Create your own iPhone app quickly and easily

Posted in on 4 January 2010 | Comments

The growth of the iPhone app store and market has been phenomenal in recent years. Many websites and blogs have developed their own iPhone applications as a way of promoting their brand. One recent example of this was the Guardian newspaper in the UK with its own Guardian iPhone app. Quite a smart way of leveraging the newspaper’s online content I think.

Up to now, you needed to have some development experience and you had to navigate your way through the Apple app development process before creating and (possibly) selling your app. However, AppMakr is a new website that promises to make iPhone app development easy, fast, and inexpensive. If you have website content and an RSS feed, AppMakr makes it straightforward to create an iPhone app for a low price (from $199). I viewed their demo movie and it all looks very easy!

This is one of those (rare) websites that has really made me sit up and say Wow!

Related: Want to optimise your website for iPhones using the traditional CSS route? Try iPhone CSS—tips for building iPhone websites

Plans for this blog in 2010?

Posted in on 14 December 2009 | Comments

I have been thinking about what I might do with this blog next year because I want to do something that would be (for me) a bit different. I have been wanting to redesign for a while and here’s an idea that I am considering.

Firstly, I’d quite like to strip the style sheet down to a more slimline version of what I have now. Over the years, I have added more to the style sheet without removing or redefining the style sheet ‘fluff’ as much as I could have. As a result, I feel that it is becoming a bit bloated with style rules that are no longer used… or that are not used as optimally as they might be.

Secondly, I would like to try out new styles so my plan would be to create a new style for the blog every month. The basic HTML would remain the same or similar with each iteration but the style sheet would change 12 times over the year. I am not sure I can keep this up for the whole year, or even how different the styles will be, but it sounds like an interesting thing to do and it might encourage me to experiment a bit more.

My initial idea would be to start with a base style sheet and modify this throughout the year. Perhaps Andy Clarke’s universal IE6 style sheet would be a starting point? It was designed for a different purpose but has a core set of typographical styles that could be a good ‘baseline’.

I will not be going so far as to create a new style for every blog post but I figure that once a month might be possible. Anyway, before I decide whether to do this, let me know if you have any thoughts or comments. All ideas or feedback considered.

Advent calendar websites for web developers

Posted in on 7 December 2009 | Comments

This is the time of year when online advent ‘calendars’ spring to life. As a web designer/developer, I don’t mean those nice pictorial calendars that we give to children but instead websites that publish an article a day for the first 24 days of December. Here are three that are aimed at geeks, developers, or web designers.

Read more ...

See how a top designer and copy writer redesign the CannyBill website

Posted in on 19 October 2009 | Comments [2]

Have you ever wanted to get more insight into the thinking behind a website redesign? I know I have. Well, there’s an interesting open design process happening at the moment with the redesign of the CannyBill website. Andy Clarke is redesigning the website with the help of Relly Annett-Baker who is rewriting the copy … and they are describing each step of the process. There have been several posts already including this one about redesigning the home page and another about how Andy organises his files.

These posts provide great insight into the thinking behind the redesign and it’s not often that you get this. I’ll definitely be following along over the next few days/weeks!

Twitter: Follow Andy Clarke and Relly Annett-Baker on Twitter to get their latest updates on the process (and their other tweets).

Please start from the beginning....

Posted in on 4 August 2009 | Comments

Ryan Taylor has been producing a series of video interviews with famous web folks for a few months. The series is called Please Start from the Beginning and each interview includes a set of questions. For example, what was your first job? How did you get into the web industry? The videos also have a window-within-window format which feels quite personal and is not something I have seen before.

I have watched a few of the interviews recently [for example, with Simon Collison] and I really like the format. The interviews put a more human face on people who I have seen on Twitter, at conferences, in blog posts, and around the web. It’s not that these well-known people are somehow impersonal in their other activities but unless you know them, have chatted in person, or otherwise interacted on a regular basis, it’s difficult to know if they are funny, serious, or whatever. The Please Start from the Beginning video interviews give a better insight into each person, personally and professionally.

Why not watch a few of the interviews when you have a spare moment? I hope to catch up with some of the previous interviews over the next few weeks.


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