00:00+00:00 http://shinydevelopment.com/blog/speaking-engagements-for-september-october-2011 I have been lucky enough to be asked to speak at a few conferences over the next couple of months wanted to summarise my plans here in case you want to come and say Hello! <br /><br /> <a href="/blog/speaking-engagements-for-september-october-2011">Read the rest of this article…</a> 2011-07-19T00:00:00+00:00 http://shinydevelopment.com/blog/we-are-hiring-an-ios-apprentice Unlike Lord Sugar, we don't have £250,000 to invest in your business, but we are looking to hire an apprentice to work with us developing iOS applications. We are offering a one year apprenticeship where you will be fully immersed in learning to create the best iOS software around. <br /><br /> <a href="/blog/we-are-hiring-an-ios-apprentice">Read the rest of this article…</a> 2011-05-28T00:00:00+00:00 http://shinydevelopment.com/blog/over-the-air-ios-provisioning-and-distribution I have been asked several times recently about iOS Ad Hoc distribution and specifically about over the air deployment of ad hoc builds without the need for an enterprise deployment certificate, or use of a third party service, or for those of you who just want to know more about the process so I thought I would write up a little step by step of how to do it! <br /><br /> <a href="/blog/over-the-air-ios-provisioning-and-distribution">Read the rest of this article…</a> 2011-03-14T00:00:00+00:00 http://shinydevelopment.com/blog/ios-training-courses-updated-for-xcode-4 Last Wednesday, Apple released a brand new version of their development tools, Xcode 4. We have been working with Xcode 4 for a while now and I am very pleased to announce that all of our training courses are now fully updated with materials that are written specifically to target the new version of Xcode. All of the slides, lab notes and sample code have been updated to be compatible with all of the new tools included in Xcode 4. <br /><br /> <a href="/blog/ios-training-courses-updated-for-xcode-4">Read the rest of this article…</a> 2011-03-11T00:00:00+00:00 http://shinydevelopment.com/blog/iphone-and-ipad-design-links Here is a quick list of a couple of sites I discovered recently, and a couple that I have been following for a while that are all fantastic ways to keep up with what is happening in iOS and Mac app design at the moment as well as being great sources of inspiration for your own apps. <br /><br /> <a href="/blog/iphone-and-ipad-design-links">Read the rest of this article…</a> 2011-03-07T00:00:00+00:00 http://shinydevelopment.com/blog/how-long-do-apps-take-to-review I get asked all the time &ldquo;How long does Apple take to review an app?&rdquo; and beyond the length of my last app review and a feeling about how long the reviews of friends are taking I really have no good answer to the question. People occasionally tweet about how long their last review took, but people tend to only do this when it is an unusually short or long amount of time. <br /><br /> <a href="/blog/how-long-do-apps-take-to-review">Read the rest of this article…</a> 2011-02-28T00:00:00+00:00 http://shinydevelopment.com/blog/upcoming-ios-training-manchester-march-2011 Just a quick mention that we still have places available for our iOS Development Training courses in Manchester, UK next week from the 7th to the 10th March! <br /><br /> <a href="/blog/upcoming-ios-training-manchester-march-2011">Read the rest of this article…</a> 2011-02-22T00:00:00+00:00 http://shinydevelopment.com/blog/being-embarrased-about-shipping Are Apple ever embarrassed about the v1.0 products they ship? Absolutely, but they are embarrassed about lacking features, not quality. Shipping a product is a huge task to take on and compromises are always going to be made but I believe Apple take the right choices here to still ship amazing products while making the necessary compromises. <br /><br /> <a href="/blog/being-embarrased-about-shipping">Read the rest of this article…</a> 2011-02-08T00:00:00+00:00 http://shinydevelopment.com/blog/automatic-property-instance-variables-with-objective-c The modern Objective-C runtime includes a great timesaving feature of allowing automatic synthesis of instance variables. This is a great feature but one that I have been reluctant to use (and especially reluctant to teach) as the default implementation of it makes silly mistakes really easy to make. <br /><br /> <a href="/blog/automatic-property-instance-variables-with-objective-c">Read the rest of this article…</a> 2011-01-12T00:00:00+00:00 http://shinydevelopment.com/blog/find-errors-in-your-ios-app-before-your-users-do We recently released a new version of Explore Flickr and while we did an extensive beta test with several users both technical and