2011
Facebook Deprecated APIs wont work
I got information that Facebook’s REST based API stopped working. Yes, it was true. Checked few popular apps and everything looks screwed. Mainly when it comes to iPhone it is really a pain to undergo this change and plan a release exclusively for Facebook change. However Facebook says them as part of the road map but most of the developers gets confused or unaware. You can find them on http://developers.facebook.com/roadmap/.
One fine morning developers who gets negative rating because their iPhone facebook sdk (not Facebook iOS sdk) does not work anymore. This brings a public nuisance and mainly for developers. I also think from the Facebook end. Managing and informing all developers to upgrade to their newest SDK is really a pain. However, rather than discussing this topic I would encourage my fellow developers to fix the facebook stuff and release them again to the app store to keep the apple reviewers busy.
Even top apps on the app store suffer this damage. Some of them were CNN, Weather Channel …
A note to the users to the above mentioned app. Dont rate the app negatively, rather intimate the developers to they can find the right fix for the same.
Hope this helps to my fellow iOS developers.
2011
Mobile Apps Usability Review (iPhone / Android)
I am not an usability guru or an expert in usability arena. But I would like to share my thoughts when I had an application which my team developed for review with few iPhone users. Surprisingly, I could see lot of things on how people react to the usability of the application. The group ranged from sparse users to best users of iPhone.
I had to admit that I was unable to digest all the feedback given by the users. But still I feel all the points given by the users has got a huge value. I would like to quote some examples from the review. The application had barcode scanning, the user took the iPhone device and started to place the camera of the iphone to very close to the barcode. However, after sometime the user managed to scan a barcode. I felt the necessity of placing a help mechanism to get the users right at the first time. Again that is subjective to the users whether they opt of reading through the help.
Another issue on usability was throwing a registration screen in front of the user. We had a registration screen and users did not know how to navigate through it. If we wish maximum number of people to use our application we should cater to the weakest or dumbest request of the user.
Learning is fun. I understood that the touch screen users try to use their click click mind on a touch and expect it to work as they do in desktop. This needs to be kept in mind of the designers / developers of mobile application. Hope this might add 2 cents to someone who needs something about usability on mobile phones.
2009
iPhone Development
After getting into the open source world of web (Drupal) which excited me a lot, I jumped into iPhone Development. It is more exciting than what I have thought and realized.
iPhone is a revolutionary phone from Apple which gives tons and tons of features for the gadget enthusiasts. Although I had to admit there are some cons in the phone, I am glad to say that the pros of the phone are 1000 times more than that of cons. Which in fact hides the dark side of the iPhone.
The next question I asked myself is what made it stand apart from the other phones that are available in the market. One of the simple answer to this question is the way the phone responds to the users touch. I have seen few touch screen phones and I do have one, but I have never seen and intuitive interface in any phones. However I am not a worshipper of Apple products, but an distance admirer of them.
The programming for iPhone got bit easier as it follows the same strategy followed in Mac development. The gesture programming is the coolest thing apple had come up. When I started to get into iPhone development I found it extremely straight forward and simple. And the best part is that at least majority of the iPhone developers are sticking to the human interface guidelines.
As part of my training I went through the videos available in http://developer.apple.com/iphone and I liked the way it was structured. Again it is my personal liking that I fell in love with the mac platform development. And if you want to become an iPhone developer I would recommend you to get an apple developer id and start watching the videos they have in order. BTW, it is not recommended to skip and video. Although watching lengthy training videos sucks at times.
It doesn’t make sense for me if I speak a lot about mac without owning at least one of the apple product. So for getting into the iphone development I need a mac. I have all my SDK downloaded from the iphone developers website.