Theocacao: Video from UI Design Essentials CocoaHeads

Video from UI Design Essentials CocoaHeads

The video from the UI Design Essentials talk at last month's CocoaHeads Silicon Valley, is now available, along with the Debugging with Xcode talk by Joar Wingfors.

This is a topic that's close to my heart and we had some great audience participation. I'd love to do something like this again on a separate but related topic. We may want to revisit this once the iPhone SDK is out of beta, for example.

Meeting Intro and Xcode Tips: Debugging with Xcode

We start the meeting and introduce Joar, who talks about using tools built into Xcode to help you debug your application. This talk is aimed at Mac development, but Xcode is obviously used for the iPhone SDK as well.

• Google Video
• QuickTime HD (213MB)
• Slides in PDF

UI Design Essentials

In this presentation, I introduce some of the basic ideas in user interface design, as well as some specific examples that developers often need guidance on. This video is currently only available as a download, though I think we'll try to get it up on Google Video as well.

• QuickTime HD (532MB)
• Slides in PDF

(The UI Design video does get out of sync with the audio. We want to get this fixed but it takes a lot of time to re-encode everything and upload it.)

Jacob Gorban of Apparent Software was the brave soul who volunteered to have his app, ImageFramer, criticized and deconstructed in front of a live audience. As I said in the presentation, the concept of the app is interesting — essentially, allowing users to add decorate frames to their images. ImageFramer 2.0 is currently in beta, so take a look.

I want to thank some key people. Michael Jurewitz, Apple's Developer Tools Evangelist, continues to go above and beyond the call of duty to make sure CocoaHeads has a place to meet each month. Stephen Zyszkiewicz puts a ton of time into recording, editing, and uploading these videos. And last but certainly not least, Joar Wingfors continues to invest time in helping me come up with and present technical content for the meetings.

When you see these guys at WWDC or even another meeting, please take a moment to walk up to them and tell them thanks. I'm sure they'll appreciate hearing it. Finally, thanks to all of you for showing up and participating. Obviously, that's what makes this whole thing work.

Video from UI Design Essentials CocoaHeads
Posted May 11, 2008 — 14 comments below

John Hoffman — May 11, 08 5807

If I see above mentioned people at WWDC I will certainly thank them. But, I must also heartily thank you for this website and the time you have devoted to it.

Peter Hosey — May 11, 08 5808

Have you considered running torrents of these videos? Serving up three-quarters of a gigabyte to each person who wants the HD videos will surely fatten the CocoaHeads bandwidth bill.

Ross — May 11, 08 5809

Thank you

Martin — May 11, 08 5810

Many thanks to Scott and all the people that participated in the making of those videos. They're really great: it's like WWDC videos for free and all year long. Keep up the good work.

Robert McGovern — May 11, 08 5811

I agree, using torrents is probably the best thing you can do to get these videos out. I would be more than happy to help seed them.

Chris — May 11, 08 5812

Thanks for making PDFs of the slides available too - quite a lot of them on the video have gone a soft of mushy blue colour making them impossible to read there.

JB — May 11, 08 5813

Thank you.
A funny Freudian typo on UI Slides, page 11: Developer constructs interface
from resuable components.

Jeff LaMarche — May 11, 08 5814

This is awesome! Thanks so much for posting this.

Steve — May 11, 08 5815

Dreamhost tells me we've only used 40 GB since May 2, and I have 4000 GB allotted for cocoaheadssiliconvalley.com. Don't worry about it too much yet.

Chris Hanson — May 11, 08 5816

I put together a video podcast feed for the CocoaHeads videos, thanks to Podcast Maker. Unfortunately, the videos themselves aren't viewable on Apple TV, so I've abandoned it for now.

Is there any chance that future videos can be rendered in a format that's compatible with Apple TV? It's much more comfortable for viewing long-format content, and the video will still be compatible with straight-up iTunes viewing.

The content right now is an OK size (1248x702, why not 1280x720?) but it's 29.97 fps; it needs to be 24fps to play at 1280x720 on Apple TV. Most encoding software these days has "Encode for Apple TV" as an option, so you don't have to sweat the details.

If someone can make sure Apple TV-compatible video is available, I'll put it into a podcast feed on my own site, or send the feed XML to Scott to put on the cocoaheadssiliconvalley.com site.

Joe — May 13, 08 5823

Hi Scott,

Great presentation. Have really enjoyed the ones that you have presented yourself, and gotten a lot out of them. Thanks for all the insight and tips for folks just getting started.

I came away from the presentation wondering,

is it uncommon to develop both of these skills? to become a developer and a designer?

And is it common to develop a product alone? Or is developing an app all the way to a sellable product, getting it up for sale, supporting it and everything else just too much for one person to take on?

I hope that you will talk more on design in the future.
And hope that you will dig more into code as well.

thanks a ton,
Joe

Scott Stevenson — May 14, 08 5824

@Joe: is it uncommon to develop both of these skills? to become a developer and a designer?

It's uncommon in the sense that it's rare for someone to have true interest in both. One point I really tried to drive home is that unless you really love designing user interfaces, you really shouldn't be doing it because it will come across in your work.

That said, there are some Mac developers that do successfully both design the UI and implement the application itself. The reason, I expect, is that they love doing both. It's certainly a lot of work to do absolutely everything yourself, so even if you want to be the only product guy to start, you may want to find one-to-three other people to do support, PR, and so on.

Thanks for the kind words.

Kelan Champagne — May 15, 08 5845

Thanks to you and everybody involved in making these videos happen. I am bummed I can't make it in person anymore, but I am really grateful for the videos you guys are able to put up. I know it's all a lot of work (organizing, preparing, presenting, recording, and editing), and I really appreciate it.

This was a great topic, and a great presentation. I would love to hear you go more in-depth into some of the areas you touched upon, in future talks. For example: When designing, how do you know what is right? In what proportion do you mix (a) following the examples of others, (b) following the HIG, (c) going with your gut, (d) doing something totally new and exciting, and (e) other?

Thanks again,
-Kelan

Geoff — May 16, 08 5846

Thanks for putting these videos online. It's great for people who don't readily get to attend sessions like these to keep up to date.

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