iPhone Development

We started a company last year to allow independent iPhone app developers to make the transition from “wanna-be” to published developer. The model works similar to a record label, where LTZ provides the leverage, so that developers can concentrate on coding rather than the logistics of getting apps out. We wanted to start small, get a few early successes and then use that momentum to gather a pool of developers. We’re also planning a Code Kitchen, which is a class to teach iPhone and Mac programming to anyone interested for free.

Most of our early time was spent on logistics, even though we had our first app idea right from the start. It was a lot of waiting; we waited for resources (copy, data, images, feedback), we waited for Apple, we waited for the lawyers and we waited for contracts. So in a year’s time, we finally had an application ready to release. But thankfully, most of that work won’t have to be completed again since the contracts, setup and other logistics are taken care of. I’ll post a longer article on the whole process (what it took, what we learned, etc), but as I type this, our app, BarNinja is “In Review,” waiting to go up on the Apple App Store. It still might get rejected (one never knows with these processes), but we’re hopeful that it will appease the Apple review gods. We’re also more hopeful that the app will actually sell well and we can get some money into the business so we can buy “test” devices, like the brand new iPad for all our people.

Scuba Diving in Blacksburg

As many already know, scuba diving is a relatively new thing for me. However, I instantly fell in love with the sport and have tried to progress as quickly as I can. It’s been a lot cheaper than flying.

I got my Open Water (OW) certification in November of ’08 (with dives in Cozumel, Mexico in December), my Advanced Open Water (AOW) in July of ’09 (with dives in the Florida Keys and on the US Coast Guard Cutter my grandfather served on in World War II), my Rescue Diver certification (that required another certification of Emergency First Responder) and now I’m working on my Divemaster certification, which is a professional level diving certification. As you can image, this has been a long journey, with a ton of training, reading, and diving. The diving part was especially difficult due to the location. Blacksburg is not known for it’s amazing scuba diving, but diving in the local river, which has a maximum depth of 41 feet, has made it a bit easier.

We should be able to finish up the divemaster certification in May of this year. That’ll allow me to help teach some classes with Scott, who runs Avalon Adventures here in Blacksburg and the New River Valley (NRV). He’s my current instructor and I’ve helped him out with his website. The plan is to serve Blacksburg, Christiansburg, Radford, and the surrounding NRV to provide classes, dive trips, dive refreshers and other adventures. Hopefully, we’ll also make some money in the process.

Music

I’ve picked up my guitars again. Sadly, I don’t think I’ve picked them up in at least six months, but I’m at it again. Luckily it only took me a few minutes to remember what those six months made me forget. I am also helping my old Computer Science instructor with his business at Rocket Music. It helps me get back into music, even though its on a strictly computer programming level. Just talking about guitars, buying guitars, customizing guitars and everything guitars reminds me to go pick up one of my guitars and practice, if for only 15 minutes.

Our Foster Dog

Our foster dog Petunia has really adjusted well with us. When we first got her, she had some problems with other dogs, being generally nervous, crying when we left her home alone, etc. We weren’t surprised, since her previous owners abandoned her and she spent a long time in the shelter. Now all she does it try to cuttle up with us and never leaves us, even if that means following us from room to room.

Ana is getting attached to Petunia and I don’t think we’re going to get her adopted. Being a Pitbull mix, people are afraid of her. However, everyone that’s met her has loved her, which is another reason we don’t think we’ll let her be adopted. She never barks, is great with our cat, loves to play, never complains, and is so adorable. She’s gathered such nicknames as Petu, Petufilese and just Perrita. Dogs are a lot of work, but I think in this case, for her, she’s worth it.

Apartment

My girlfriend of about a year, moved in officially a few months ago. She still has her old apartment, but the rent there is taken care of by a sort of sub-lease. Previously, we were always together anyway, cooking food, studying together, grocery shopping together. The only difference was, she wasn’t paying rent or the massive electricity bill we seemed to rack up with her presence. I have an extra bedroom in my condo, which I gave to her for all her stuff. We moved in her tredmill into that room (producing some of the first small scratches in my new hard wood floors), her desk and a bunch of other things so that she has her own space. It’s worked out extremely well and while we’ve had our fights about stupid apartment and living stuff, you don’t truly know a person until you lived with them. That goes for friends and girlfriends.

