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Whenever you need to implement a facebook fanpage for yourself or for your business the first thing you want to do is customize it. So you changed your profile picture and added some details about the brand or the person but, it’s still the same page as everyone else. Luckily there is an app called Static FBML (Facebook Markup Language) that you can add to your facebook fanpage. This allows you to make some customizations to a specific page but isn’t a full blown application so anyone that can use some HTML can do it. So in order to see what you can do with this app on a facebook page I selected a few resources as well as some great examples of good static FBML usage. You should install FBML here.

Resources:

Facebook Developer Wiki

The developer Wiki has everything you need for making a page with FBML. They have tons of resources, API’s, dev resources and more.

Facebook Starter Kit

This kit gives you a ‘hello world’ template for building ColdFusion applications for Facebook. It is very much a barebones project, enabling you to easily modify and add to it and use it in the way you like to build ColdFusion applications. This is deliberate; its purpose it to get you passed the first hurdle of dealing with facebook, leaving the application framework design up to you.

FBML – Facebook Markup Language

A nice little slide rocket presentation about FBML. A quick crash course or a good starting point.

Static FBML: Not Every Facebook Fan Page Needs an Application

An article about using Static FBML vs. Regular FBML which is also a great case study from the designer of the Sunkist soda facebook fanpage. It provides some really good content and some really good rules of thumb. Also, it

FBML Essentials

Do you have an idea for a Facebook application? With FBML Essentials, you’ll learn how to build it quickly using the Facebook Markup Language (FBML) and other easy-to-use tools in the site’s framework. This book not only gets you started with this toolkit, you also get a complete reference on every FBML tag Facebook has ever written, with advice on the best ways to use these tags in your code.

Comparing Flash iFrame and FBML Facebook applications

A table from adobe that summarizes the differences when creating your Flash Platform application as an iFrame or FBML Facebook application. The two most significant differences are the ability to control the embedding of a Flash object and the ability to access scripts.

Examples:

Sunkist Soda

Twilight

Southwest Airlines

Nissan

Mountain Dew

Honda

Harley Davidson

Dunkin’ Donuts

Coca Cola

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I recently had the pleasure of sending Andy Hatkoff, the Vice President, OEM and Technology Licensing at PANTONE some questions about their iPhone app myPANTONE. myPANTONE is an awesome companion for designers and creatives alike. We are excited to bring this information from behind the app and a review of the app itself.

The iPhone is a perfect platform to carry a pocket PANTONE guide, what steps have you taken to make this be the easiest way to locate and use the PANTONE colors you need?

In the development of myPANTONE, one of the key fundamentals in the design of the app and its user interface was to make it easy for the user to find the desired PANTONE colors.  To that end we have taken advantage of the iPhone’s “touchablity” with the fanned out guide view and allowing the user to move about the guide until they locate the color range they wish and then by touching the page desired bringing up a close-up few of a numerous pages and scrolling through the colors in a page view.  The idea was find the general area of color and then “zoom in” to get a closer view of the colors.  I liken this to mapping solutions that let to zoom in closer for more detail once you have the area geographic area identified. Another approach is the SEARCH function that allows the user to simply type in the PANTONE number desired.  myPANTONE will then return the colors where  those numbers are used. myPANTONE also provides color sorting in two ways (1) the standard order used in the fan guides and (2) a sort in more of a chromatic type sequence.  This make chromatic type sequence makes it simple to find, for instance all the reds or blue,  etc.

How accurate is the iPhone screen and what steps have you taken to make sure that the color displayed on screen are correct?

iPhone screens are not synonymous with color accuracy.  There are a number of limitations and issues that make accuracy of the display of colors on an iPhone a problematic.  ANY app on the iPhone that uses color to its benefit (including photo apps) suffers from the same issue – iPhones are not meant to be color accurate. There exist differences on the displays between the various versions of the iPhone. For example: the first iPhones were set to a cooler white point that made the screen whiter and bluer, while subsequent versions use a warmer color temperature and different white point.   From a developer’s point of view the Software Developer Kit (SDK) provided by Apple does not give us access to anything about the actual display except its size. At this point in time, the SDK does not offer the possibility to provide any control over the calibration of the display.  Additionally, issues such as ambient lighting and the angle from which the screen is held (and viewed) can affect the perception of color.