non-technical, a crashing bug slipped through the net and we ended up with a buggy app live on the app store. Luckily, we were able to find and fix the bug before it affected too many users and before even a single person reported it. I wanted to explain how we were able to see this problem before our users by using Flurry Analytics so that you can hopefully be in the same situation with your apps. <br /><br /> <a href="/blog/find-errors-in-your-ios-app-before-your-users-do">Read the rest of this article…</a> 2010-12-14T00:00:00+00:00 http://shinydevelopment.com/blog/how-good-are-your-backups Just over a week ago, I was woken up by a friend calling me to tell me that our office was on fire! This is not a very pleasant way to wake up and I hope it never happens to any of you, however it did happen and everything inside our office was totally destroyed. <br /><br /> <a href="/blog/how-good-are-your-backups">Read the rest of this article…</a> 2010-12-13T00:00:00+00:00 http://shinydevelopment.com/blog/launching-explore-flickr-v20 Back in 2007 when we were first dipping our toes into the world of Mac development I took a few days and created a small dashboard widget based on the &ldquo;Explore&rdquo; photos on flickr.com. I loved browsing these amazing photos every day and it seemed an obvious subject for our first experiments with Mac development and we are very happy to have just a major upgrade to the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch version of this app, Explore Flickr. <br /><br /> <a href="/blog/launching-explore-flickr-v20">Read the rest of this article…</a> 2010-10-15T00:00:00+00:00 http://shinydevelopment.com/blog/becoming-successful-on-the-app-store Planning, designing, developing, illustrating, testing and debugging iOS apps can be a huge amount of work and by the time you get through with development it is easy to fall into the trap of just wanting to see your creation on the app store as soon as possible! However, the release of an app is not something you should rush into and a little careful planning (and subsequent execution) of a marketing plan can make all the difference between your app languishing at number 8273 in the charts and being successful! <br /><br /> <a href="/blog/becoming-successful-on-the-app-store">Read the rest of this article…</a> 2010-09-16T00:00:00+00:00 http://shinydevelopment.com/blog/the-many-different-types-of-balloons-in-the-world As the developer of an app with such a widely used name as <a href="http://balloonsapp.com">Balloons!</a>, we occasionally get email from people who have not quite grasped exactly what we do and I thought I would share this funny email exchange with you all! <br /><br /> <a href="/blog/the-many-different-types-of-balloons-in-the-world">Read the rest of this article…</a> 2010-06-03T00:00:00+00:00 http://shinydevelopment.com/blog/ipad-interface-design I had the pleasure of speaking at the <a rel="nofollow" href="http://ipadliverpool.eventbrite.com/">iPad at the CUC</a> event last night in Liverpool and as promised am posting the slides here from my talk. I am not sure the slides make a whole lot of sense without the words that accompanied them but hopefully they will provide some visual reminders if you attended the talk. I wish I could have talked for longer last night, there is so much more in the usability study that I referenced that and so many other apps I would have liked to showcase but there just wasn't time in 20 minutes. <br /><br /> <a href="/blog/ipad-interface-design">Read the rest of this article…</a> 2010-05-31T00:00:00+00:00 http://shinydevelopment.com/blog/speaking-at-ipad-at-the-cuc-event It is always a pleasure to be asked to speak at an event and I have recently been asked to get involved and do a short talk at the <a rel="nofollow" href="http://ipadliverpool.eventbrite.com/">&#8220;iPad at the C.U.C.&#8221;</a> event being held in Liverpool this week. <br /><br /> <a href="/blog/speaking-at-ipad-at-the-cuc-event">Read the rest of this article…</a> 2010-05-31T00:00:00+00:00 http://shinydevelopment.com/blog/more-trainee-apps-on-the-app-store I absolutely love it when people who I have trained get apps released onto the app store, after all that's what our <a href="http://shinydevelopment.com/training">training courses</a> are all about at the end of the day! I love it even more when they write and let me know that their apps are live, I recently had emails from <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.splashbroadcast.com/">Splash Broadcast</a> and <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.textiles.leeds.ac.uk/staff/stephen_westland.htm">Stephen Westland</a> both giving me the great news that they had apps approved on the iTunes store. <br /><br /> <a