Spanish

As a result of living with a native Spanish speaker, I’ve picked up a lot. I never learned Spanish. It was always the language of poor people where I lived. Instead I studied German, the language that’s most understood in Europe. While living in Hungary, I learned Hungarian so picking up Spanish was probably the easiest thing for me. With Spanish, for example, just add an ‘O’ or an ‘A’ after any English word of more than 2 syllables and translate word for word and you have a pretty good, understandable sentence.

Before I met Ana (pronounced Ah-na, not Anne-uh by the way), I probably knew less than 20 words, and that’s after having spent two weeks in Mexico scuba diving. Before that, I probably knew around 5. Now I wish I would have learned it sooner, but I’m glad I learned German since Ana and I are planning a trip back to Europe. Ana has never been, so I’ll take us around Hungary, we’ll visit Italy (which is a language both of us have studied, but she understands a lot better) and she can take us around Spain since they almost speak the same language as she does.

We have a savings account set up that we’ve been putting money in since last summer. It’s not a lot, but it’ll at least pay for the plane tickets out there. Then we plan on staying with friends where we can, and since we both have friends all over Europe, it shouldn’t be an issue.

What I’ve Been Up To is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

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3. Isla Fuerte, Colombia
4. First Dive 2009 – New River

With iPhone development, more often than not, you’re selling a product as opposed to a service, which may be a compliment to your physical or web based service. If your iPhone app is a complimentary product to a service that you already offer and charge for, your iPhone app should probably be free (depending on complexity). Look at it as a value-added feature to put you above your competition and make using your service more convenient and enjoyable. By creating more ways to access your service, you provide more opportunity for your customers to use it more often and really benefit from what you’re trying to offer them.

So what’s the sweet spot for a price for your iPhone app? It obviously depends, but there are some guidelines we came up with.

Be Unique with Your iPhone App

The more unique your application is, the more you can sell it for. By being unique, you have less competition and thus a higher demand.

Complexity of Your iPhone App

If your application can be easily reproduced by a 16 year old kid on a weekend, you either shouldn’t charge for your application, or if you do, don’t charge more than a dollar because that 16 year old kid won’t.

Proprietary

If your application uses proprietary information, software, APIs or other technologies that aren’t easily implemented or obtained, you can charge more for your application. This relates to complexity, but be aware that people will often create equivalent systems if it’s popular enough so proprietary systems and information require a lot of maintenance to keep them relevant.

Usefulness of Your Application

How often will someone use your app? Is it just a novelty or something someone will only use for a certain chore that they rarely do? If so, the demand for the app diminishes and so should your price.

No application should be more than $10 with few exceptions. Remember that you’re developing for a mobile platform and the software is limited and your price should be limited too.

If it’s a game, how is the quality and length of game play? The quality, the game play and the fun factor all play a part in your price. Obviously, people much prefer spending money on entertainment than on a new fancy laundry list application. Games are usually unique (to the App Store at least), are complex and provide a greater satisfaction to buyers, which allows them to enjoy a higher price tag.

Perspective

Having a higher price on the App Store shows more confidence in your application. Giving your app away usually means you don’t think people would be even willing to spend the price of a soda on your application. These applications are fine, but for some of us, we need to make a living.

Making your app a dollar usually means, I want to make some money, but I don’t think people will pay any more for it. But charging a dollar can also be good if your app has a wide appeal. What you lack in big numbers, you make up with bulk sales. So, if it’s a game, you could potentially have a larger market as opposed to a utility application that the user spends 30 seconds on. So you really need to look hard at your application and keep several factors in mind before you price your app. You can always change it later, so one approach is to start low and see how sales go.

iPhone Pricing is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

Related posts:

1. Corona Game Template in Lua
2. BarNinja – An iPhone App Postmortem
3. How to Program for the iPhone – A Plan
4. A Very European Christmas

This is not so much how to make applications for the iPhone, since there are so many on of those on the web already. This is more a syllabus on how to get started with the vast amount of information already out there and where to start from to quickly become proficient at iPhone development without getting frustrated or discouraged.