Because of these inherent limitations, we would caution users of myPANTONE (or any other color intensive app) should not be used to validate and approve color.  MyPANTONE is a creative tool and not a production tool. It allows users  to capture the idea of color with a wonderful mobile device  that is used broadly in the design community. The user of myPANTONE  can select a color and play with it, amend it and use it as inspiration in the design process. That’s what myPANTONE was developed for; and it is what you can expect of an iPhone app. A PANTONE Color guide should ALWAYS be used for an accurate representation of a color in a print environment, regardless of whether you used an app or a monitor in the design process.

Creatives are on the go more and more these days especially as mobile technology is getting faster and easier to use. This app allows you to share via email, post to the myPANTONE site & send to other devices. Why is sharing and integration the best possible outcome for an app like this?

It was important for us not only to provide a way to deliver a creative tool, but also to add significant utility and shareablitity.  By taking advantage of the iPhone’s  connectivity functionality, we can e-mail a palette as not only an HTML document, but also as enclosures whereby the user created palette can used within the Adobe Creative Suite and QuarkXPress.  Getting information into the iPhone was only one half of the equation for the user experience- the other half is getting the information out of the iPhone and a way to make it useful and usable.  Through support of the popular design and page layout apps it is now possible to create a palette in your iPhone with myPANTONE and then easily integrate and use the palette in the design process.

At what point did a PANTONE app seem like a logical step?

It was clear that the paradigm for creativity was rapidly shifting from the confines of the desktop (or laptop) to a mobile environment.  The device was there waiting to be populated with tools.  In the same way that the computer is rich environment that will only become useful if  it was populated with meaningful solutions, the mobile platform of the iPhone also offered a robust canvas waiting to be inhabited with solutions that provide a rich user experience.  In focus groups and discussions with our customers, it was apparent that their creativity is was not restricted to the time they spent in front of computer.  They were seeking the freedom to be creative wherever they are and wherever they go.  The iPhone represented a great platform to untether their creativity and give them the capabilities to work with a highly portable version of the PANTONE Color Systems.

How many different variations of the current app have there been before it went to the final version?

It is hard know exactly how many concepts, wireframes and prototypes were iterated before we decided upon the current implementation.  Needless to say we wanted to take full advantage of the iPhone user experience and provide a robust app that would be not only cool but have a high degree of utility.  Our team wanted to make sure the app deployed the touchable aspects of the iPhone to full advantage and at the same time provide a visually interesting environment for a creative audience.  Obviously dealing with the size of the screen and understanding that apps need to be focused and are not just a small desktop application were challenges we had to understand.  At the end of the process, we were delighted that we had successfully married the user interface and capabilities of the iPhone platform (touch, e-mail, GPS, voice functions) with an app that is not only fun, but useful.

Now that the app has launched, is this app finished or will there always been a constant refinement of the app and pushing it into new developments and integrations?

When we were designing the myPANTONE app, we had so many more features, functions and product ideas that, rest assured, there will be ongoing enhancements to the existing product, but also a series of the other apps.  The mobile platform is an exciting way to deliver tools to our audiences.  Also, the mobile environment is part of a larger strategy where the desktop, the web and mobile will all be tied into a large Pantone ecosystems that will have a high level of interoperability and synergy.  The key is providing access and usage of the PANTONE Systems regardless of whether you are on the go, on the web or on the desktop.

The app is listed at $9.99 how does pricing weigh in to the app? Did you think of other price-points and has this one worked for you thus far?

The setting of price points provided many interesting internal discussions.  I think the market is in the formative stages whereby developers are trying to balance the original concept whereby a vast majority of apps were free.  But as the mobile platform evolves to serve as not only a delivery vehicle that is beyond games, social networking and other similar apps, there is a realization that developers can provide highly useful tools that can be monetized.  We have been extremely pleased with the response to myPANTONE.  In less than 2 months since it was launched we have over 27,000 downloads.  It is a learning experience and the customers ultimately will tell us what is working (and what is not).

The Review

myPANTONE gives you the ability to have several PANTONE colorbooks in your hand at any given place in the world. This is a perfect app for designers, Art Directors, Creative Directors, Interior Designers or anyone that has to deal with PANTONEs. myPANTONE is an amazing app to use. The app has a simple and clean user interface that is both intuitive and consistent with normal iPhone standard applications. The beautiful thing about myPANTONE is it operates like a PANTONE swatch book and you can rotates and flick through colors. This is extremely enticing if you have ever needed to leaf through a PANTONE book while you were on the go and needed something. However, this is not just for people that use PANTONE’s anyone could enjoy this app and learn new things about colors, hues and how to make a color palette.

