Jonathan Cusick

I am thinking about writing and teaching course later this summer entitled ‘Digital Robot Software: Learning from the manual’ (The manual of course being the company blog).

This will be a free course for people interested in software development (even if you haven’t done any before, so everyone is welcome) and will aim to tech people the basics of software development and build on these foundations, so by the end of the course you should be able to build basic iPhone applications.

If this goes well I can also extend the course to cover more advanced concepts but I just want to get an idea of who might be interested.

Please drop me an email at jon@digitalrobotsoftware.com or leave a comment if this would interest you.

Thanks!

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!

After spending a lot of time on client work after SXSW, I am just going to provide a couple of updates on some interesting Digital Robot Software developments.

A complete Digital Robot Software (.com) site will be launching in May which will have the following features:

Company Blog – This will contain updates/news from DRS and articles on areas of interest in the field of software development along with case studies and areas of research.

Company Overview – This will contain the history for Digital Robot Software and individual profiles for the team.

Portfolio – An area with a list of clients and an in depth analysis of the applications that have been designed and developed by Digital Robot Software.

Services – This section will provide details of all the services we offer from consultancy to design and development.

Support – At Digital Robot Software one of our key areas is offering a top class level of support, from here we will provide all support details for our customers.

Contacting Us – As always we can be contacted by phone and email, but in addition to this we feel that it is important to utilise a wide range of social networks so we are always just a click away. In this section we will provide a list of everywhere you can find us.

In May we will also be announcing a couple of new and exciting projects which I have a feeling will raise some interest and I am looking forward to announcing them.

Digital Robot Software will also be offering a couple of intern positions this summer, if you are interested in working with state of the art technology in a creative environment with software development or design please feel free to contact us. More details about these positions will be available soon.

After working on some GPS location based DRS projects, next week I will provide a post about path finding algorithms and how Google Maps can be easily integrated into applications.

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.

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)