Development Requirements

An Intel-based Apple Mac
$99 (optional – if you want to actually publish your app)
That’s all!

Apple Developer Account

Development for the iPhone is initially free. So feel free to head over to http://developer.apple.com and sign up for a developer account if you don’t already have one. This will give you access to the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) called XCode, which is required to develop applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch. It also serves as a treasure chest of free information, sample code, tutorials, how-to videos and news, all of which I’ll talk about how to use later.

Once you’ve signed up for a developer account, you’ll need to download XCode and install it on your Mac. PC users are, as they always are, out of luck since a Mac is required for development. Once that’s done, put it aside as you won’t need it for a bit.

Learn to Program

An Important Design Pattern: Model View Controller

If you already know how to program a little bit, but haven’t gone through the rigors of a four year university Computer Science degree or something similar, start with learning an important design patterns, namely one called Model View Controller (MVC). Of course, a 4-year degree is not necessary, but you need to understand basic software engineering principles, design patterns and basic usability practices, which practically none of the programming tutorials, books and online articles teach. Also, a lot of practice helps as you’ll learn how to fix non-obvious compiler and runtime errors, how to structure your code, and pitfalls of each language you use.

Objective-C: The Language of Choice

After you understand the basic principle of MVC, you can then move on to learning the language of choice, Objective-C. Why Objective-C? Why didn’t Apple just choose a common language like C++ or Java? The reasons will become obvious as you learn about the language, it’s power, and how it fits into the MVC methodology better than any other language you’ve likely seen before. So here’s a nice tutorial on how to program in Objective-C.

If you already have a great understanding of programming and know a C-based langauge, skip the lengthy tutorial and take a look at this primer to get a sense of the additions to C that Objective-C brings to the table. For most people who are familiar with a C-based language, this will be all you need to get started.

The Cocoa Framework: Because Reinventing the Wheel is for Marketing Types

Ok, great. Now you speak the language, but you need to know the framework and how the language leverages this technology so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Take a look at Cocoa Fundamentals to learn how the fundamentals of Cocoa work. The Cocoa framework is a superset of the Cocoa Touch framework that is specialized to fit the paradigm and requirements of the iPhone and iPod Touch devices. Knowledge of the Cocoa framework is essential to understanding how to use such things as data structures and containers, user interface (UI) elements and the rich built-in functionality that all these components offer you for free. Many of the Cocoa framework elements carry over into Cocoa Touch, such as strings, CoreData, CoreAudio, CoreAnimation and concepts such as delegation, protocols, interfaces and application bundles.

XCode Tools: The Real Workers

Once you know how to speak the language and use the technology, you need to know how to use the tools to make it all happen. Here’s another Apple document that explains what XCode is and how to use it. Even if you’ve worked in XCode before, it’s worth checking out as XCode is a powerful code editor, debugger and provides a host of other tools and features. If you’re interested in what else XCode has to offer, there’s a more detailed explanation of the other tools that come with XCode.

Your First iPhone Application

You need to keep in mind that even though this is a lot of information to process, if you’re unfamiliar with the platform, it’s all very intuitive and will become second nature with a little practice and time. Just keep looking at a little bit every day and re-read some of the things you read early on. No one can learn a foreign language in a week, so don’t expect to be fluent in everything Objective-C and Cocoa in less than that. Spend a little time with it every day, go through sample code that interests you, read developer forums to see what other people are having trouble with and come up with a few of your own app ideas just to put all this theory to work. You never truly learn something until you have to use it in the real world.

So now that you have made all the theory, concepts and language familiar to you, you can cement it in your brain with your first iPhone application. This tutorial will cover most of the concepts you already learned (repetition is the key to really cementing that knowledge) but it will also show how they all tie together, which is the most important part. Don’t just copy and paste the code. You don’t have to memorize it, but typing it out really helps you recognize the code later when you have to use it on your own.

