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 — 25 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 16, 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.

Chris — May 20, 08 5857

Thanks for making these talks available. Better than flying around the world for the presentation in Cupertino.

One might consider bit-torrent as a matter of speed. After an initial spike these videos download at around 10K/s for me. (eta 7 hours) I can download the economist in contrast at a rate of 500 K/s. (130 Mb/4 minutes)

mj — May 20, 08 5870

I'm trying to download the UI Design presentation and I'm only getting 122MB of the 532MB and I can't play the partially downloaded file.

Is there something wrong with the file.

Thomas — May 21, 08 5880

Thanks to all who have contributed to this. Your efforts are appreciated.

Unfortunatly there seems to be some problem with the download of the videos. The download is very slow and breaks down at seemingly random intervals. Is there any possibility that you can improve this situation?

Thanks (again).
Thomas

Joe — May 23, 08 5896

Hi Scott,

Thanks for answering those questions. This has got me thinking.

When a coder teams up with a designer, to develop and app, is this generally a fifty/fifty work load, and an even partnership? or is one job more work than the other?

Which has led me to more questions.
Saying we're talking about a consumer app, like this size of iphoto or smaller.

If one decides to hire a professional for the design (I hope I'm not going to far here), what does that generally cost?
And if a designer wants to develop an app, and hire out the implementation side, is this a similar cost?

And my final question is this.
It sounds like the best thing to do is to get together with other mac developers, designers and talented people. So if you're really into this stuff, and determined to go in this direction, what do you do if you live in the middle of virginia, and have never even met another mac developer in person?

Do you keep trucking through the web, and try to build relationships along the way?
Do you move to California to meet people or try to get a job to get some experience before going out on your own? and then find colleagues who want to quit their jobs with you for the dream of success.
Or do you just hack it alone cause you live in the middle of virginia??

Scott Stevenson — May 24, 08 5911

@Joe: When a coder teams up with a designer, to develop and app, is this generally a fifty/fifty work load, and an even partnership? or is one job more work than the other?

Neither engineering nor UI design is "harder" than the other, so I don't think that's really the way to look at it. Both usually take a lot of experience to get good at (though some are naturally talented), but they're different jobs. In some cases, a designer and a developer will form a 50/50 partnership, but that's just one option.

If one decides to hire a professional for the design (I hope I'm not going to far here), what does that generally cost?

There's no simple way to answer that, but the range of hourly rates for designers is roughly the same as engineers. I don't want to name a specific number because there are a lot of different factors: experience, location, type of project, type of employment, and so on.

And if a designer wants to develop an app, and hire out the implementation side, is this a similar cost?

I think that's pretty likely.

Do you move to California to meet people or try to get a job to get some experience before going out on your own?

I wish I knew how to give you a precise answer. All I can say is I've lived here for most of my life, and a lot of people here are involved in technology in some way. We're right in the middle of Apple, Google, and so on. I really think I'm incredibly lucky to have ended up living in the place I live, knowing the people I know.

Some people do move out here specifically to be involved in it, but that's not the only way, and it wouldn't make everyone happy. But it is an option. That said, there are plenty of successful Mac developers who don't live in California.

I'm not sure offhand what the best option is to find co-workers and get involved if you're not physically near other people doing the same sort of work.

One good option that seems to have worked very well over the years is to publish open source code or tutorials. Contributing to the community gets your work out in the public and helps you become a better developer in the process.

I hope that helps. If you have follow-up questions, let me know.

Pascal Bourque — May 25, 08 5919

Scott,

I'm not having much luck downloading the videos...

Would it be possible for you to make the videos available via bittorrent? Or, if anyone who has successfully downloaded the videos is willing to share them with bittorrent, would you allow it?

Pascal

Scott Stevenson — May 26, 08 5921

@Pascal Bourque: Would it be possible for you to make the videos available via bittorrent? Or, if anyone who has successfully downloaded the videos is willing to share them with bittorrent, would you allow it

We aren't doing bittorrent seeding ourselves right now, but anyone is welcome to do it.

Joe — May 28, 08 5944

Your insights are really helpful.
Thanks Scott.

I have tons more questions about this, but I'll try to take it easy for now; one step at a time.

twobyte — May 30, 08 5963

Overall very wrong point of view on the software UI design. Software developer should not be a UI designer, but a clear and effective communicator.

Scott Stevenson — May 31, 08 5965

@twobyte: Overall very wrong point of view on the software UI design. Software developer should not be a UI designer, but a clear and effective communicator.

I addressed this very point early on in the talk. Software development and user interface design are two very different things, but some people are multi-talented and are able to do both very well.

But I agree a developer should not undersell the importance of the user interface. Most of the talk revolves around helping developer understand basic UI concepts so they can work better with designers on their team.

Mohannad Shahat — Sep 10, 08 6374

Many thanks to all of you,,, i really enjoying these videos ...

Thanks again to all your work :)

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