Jonathan Cusick

After 6 months, we are finally live!

Since November last year I have been working hard to establish Digital Robot Software as a new software development studio in Belfast. During this time I have been hard at work developing a wide range of applications for the iPhone, iPad, Mac while also investigating the Android platform.

In addition to this we have also been through a significant branding process, thanks to the creative talent of Davy Mac a strong logo was produced which can be seen predominantly on our website and applications.

After the Digital Robot initial branding was completed we were off to SXSW in order to meet other developers and also clients. This proved to be a very successful trip for us and we are currently working with a number of US clients in order to develop creative solutions in order to meet their requirements.

After SXSW we were happy to announce a new member to the team, Adrian Hanna joined us as our Principal Enterprise Architect. Adie is our lead Android developer and a master of scaling backend systems for our enterprise solutions.

We are also extremely fortunate to announce another member to the team, Adam McAllister has joined us as our in house UI designer. Adam produces extremely high end quality design work and is welcomed addition to the team.

We will be talking to a few more people about intern positions later this month and will hopefully have some more good news to announce.

I am sure most of you will have noticed that we are now rocking a ground breaking website. This is down to the creative genius of Mr Andy Good (McMillan). When not running world class design conferences he is putting his mad skills into practice with great results.

We will be regularly updating our blog ‘The Manual’ with development news, research and tutorials.

Keep an eye on the main sections of our site as well in order to see the latest applications that we produce.

Please feel free to say hello! jon@digitalrobotsoftware.com

I am pleased to announce that Digital Robot Software will be attending this years World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco which begins on June 7th and continues until June 11th.

As WWDC is an Apple conference it is focused on iPhone, iPad and Mac development and this will be an amazing opportunity for us to meet the Apple engineers and learn a wide array of new SDK features, that we will be implementing into our applications over the next year.

We are working hard at the moment in order to get the new Digital Robot Software website online and it will be live by 18:00 GMT tomorrow (Monday May 17th) – be sure to check it out!

The interactive side of SXSW is now drawing to a close and I have had some time this morning to reflect on some of the things I have learned from some of the companies, developers and designers that have been involved at the conference.

One of the most important things I have learned was from a group of freelance developers and also from Gary Vaynerchuk which is really about providing a world class level of customer service. Often when developing you are mainly focused on delivering the end product and the next extension of that product so customer service can often be made a secondary objective.

I have heard this a few times during the conference and actually saw some examples of great products which where not offering much in the way of customer service or support, mainly just a contact e-mail address. From my personal experience with other big companies such as PayPal and Ebay it can be nearly impossible to contact them and a considerable amount of time to get a reply.

If the big companies don’t fix this it does mean that the smaller developers can capitalise on this and set a high standard which hopefully will be replicated throughout the industry.

On another note the SXSWNI guys have all been working hard throughout the trip even if there are no desks or chairs.

David Rice hacking away during SXSW

Lee Munroe has also been giving a series of updates on are trade trip to SXSW which can be found on his blog and also on his Posterous.

We are now on day 5 of our epic adventure in Austin, and have managed to speak to pretty much every company that had a presence on the trade floor.

From my perspective even though I am mainly focused on Mac and iPhone development I was very keen to meet the Microsoft guys to discuss Windows Phone 7 and WebSiteSpark.

I was lucky enough to be interviewed in a commercial for Microsoft discussing the benefits of the WebSiteSpark service and what this would mean for a development studio work flow – this was a great experience and they even gave me a 16GB Zune HD for taking the time to work with them.

I also managed to bump into a few of the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders who where promoting WebSiteSpark this was pretty cool!

This has been a great day and I am looking forward until tomorrow where hopefully I will learn more about the underlying technologies behind Windows Phone 7.

If you are planning on developing applications for the iPhone chances are you will be familiar with object oriented programming. Design patterns promote code and design reuse along with making an entire application easier to understand and why a certain structure was adopted.

It is important to note that a design pattern is not a blueprint for an application that just has to be written in your development language of choice, but rather a blueprint for how to implement your code in order to enable stronger code maintainability, testing and to avoid a wide range of issues that could otherwise occur with unstructured (spaghetti) code.

The iPhone platform makes use of the Model View Controller (MVC) design pattern.

Model – Manages the data for the application and how the state of the data should be updated.

View – Will handle how the data is displayed on the screen.

Controller – Deals with the inputs from the user such as utilising all the available on screen elements such as buttons and keyboard functions.

With the MVC design pattern it means that when developing for the iPhone you will have a better way of maintaining and testing your applications. Overall this should mean that better quality applications are created.

On a side note I used Balsamiq Mockups to create the above diagram, I would highly recommend giving it a try. This has quickly become one of my favourite applications.

Updated: Diagram updated to show two way relationship between model and view (well spotted by David Rice)

Last week I received the Adobe CS4 Web Premium software which I won at the Build Conference, a massive thanks to Giant Training and Adobe for this.

The following is the complete story:

On November 5th I attended the Build conference in Belfast, during the event Ian Sayers from Giant Training held a prize draw for the chance to win a copy of Adobe CS4 Web Premium or Design Premium worth a whopping £1500. I was extremely lucky when Eric Meyer pulled my name out of the box, I seriously couldn’t believe I had won and opted for CS4 Web Premium.

With CS4 a wide range of new and exciting opportunities have presented themselves. I am currently developing several iPhone applications which will now have their entire interface redesigned in PhotoShop which will give them a much more professional presence.

As an amateur photographer I will now have the ability to add a new dimensions to my photos in addition to designing and developing a new website to showcase them.

These tools will significantly help me on a daily basis with all my personal development and design projects.

Many thanks to Giant Training and Adobe!

Jonathan Cusick

I have had an incredibly lucky streak this year where I managed to win an iPhone 3GS at Refresh Belfast which was provided by Ecliptic Labs and then a CS4 Web Premium applications package at the Build Conference from Ian Sayers at Giant Training.

Jase Bell has now created an iPhone app proposal that I feel if developed should be implemented in competitions across the land!

Although in all seriousness I have been extremely lucky at these two events and I am putting both the iPhone and CS4 suite to very good use. Hopefully there will be a post here in the not to distant future referring to the launch of an iPhone application.

On Thursday November 5th the first Build conference was held in Belfast’s Waterfront Studio.

The atmosphere during Build was fantastic, a really positive vibe was emanating from the audience all day. The speakers did interesting and informative presentations, we even learned how to open a banana thanks to Tim Van Damme, I can’t believe we were doing it wrong all this time.

In case anyone missed the lineup of speakers, they are all top class:

Eric Meyer
Tim Van Damme
Mark Boulton
Wilson Miner
Andy Budd
Ryan Sims

I was also very lucky during the Build conference as I won a copy of Adobe CS4 Web premium (for Mac OS X) from Giant Training, thanks to a prize draw where Eric Meyer picked my out of a box.

The Build after party was also made of the stuff of legends, many beers were had and I met so many great people who I hope to see again next time!

A great job by Andy Good/McMillan on organising Build, it has been the most informative and fun conference I have had the pleasure to attend. Already I am looking forward to the next Build!

Conference pass.

Tim Van Damme getting things started with the first presentation.

On Wednesday evening (November 4th) the Build conference events continued, ‘An evening with Airside‘ was held in the Conor lecture theatre at the University of Ulster, where we were all treated to an insight of the inner workings of one of the UK’s leading design studios.

Until the Build schedule was announced I was unfamiliar with Airside, now after an inspiring lecture I look forward to closely following their work.