Beyond the Basics

This is where most tutorials stop. They pat you on the back, call you an iPhone developer and send you on your way to flail your way through haphazard development. All you really know however is how to put a few buttons on the screen and make them do something stupid (which admittedly is most of the apps that are available on the app store). There’s a lot more you need to know to be truly dangerous.

Usabilty on the iPhone: The Apple Human Interface Guidelines (HIG)

Take an afternoon and sit down and read the Apple Human Interface Guidelines. This will give you a slew of iPhone capabilities, but more importantly, it’ll give you a sense of how to properly use the interface elements of the iPhone. Nothing shows an amateur or know-nothing developer than an improper use of an interface element or using a certain interface element because it looks or acts cool (anyone remember the drawer?).

Developing iPhone Apps:

Gather those Building Blocks

Create an iPhone Utility Application

iPhone utility applications are the easiest to understand. They have two views, a front side and a back side. This type of app is great for learning how two views can communicate without worrying about complex data structures, implementing confusing protocols or dealing with the frustration when your code compiles, but doesn’t work. You can also experiment with new technologies such as CoreData, CoreAnimation, CoreAudio, WebViews, playing music or anything else you’re interested in without the overhead of managing views and other complexities like that. Keep it simple and think of a few ideas that fit the paradigm of an iPhone utility application.

Navigation Controller: Controlling Presentation

After you’ve successfully completed a working iPhone utility application, the next and most common interface technology is the Navigation Controller. This is the controller that allows you to hit a button and have a new view slide in from the right. I love this controller because it adds a lot of functionality to your app without a lot of work. Simply allocate a new view, push it onto the navigation controller and release it because the navigation controller does the rest.

Tab Bar Controller: Multiple Sections in One App

The Tab Bar Controller is a great way to segment your applications into features. It’s a bit trickier to set up, but once you know how it works it’s intuitive and flexible. For example, you can use the views that Interface Builder gives you to drop your UI elements onto, or you can tell Interface Builder to load a particular View Controller of your choice. It greatly extends your application’s functionality with minimal work.

Tableview Controller Class: Displaying Your Data

Table views are a bit more complex and involve a bit more understanding but it’s hard to get far in iPhone development without using a tableview. Invest the time to understand these creatures and it’ll give you a nice return on your investment. Take a look at the TableViewSuite sample code to learn how to do everything you ever wanted to with table views.

Tool Bar: Making Your App Accomplish Something Useful

Applications need to do something useful besides editing data. Sometimes you may want to do something a little bit different and adding a tool bar to your application is a great way to add a different kind of functionality. It’s simple to use and gives you a standard way to manipulate data in your application.

Core Data: Handling Lots of Data Without Too Much Real Work

A lot of your app ideas are going to be based on having lots of useful data that needs to be displayed and manipulated and Core Data is the easiest, most flexible and optimized way to do that. So spend some time and read the Core Data Programming Guide. Secondly, it’s important to learn how to use a fetch results controller as it will allow you to display your data in a tableview in a simpler way than straight out of the fetch request. It will also give you the functionality of indexed tableviews for free (as seen in the Contacts application).

More Programming for iPhone

This is the one of the best paths to picking up programming for the iPhone. It starts you off with the most useful items without overwhelming you. However, it does take a lot of time to read and a little more than that to understand, but take it slowly, look at it over a course of several weeks and soon you’ll be able to add anything to your application by only reading the API references.

There are a ton of things that you’ll need to learn in order to be an effective developer, so in future articles I’ll take what I’ve learned, some pitfalls and neat tricks and show you some of the basic stuff that you can’t find in the Apple developer documentation such as handling common problems, design patterns and usability pitfalls.

After all of this, you’re still not done. You’ve only grasped the basics, but at this point, the real challenge is not understanding the technologies, it’s figuring out where to go from here: what should you learn next, how can you get started programming a real app, and most importantly how you can make a lot of money. All of this will be covered in future articles as this one is too long already, but I will leave you with some of my favorite links. In the mean time, subscribe via RSS or email to get future articles on iPhone and everything else I do. Finally, frequent the Apple developer forums and try to answer some of the questions there. You won’t always know the answer, but a little research and you will be able to figure it out and learn in the process.

