Categories
management mobile Presentation

Upcoming Talk on Effective Mobile Engineering Teams

I’m working on a talk about running effective mobile engineering teams – I’d love to know what questions you have about this, what you worry about when it comes to mobile teams in your organization, and what you’ve found most helpful to communicate about them. Comments or email or DMs on Twitter welcome! Title: YOLO […]

Categories
mobile Presentation Usability

Speaker Notes: How To Be Invisible

Speaker notes from a talk I gave earlier this year at Try!Swift, and 360iDev. There was an article I read last September that profoundly affected my thinking. It was by Sarah Tavel, and is called “Times have changed — going after dollars vs minutes”. She breaks products down into minutes – which I think of as attention […]

Categories
mobile

Giving Up on Android Wear

I discarded my Android watch in the UK. My brief period as the kind of idiot that wears two smart watches is over. I’m all in on iOS. The irony is I actually preferred the Android wear, I haven’t really made sense of the Apple Watch and it’s even more annoying to have a bunch […]

Categories
management mobile

Empathy and Mobile Development

One of the (many?) things my team may be tired of hearing from me is “empathy is part of our job”. What do I mean by that? Well as mobile developers, we are the closest to the humans that use our product. We need to have empathy for our users – what do they need? […]

Categories
mobile Programming

Android: Touch to Change Image

On iOS I do this using a button (with different pressed state), and I figured it would be the same on Android, but turns out, no. Step 1: Add a second image to the XML, and set the visibility to “gone”. This file contains bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what […]

Categories
mobile

Mobile is a Systems Problem

Notes from a talk I gave at @NSConf and @iOSDevUK. I used to be a ski instructor. Back when I was in grad school. Weekdays I would write code, academic papers, and teach first year programming. And at the weekend I would be out in the fresh air, teaching people, mostly kids, to ski. One […]

Categories
mobile Programming

Cross-Platform Development Decisions

I’ve started to port Show and Hide to Android. There’s still a lot to do, but I hit a milestone of having it working end to end on the emulator last week, which was exciting. One of my friends asked if I was using any libraries to make it easier, and the short answer is no. But […]

Categories
mobile

#iOSDevUK: Tehila Sabag: Mobile Monetization – Navigating in a Free Eco-System

My notes from Tehila’s talk at iOSDevUK. StartApp – mobile monetisation platform. Brains and beauty of the mobile industry. Right ad, right time, right user. Using BA tools and data. Beauty side – most engaging and appealing ads. How do you make your app stand out in a crowd? How do I retain the user? […]

Categories
mobile Programming

#iOSDevUK: Steve Scott: Sherlocked! Deprecated! Changed! AKA “Do Apple Hate Developers?”

Helpful to take a step back and see where we are. We all tend to view the world through rose tinted glasses. Depend to look through a lens that colours what we are seeing. Unless take them off, hard to see what the situation is. Glasses worn by iOS is “we are indie devs”. Sense […]

Categories
Programming

The Entire Dev Team is Sick

I’m working on an app right now. I’ve been working on it since I escaped my gilded cage, modulo distractions – consulting, travel, talks, writing. It’s fun, working on my idea, and thankfully I met a great designer so it’s not going to be Developer Art. And it’s cool. I’ve had a working demo for a while […]