Interface

Engineer Thinking

9 Mar 10 — Development / Interface / User Experience — 7 comments

I made a remark on Twitter the other day that gave rise to a discussion, and a few of the comments exemplified something I want to briefly talk about.

The actual topic of discussion isn’t particularly germane to my point, but suffice to say that it concerned a situation where Xcode (the development environment for Mac and iPhone/iPad programming) wasn’t doing anything to assist in a very common situation where you’d want to choose one of two possible courses of action, due to an underlying feature of the programming language used.

In probably more than 80% of cases, one particular choice would be made. My point, of course, is that Xcode ought to default to the most common choice, but transparently allow overriding that choice if the other option was needed.

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iPad Application Design

5 Mar 10 — Development / Interface / Tech — 81 comments

I held a 6-hour workshop at NSConference in both the UK and USA recently, focusing on software design and user experience. Predictably, an extremely popular topic was the iPad, and how to approach the design of iPad applications. I gave a 90-minute presentation on the subject to start each workshop, and I want to share some of my observations here.

Please note: this is about the user interface conventions and considerations which apply to creating software for the iPad platform (and touch-screen tablet devices in general). It is not a technical discussion of iPad-related APIs (which remain under NDA at time of writing in early March 2010).

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Speaking

27 Feb 10 — Interface / conference / speaking — No comments

Just a quick note that I’ve added a page about Speaking engagements (such as conferences and workshops) to this blog. It’s strictly an as-time-permits thing and not at all my main business (for the moment), but I thoroughly enjoy presenting and I’ve had some very positive and kind feedback over the past year.

If you’ve attended one of my sessions and want to share your thoughts with me (and/or offer a testimonial for publication), please do get in touch either in the comments on this post or directly via email (gmail; matt.gemmell).

NSConference 2010 US Workshop

8 Feb 10 — Development / Interface / conference / speaking — 1 comment

If you’re attending my workshop in the US at NSConference 2010, I’d like to ask you to please read this and email your questions, topics and suggestions for what you’d like to cover. Anything at all is most welcome; it’s your workshop, and the reason the UK one went so well is because so many people contributed interesting points for us to discuss.

You can ask to remain entirely anonymous if you wish, and you can similarly contribute a question or issue that you’ve already solved – there might be scope for other views or some useful additions. In you have a possible topic in mind and aren’t sure about it, send it anyway!

You can send your thoughts to me via email to my gmail account (matt.gemmell) or to matt at this domain. Get those suggestions in.

Ask me anything

7 Feb 10 — Development / Interface / Personal / Tech — 3 comments

I discovered Formspring today via Twitter, and I think it’s an interesting idea: you can ask people questions on anything you like, and see their responses listed. Very simple and not very original, but the lack of a need to sign up (though you can if you want to) and the simplicity of the interface is somehow very conducive to just asking and answering.

I’ve already answered almost 40 questions on all kinds of things (mostly Mac/iPad/iPhone UI/interaction questions), and I’ve love to hear yours – though please note that I’m more interested in giving my opinions on things than answering specific technical questions. You can ask me a question here.

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