Additional Links

Stack Overflow – A great site for asking programming questions of all kinds.

iPhone Dev SDK – Forum-based site for asking and answering everything iPhone related.

iPhone SDK Articles – Blog-based site with lots of useful and informative examples on iPhone development.

My Apple Background

I’ve been developing Mac applications since 2003, attending WWDC 2004 and 2005. I’m the author of several small Mac applications including a Terminal GUI tool that’s been quite popular in the past. I have taught Code Kitchens at Virginia Tech on Cocoa through the Mac Users Group and I use to sell, support, demonstrate and evangelize Apple products to college kids as an Apple Campus Rep. I’m now an independent developer, working in partnership with LTZ, a company started to give independent developers and free thinkers a platform and voice from which to launch their apps or app ideas.

How to Program for the iPhone – A Plan is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

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1. iPhone Pricing
2. Handling Your Initial View Controllers for iPhone
3. BarNinja – An iPhone App Postmortem
4. Corona Game Template in Lua

Obvious Solutions

The obvious solution when you have a dynamic text field, that is either driven from XML, RSS, or other external document or data source, is to embed the font’s character sets. Obviously if you are going to be using Korean in your Flash application, you want to embed the Korean character sets so the Korean characters show up in the font you have chosen. However, with so much emphasis on branding these days, not all specialized fonts have characters in Korean.

For example, the Star Wars Jedi font that I once worked with has absolutely no other characters beyond A-Z, a-z and numerals. Forget Spanish and it’s tildes, forget German and its umlauts, but Russian?! Ha! Everyone knows there were no Russian Jedis! So, what to do?

Dynamic Font Swap!

There are several nuances to Flash character embedding (ok, there’s probably a few hundred as I find at least one new one a week). Unfortunately Star Wars applications with the Jedi font won’t work in any language but High Schooler English since they don’t use punctuation either. So we have to change the font to something more appropriate if we want to use another language. Here’s the ActionScript 3 (AS3) code, which I’ll explain a bit after:

Ok, so what does that all mean? We take the textfield’s font properties (say, Jedi Font, size 14pt, embedded characters, etc) and alter some of the properties we need to so that our application can speak to our Russian Jedi friends. This particular code will accept a fontsize_num variable in case you want to alter the font size of the text so that it will fit within the given textbox because we all know Russian Jedi Masters are sometimes really wordy!

Next, we have a variable isSpecialCharacterSet_bool, that if true, will execute the font swap that we need. You can set this variable via XML to control, on a per language basis (having a separate XML file per language), if you want to swap fonts. After that is the defaultFont_str variable, which we can also set via XML to determine which font we want to use as a replacement of our Star Wars Jedi font. Recommended fonts are _sans, _serif, Arial and Helvetica as those are fonts that include almost every character known to modern languages.

Then, we turn off bold because, believe it or not, a bolded font is an entirely different character set and causes all sorts of other problems. We also turn off kerning because it’s a ridiculous feature that doesn’t work and I guarantee will mess up your dynamic text fields, foreign or otherwise.

The next two lines are super important:

Unless you embed ALL the font characters that Flash will let you, you won’t have your foreign language characters, which I don’t recommend anyway due to a huge increase in file size and also for the fact that it still won’t work (I’ve tried, trust me on this one). So, even though everyone has _sans, _serif, Arial and Helvetica on their computer (which allows us to display the characters without embedding them), if you DO embed some character sets, it won’t show up. Go ahead, create a dynamic text field in Arial, embed A-Z, a-z, numerals and punctuation and watch it NOT show up when you assign a string in Russian to it. Go back, click “Don’t Embed” on the textfield and watch as your Russian characters show up again. So, we programmatically disallow fonts from being embedded.

Another thing you’d think Adobe could have gotten right but doesn’t seem to care about the non-English speaking community, a.k.a. the 6 billion other people on this planet, is the bug that if a foreign character exists in a textfield that is even slightly rotated, the entire textfield disappears. So, thank you Adobe for wasting my time with your poorly programmed textfields. The trick though, is to simply make the textfield’s rotation 0. Strangest thing ever, but give it a try if you don’t believe me. And if the textfield’s parent movieclip is rotated, not your child textfield within said MC, try:

You can also programatically set the multiline property if translated text seems to be a bit wordy. But you should probably have set up your textfields to handle the expanded text anyway.

