Today I received notification from Apple that my first iPhone app submission had been approved for the app store.
#RDGGEEK is a native Objective-C app that displays the speakers and talk descriptions for Reading Geek Night events past, present and future. The app is powered by a JSON feed from the main Reading Geek Night website. The event data is stored offline and updated every time the app is launched.
The #RDGGEEK app can now be downloaded from the app store.
This week has seen the launch of my latest freelance project, working with Josh Wynter, a talented composer from Bristol.
Josh wanted a portfolio site to showcase a wide variety of media including; audio, video, photos and a news feed. He also wanted to manage the site using wordpress and for all of the content to be navigable without any page refreshes.
This was the first time I had worked with the new wordpress 3.0 release and it was a great opportunity to make use of the new custom post types. I personally think this is one of the best sites I have ever built and enjoyed every minute of it, Thanks Josh.
Josh’s website: http://joshwynter.co.uk
This month’s issue of .net magazine has awarded the recently reskinned Yell.com HTML5 site of the month!
As a front-end developer on the project I was quoted in the article as saying…
“The front-end dev team at Yell wanted to advance the coding standards, and moving to the HTML5 doctype was the first logical step. We made use of custom data attributes, placeholder attributes and local storage, all of which contributed to an improvement in the quality of our source code and the performance of our JavaScript. We also had the added benefit of being able to simplify our charset, style and script tags.” - Chris Bewick
This was an excellent project to work on and I am delighted with the reponse. Many thanks to @brucel for the great write-up and to @doodlemoonch for being, as always, a delight to work with.
This article can be found on page 57 of issue 204 of .net magazine.
Last night I came across a new post on stuff and nonsense entitled Could you be a dick? in which Andy Clarke challenges the world to come up with a spoof business card for a private investigator.
I was rather amused by this proposition and set to work on my own idea which has now been uploaded to the Hardboiled card flickr group. The nine best entries (as judged by Mr Clarke himself) will go on to feature in the pages of his forthcoming book “Hardboiled web design” to assist in the explanation of CSS3 selectors.
This blog post is a follow up to a post I made last month called Snap Bird - Flexing my design muscles. In last month’s post I presented the results of an evening spent doodling design ideas for a new Twitter search app called Snap Bird.
Shortly after my last post, Snap Bird creator Remy Sharp (@rem) replied to my email and said that he wanted to incorporate some of my ideas into the Snap Bird design. A couple of weeks later, after some great work from Clearleft’s Paul Annett (@nicepaul), the final Snap Bird design has now been launched.
Much to my delight, my bird illustration has been adopted as the Snap Bird mascot and has also been made into a favicon!
Many thanks to Remy and Paul for a credit in the final design, much appreciated.
Last night whilst catching up with twitter I saw the following tweet from Remy Sharp…
“Found a decent name for my app: http://snapbird.org - as in “snap! I’ve found my tweet”, pretty design hopefully soon-give-or-take” - @rem
Snap Bird is essentially an enhanced twitter search application that Remy has built to find archived tweets which are more than seven days old. I liked the idea and also liked the name ‘Snap Bird’ and I then began to wonder what a snap bird might look like if it where real creature. Before I knew it, this day dreaming had spawned an impromptu design session and moments later I’d cracked out Fireworks and had begun creating an illustration of a snap bird.
From this simple character I continued to develop a logo/brand and before too long I had created an entire layout for the Snap Bird home page.
I was quite pleased with how this design had turned out and decided to email Remy a link to the design to see if he was interested in using it to replace the largely unstyled version that he currently has up. As yet I have had no reply, although judging by further tweets from Remy today, it seems that he has already begun work on his own design.
I look forward to seeing what he produces.
EDIT: Find out what happened in this follow up blog post