href="/blog/more-trainee-apps-on-the-app-store">Read the rest of this article…</a> 2010-05-11T00:00:00+00:00 http://shinydevelopment.com/blog/announcing-our-iphone-os-developer-training-courses In the two years since we did the last major update to our web site, Shiny has changed quite significantly. The big news is that we are now scheduling and running our <a href="/iphone-training/">own training courses</a> which go on sale today! We are starting out by running two courses in Manchester scheduled for August and October. We have special pricing for freelancers and also early bird discounts at the moment so if you have been wanting to learn how to develop for the iPhone and iPad, now might be the time to do it! <br /><br /> <a href="/blog/announcing-our-iphone-os-developer-training-courses">Read the rest of this article…</a> 2009-12-14T00:00:00+00:00 http://shinydevelopment.com/blog/how-and-why-do-balloons-pop One of the biggest problems we have had to deal with since <a href="http://balloonsapp.com">Balloons!</a> went live on the app store is the issues around how and why Balloons pop so I thought I would write up some of the experiences and explain some of the reasoning behind popping balloons! <br /><br /> <a href="/blog/how-and-why-do-balloons-pop">Read the rest of this article…</a> 2009-11-22T00:00:00+00:00 http://shinydevelopment.com/blog/balloons-everywhere-but-which-is-your-favourite They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, so I will keep this brief and get to the picture! <br /><br /> <a href="/blog/balloons-everywhere-but-which-is-your-favourite">Read the rest of this article…</a> 2009-11-13T00:00:00+00:00 http://shinydevelopment.com/blog/optimisations-to-the-balloons-servers We had some issues this week with the <a href="http://balloonsapp.com">Balloons!</a> servers and while they didn't get bad enough to cause a noticeable slowdown to users but as usage of Balloons! has ramped up this week the servers were gradually slowing down. <br /><br /> <a href="/blog/optimisations-to-the-balloons-servers">Read the rest of this article…</a> 2009-11-12T00:00:00+00:00 http://shinydevelopment.com/blog/the-moderation-problem During the development of <a href="http://balloonsapp.com">Balloons!</a> I would tell people about the idea and they would occasionally come back with "But what about abuse? Isn't it going to be filled up with porn/spam/etc... within a few days?". <br /><br /> <a href="/blog/the-moderation-problem">Read the rest of this article…</a> 2009-10-22T00:00:00+00:00 http://shinydevelopment.com/blog/building-a-reliable-back-end-for-balloons So I have spent the last few months building our new iPhone app, <a href="http://balloonsapp.com">Balloons!</a>. Obviously it needs a back end web service to move all of the balloons around the skies and host all of the attached messages. The back end is (predictably for me) written in Ruby on Rails and we just finished moving the hosting for it to <a href="http://brightbox.co.uk">Brightbox</a>. <br /><br /> <a href="/blog/building-a-reliable-back-end-for-balloons">Read the rest of this article…</a> 2009-08-02T00:00:00+00:00 http://shinydevelopment.com/blog/iphone-game-scoreboard-using-core-animation I have been helping out recently with a project running between <a href="http://www.uclan.ac.uk/">UCLAN</a> and <a href="http://www.lancs.ac.uk/">Lancaster University</a> which involves two teams of students working together to create a couple of iPhone games. <br /><br /> <a href="/blog/iphone-game-scoreboard-using-core-animation">Read the rest of this article…</a> 2009-02-05T00:00:00+00:00 http://shinydevelopment.com/blog/build-an-iphone-app-in-20-minutes-source-code Back at <a href="http://barcampleeds.com/">BarCamp Leeds</a> many months ago I gave my first iPhone talk and I decided to attempt to write a native iPhone app in 20 minutes. I really wanted to talk about iPhone development but I also wanted to let people know that it is not hard to get started so I really needed to be able to do "New Project" at the start of the session and with the exception of some copy/paste for the XML fetching code to show the end to end process of building a simple app. <br /><br /> <a href="/blog/build-an-iphone-app-in-20-minutes-source-code">Read the rest of this article…</a> 2009-01-21T00:00:00+00:00 http://shinydevelopment.com/blog/iphone-screen-design-template-pdf This is something that I find useful when designing iPhone projects and so I thought I would share it with you all! Print a few copies of this PDF out and draw screen designs all over them, it is approximately the same physical size as the phone itself and includes plenty of whitespace around the edges for notes. <br /><br /> <a href="/blog/iphone-screen-design-template-pdf">Read the rest of this article…</a>