Put that code into a function and throw the textfield at it and additionally the font size (which I usually get from the XML node’s property). Unfortunately, you have to do this for every textfield and every time you set the text, but if you plan and build your Flash applications correctly, this should be a simple addition to your application framework. If it’s not obvious, let me know and I’ll write another article on best practices for localizing your Flash applications.

Flash Textfields Are Still Broken!

What isn’t broken in Flash? If you’ve delved deeper into Flash than simple animations, you’ve more than likely run into several on your own. Most of the time, restarting Flash will work, but other times, some detective work must be done in order to sort out the workarounds.

Masked fonts

If your dynamic textfield is masked, in anyway, fonts won’t show up if you disallow font embedding. Why? Well isn’t it obvious? Flash is broken. So, don’t mask your fonts if you want them to work internationally.

So many thanks to Adobe, we enjoy overpaying for your products so that they’re full of bugs. I’ve worked in Flash since the late 90s and I can’t remember them EVER releasing a patch for it. Just a new version that you have to pay several hundred dollars for. So my advice is to use an open standard for your applications and websites since those always support international languages.

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Dynamic Textfields in Flash AS3 and Their Bugs is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

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If you don’t work with people who are better than you at something, then there’s a problem. The problem is you’re the best at what you do. If you don’t see the dilemma (and silly you), let me explain.

How We Improve

We all go to school to learn skills to do our jobs better. We attend conferences to learn what’s new in our industry of choice. And we sometimes take online college courses to stay fresh and relavent. But all these things are being taught to us by someone who is better at what we do, be it a college professor, a peer who has done more research in the area or a committee of people who have dedicated a large portion of time compiling the information you are now trying to absorb.

We are best at what we do the most. For some people, they’re good at watching TV (some of us can’t sit still that long). Others are good at playing video games, cooking, or sports. Hopefully we are all good at our jobs, since above all, we spend the majority of our waking hours doing just that.

So, if the majority of your time is spent at work, working with people who are uninspiring and not as talented as yourself, it might make you feel great that you’re the smartest person in the room, but honestly, how smart are you really compared to other companies? Some of us can claim to be the world leaders in our respective industries. Unfortunately however, most of us can’t and if we aren’t exposed to people who have different ways of working and who are better, we never learn anything new.

Be Humble and Learn Something

I have several developers that I work with. The first thing I do is admit that I don’t know everything and that their input is very important to me because of that. Complex databases are not my thing. I know a lot about them, but I work with people who know more about them. Sometimes you just need to shut up and listen, even if you think you’re right about something. You’ll learn that not only are you not always right, but that other people can be right too, and sometimes you can both be right; just with different solutions to the same problem. So surround yourself with smart friends and co-workers and just by hanging out with them you’ll pick up things you wouldn’t have otherwise. Don’t worry about being the small fish, revel in the wealth of information and inspiration that surrounds you.

Working With People Better Than You is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

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Their Failure is My Failure

Being the Technical Director at my company means that I get to pull out all the stops when it comes to investing in our technical capability as a company. But it also means that I am responsible for those technological failures as well.

Coming from the world of Human Computer Interaction (HCI), the user is never wrong or stupid, but instead it is your design that is wrong or inadequate and the sooner you realize that, the sooner you can move on to building better, more functional and friendly software.

The same goes for my developers. They are forced to use the solutions I provide for them and if they have problems with it, break it, or can’t get it to work, that’s my failure to design a well-working platform for them to develop on. Sure, I can always fix the problem for them in a few minutes and show them where they were misled because I understand how all the pieces fit, but I’m the one that made it, so of course I understand it. I could dismiss their problems as them not knowing how the code works or that certain things need to be placed in particular spots for things to work properly, but that’s not their job. Their job is to develop really great pieces of work and it’s only a difference of mentality on how they should do their jobs better and easier.

