I have been working hard over the last few months establishing a small iPhone and Mac development studio called Digital Robot Software.
Digital Robot Software will be going live on March 10th with a website launch which will contain details of current and future projects. I have also been working closely with an extremely talented designer who is doing the branding for the company which should give it a strong presence.
Digital Robot Software will also be at this years SXSW conference with 11 other Northern Ireland based companies who I am sure many of you will be familiar with:
Airpos
David Rice
Filmtrip Ltd
Good on Paper
No More Art
Sonic Academy
The Design Zoo
Lee Munroe
Frank Design & Communications Ltd
This is great news for Digital Robot Software as it will enable a wide exposure of the companies services and will hopefully produce a range of clients and new skills from the available workshops and presentations.
A NISXSW Ning network has been established so all participating companies can easily communicate and so that others can follow us during the conference.
Another site niatsxsw.com has also been established to give complete profiles of the 12 companies including podcasts company backgrounds and will also be updated regularly.
If you are interested in following us on our journey to SXSW you can follow the websites and also the hastag #NISXSW on Twitter.
On Saturday February 6th the first Super Happy Dev Castle (SHDC) took place in Northern Ireland. Super Happy Dev House (SHDH) started as a hackathon event for developers and anyone interested in development, technology and geekery in a relaxed and extremely motivating environment.
You may be wondering why this event was called SHDC and not SHDH, the reason for this is because the first event was hosted by Blaine Cook who not only happens to be an extremely nice person and world renowned developer but also happens to live in a castle. In addition to Blaine hosting the event, two local developers David Wilson and Steven Holdsworth were organising it and deserve a pat on the back for making the event a success.
The criteria for the day was to bring along a laptop, beer, Unix books and big smiles! This was clearly not an issue as there was a great turn out (around 30 people) all working on exciting and state of the art projects.
A fantastic Spotify playlist and IRC room were quickly implemented at the start of the event and proved to be popular as they lasted for the duration, and I am still listening to the playlist in work this week.
Working in this environment proved to be an interesting experience, as new creative ideas where constantly being discussed and analysed, in addition to many laughs and what can only be described as one or two moments of madness (probably due to the beer)!
Many thanks to Blaine and Maureen for being such great hosts and keeping us topped up with great pizza and amazing coffee.
Some of the guys hacking code at SHDC
I have been thinking about some New Year’s resolutions for 2010 so I have composed the following list.
1. Learn to use my Canon 450D properly
2. Finish my iPhone apps and get them in the app store
3. Attend SXSW in March (flights and platinum badge already purchased)
4. Attend WWDC in June
5. Experiment with more software development design patterns
6. Get digitalrobotsoftware.com up and running
7. Produce better quality blog posts
8. Develop a desktop application for OS X
9. Run more often
10. In 2009 I have met a lot of great people so I aim to meet lots more in 2010
As New Year’s resolutions are notorious for not being maintained, I have made this list realistic and by the time we reach 2011 hopefully these goals will have been achieved.
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
On the OS X operating system you can read NTFS external drives but you will not be able to write to them by default. There is a simple solution for this that comes in the form of a couple of applications MacFUSE and NTFS-3G.
Utlising these tools makes writing to NTFS drives seamless and you won’t have to worry about performing any complex configurations, the NTFS drives will just work as with any other HDD.
Best of all both of these applications can now be installed from a singe source over at SourceForge as part of the Catacombae project.
Enjoy!
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.
I picked up a passport size 320GB Iomega HDD from Tesco’s a few months ago. It really is an extremely useful piece of kit to keep in my laptop bag.
Last Friday I embarked on a road trip to Dublin with Stuart Gibson to catch the Jonathan Coulton show at the Academy 2, which was part of his UK/Ireland 2009 tour. Jonathan was supported by a comedy music duo Paul and Storm who gave a superb performance and made me a fan.
Jonathan as expected rocked the house and we were lucky enough to briefly talk to Paul, Storm and Jonathan who are extremely nice people and also kindly signed our tickets. Hopefully they will all be back to do another UK/Ireland tour next year!