On the one hand, I could produce documents and try to explain how everything works and occasionally field questions on how certain things work. The alternative is to pay attention to the problems they’re running into and resolve it in a way that’s best for them. This may require a higher initial investment, but it’s an investment that’ll yield higher returns in the long run, not to mention happier developers.

It’s Not Them, Stupid, It’s You

We’re quick to fault others for something that we ourselves may understand quite well, but with the wealth of diversity in this world, no one can know exactly the same things you do. I work with really talented people and I can’t blame them for not knowing things I think are common sense because I know they know things that I couldn’t even begin to grasp. So instead of trying to be superior to people or trying to absolve yourself from blame, take the stance that the end-user is always right, be it your co-workers, your clients or your customers. Remember, you’re not trying to compete with them, you’re trying to work with them.

Don’t Fix It, Improve It

Take something in your line of work that is tired and old and revamp it. If your software is coded in ActionScript 2, upgrade it to 3. If your website is made with just straight up HTML, refactor it to include CSS and some JavaScript. If your invoices are still written in the Courier font, hire a designer to make them less intimidating (unless that’s the point, in which case your business model is flawed if you’re constantly trying to convince your customers to pay up). I know it might not seem broken and may seem to work fine, but by improving on what you already have, it allows you to evolve and be a leader rather than having tired old things hanging around and weighing you down.

Fixing What’s Not Broken: A User-Centric Perspective is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

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1. Job Search
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The idea is going to be, talk about what I do, and explain my experiences, what I’ve learned and what I’d do differently. Since I have such a wide range of things I do, hopefully some of this will be interesting to you.

Lightroom 2

I recently acquired Lightroom 2 for my photo workflow. I’ve been using Lightroom 1 for a few years and it’s been a blast using it on my PowerMac G5. However, it was a bit slow and it was slowing up my workflow. Lightroom 2 has tremendously sped up the processing of my photos (perceptually twice as fast). Before I was waiting on the computer, now I can mostly just work and not have to sit there while the computer processes the changes I just asked for.

The sharpening tool is much more improved and the adjustments seem to work more as I think they should. LR 2 also gives you the ability to manage multiple catalogs on different hard drives. Having an external hard drive, this makes it extremely convenient for me to have catalogs for various purposes.

My favorite part about the new Lightroom has to be the dual monitor support. Now I can edit my photos on my LCD monitor (that’s actually calibrated) and have a listing of the photos (grid view for example) or other parts of the application on the other monitor to give me the maximum space for the photo while I edit it. The secondary items on the second monitor disappear when the program loses focus, so it quickly gets out of your way when you want to switch applications for a bit.

The photos above are from a soccer game I shot today. White shirts are really hard to shoot since they tend to get blown out. Lightroom has a “Recovery” adjustment that allows you to get back a lot of detail from the white, blown out areas in your photo. Likewise, there’s a “Fill Light” adjustment that recovers black areas that have been clipped. Clipping happens when multiple shades of the same color get interpreted as the same shade and you lose that detail. If you shoot your photos in RAW, most of the situations where you encounter clipping (from under or over exposure) are recoverable. Some images just can’t be salvaged, but Lightroom has been able to help me out on a number of occasions.

To help with blowing out white shirts in a soccer game (or where ever you happen to be), set your exposure compensation down a step or two. This will under expose your photos slightly but it’ll keep your whites from getting blown out and you can raise the levels on the other areas to lighten those up without affecting the brighter areas that are prone to clipping. This also gives you the bonus of gaining a faster shutter speed as the camera doesn’t need as much light to take the shot–a great thing when shooting sports! You can also raise the ISO up to 200 or 400 (if you have a digital camera that will let you do that), but then it starts becoming noisy and grainy. Just take a few shots before the event and see if you’re getting an appropriate shutter speed with the available lighting conditions at various f-stops.

Revisions

So a few things are getting revised all across the board, such as the blog, website and life, but won’t be obvious until much much later on. I’ll keep you all posted on changes being made here, in life and out “there.” I hope you like change!

Open Season on Work Related Matters is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

Related posts:

1. My Photography Workflow
2. How to Take Better Photographs with your Point and Shoot
3. New Photo Blog
4. Bike Training with the Garmin Edge 705 GPS

I also work on the website, trying to make it more user friendly (I’m a huge fan of Human Computer Interaction/Interface design) and attempting to sell guitars with a better user experience (easier navigation, more photos, etc).

I am also working on a teaching tool for the guitar instructors to help their students better visualize, practice and memorize the concepts taught in the classroom.

So now you know. Do let me know what you think of the photos, I always appreciate critique even if it’s negative.

Music Store/Guitar Work is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

Related posts:

1. New Song I Wrote: Perfect is the Enemy of Good (Guitar Only)
2. Started Work
3. Open Season on Work Related Matters
4. Washington Early Music Festival and Early Music of Germany

I’m not sure which of the ones we’ve sent in were nominated, nor which categories they’re in, but I’ll update you all after the awards and tell you how well we did (or didn’t do).

2008 Addy’s is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

Related posts:

1. The Addies
2. Some of My Old Music – Part 4 of 4
3. Some of My Old Music – Part 1 of 4
4. Some of My Old Music – Part 3 of 4

I’ll let you all know if we win anything this year!

The Addies is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

Related posts:

1. A Year of Toil
2. Fixing What’s Not Broken: A User-Centric Perspective
3. Some of My Old Music – Part 3 of 4
4. New Song I Wrote: Undeserved

TechTool Protogo

Software Review is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

Related posts:

1. Bike Training with the Garmin Edge 705 GPS
2. Corona Game Template in Lua
3. Some of My Old Music – Part 4 of 4
4. Building a Game

I’ve had some trouble with tuition this year. I’ve been to the financial aid department a few times. You have to watch those people with your money and keep them in check because they won’t let you know anything is wrong or that you need to take action on anything. I canceled my budget tuition plan today because if I didn’t they wouldn’t give me my refund for my loans and I do believe they still would have debited my checking account. Stupid things like that. I just can’t wait to get a job so I can get rid of all these loans.

I applied for two jobs initially. One was based in Detroit working for Ford’s HCI department, and another was in Balitmore doing web-based HCI work. I haven’t heard back from either one yet. One told me not to call and the other never got back to an e-mail I sent them a few weeks ago.

There was a job fair this past Monday. The few companies that I was interested in are based in the Corporate Research Center (CRC) here in Blacksburg. I would love to stay in Blacksburg for a while. If the company and job is great, it would be really nice to stay here. I’m still thinking about grad school so maybe in a few years I can get my masters in CS for Human Computer Interaction (HCI). The companies I’m interested in now have some work working in testing and developing interfaces and the like, but I wouldn’t mind doing some pure software engineering too if I can have some input on the design and other aspects of the projects I am working on. With the CRC companies, they are small so it is very likely I will be able to give plenty of input.

I’m looking for other jobs in the Baltimore area including northern Virginia as well. I’m not sure where I want to live, but this area seems like a great place to start. I’m not sure what the compensation for any of these jobs are (besides the Detroit one which was $70k) but it really doesn’t matter as long as it’s what I want to do. Of course I do expect a decent salary for the skills I possess and I’ve worked so hard to refine, but it will be the last question I ask when doing my job search. Either I’ve been extremely lucky, or something, but every boss I’ve ever had has always liked me and I’ve enjoyed working for them. Wal-Mart was a little less personal, but that is ancient history.

My GPA isn’t the greatest, but when you’re working two jobs, involved with several organizations, leading one of those, and still finding time to have a life, if a company is going to eliminate me from their prospects because they can’t see beyond a GPA, then I don’t want to work for them anyway. GPA is only a small part of the equation. What my GPA says is that I work a lot and do things other than school but as long as I’m passionate about something, I give it my all. We’ll see who the lucky company is that can look beyond all of that and give me a chance.

So, a great job is sure to be on the horizon. I’ll keep you posted.

Job Search is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

Related posts:

1. Working With People Better Than You
2. Fixing What’s Not Broken: A User-Centric Perspective
3. A Year of Toil
4. New Flash Games Ending Completion