The fundamentals are simple and the app gives you access to big and bulky swatch books with just a few flicks of your fingers. Some other awesome features are the fact that you can share your colors between your machines (that will open the colors in In-Design or Quark or CorelDraw) or to your friends. You can email the colors which is great if someone in the office is asking for a color palette or a client wants to know their PANTONE color.

myPANTONE also allows you to pull colors from a photo which is great if you are trying build a color palette from a photo for a room or a design. This feature works flawlessly. I used a very complex image and this app was able to handle it with relative ease.The only minus that I found with the app is the fact that there is not a way to see the CMYK value for a PANTONE chip. This seems a bit off to me as color books give the CMYK value. It gives the RGB but not the CMYK. Aside from that being the only feature that I could see the app was lacking, this app surpassed my expectations.

Some other features include:

• You can capture and extract colors from photos and snap to the closest PANTONE Color.

• Automatically generates harmonious color combinations

• cross-reference PANTONE colors to other PANTONE color libraries

• Email an HTML image of your palette

• Email color palettes that can be used in Adobe Creative Suite and QuarkXPress & CorelDraw

• Text & Voice annotations of palettes.

• Post notifications of new palettes to twitter and facebook

• GPS tagging of palettes

Conclusion

myPANTONE is the perfect companion for any designer/creative that needs a simple and effective mobile solution. The pricepoint of the app is $9.99 which at first seemed high to me however, if you have used any PANTONE product you know that they are not low dollar and being able to have several swatch books in one application is more than ideal instead of ordering swatch books in paper form. The app has a robust enough feature list to be listed at $9.99  and more importantly is an app that anyone can use and get a grasp on quickly and easily.

Screenshots

More Info

iTunes | Twitter | Site

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Web Design is an amazing asset to showcase your app. It also gives the public a place to connect outside of the App Store. A trend in those site designs has been dark websites. The reasoning for this? The dark sites show up well on your computer, it also puts emphasis on the app instead of the site design and allows the rest to blend into the background. Here are several examples of them.

How To: Dark Background with Noise

This is a simple tutorial to show how many sites now are using a “noise” background to add a nice texture. This is very simple tutorial that requires Photoshop. The source files are not for download because this tut is only a few steps long to show you, the idea of making a noise background.

1. Open a new document. For this tut I am using a 600×200px doc. Make sure your color space is setup for RGB.

2. Fill the canvas with your select color. For this tut we are using #343434 which is a nice dark grey that would show up well in a browser.

3. Go to Edit > Fill or Shift + F5 to fill the canvas. This just filled the canvas with the color that we had chosen in the step before.

4. We are now going to go to Filter > Add Noise This will pull up a dialog box which then you can send the amount of noise you want.

5. The point of adding noise is not to go overboard but give it a nice subtle pattern where, we can make a nice background image. The amount is very small set at 99%. Make sure the distribution is Gaussian and also make sure Monochromatic is checked. If it is not the noise will be in color and will overpower your backgound instead  of being in the black and white.

6. I then like to add a tiny bit of gaussian blur. This makes the noise a bit “blended” into the background color. I do this so you can’t focus on the edges of the pixels because its pretty distracting if left 100% in focus.

That wraps up how to make a dark noise background. You can experiment with different colors, blurs and noise levels.

**NOTE: **I also would recommend putting a dark gradient or a nice layer mask that makes the noise layer fade in from one side to another. This again makes another subtle background statement. You can also try making a repeating background by making a square pattern and then defining that pattern and using fill again to “fill with pattern” instead of just filling with color.

Examples:

Scraplr

Spiffing Apps

Flowchat

Eddit – Snow Report

Simply Tweet

Tweetie

iPhone App Template Site

Go Squared

Parking App

Birdbrain App

Teehanlax Labs

Beak – Twitter Client

JQTouch

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The Five Competencies of User Experience Design

Throughout my career as a user experience designer, I have continually asked myself three questions:

• What should my deliverables be?
• Will my deliverables provide clarity to me and their audience?
• Where do my deliverables and other efforts fit within the spectrum of UX design?

Useful Glossaries For Web Designers and Developers

In a day in age where there are just as many freelancers as there are university educated designers, developers, and all around web gurus, it is amazing to me how much many of us don’t know or have forgot about our trade. As a self-taught designer, I will admit to you upfront that there is a lot I don’t know when it comes to official jargon or certain aspects of things like typography and graphic design. It is these reasons that I call upon glossaries from time to time.

Quick Usability Checklist

After reviewing websites for a few months, I’ve begun to see general patterns emerge that make a site more or less usable. In this post, I’d like to highlight some of the more common problems designers should address on their own sites in a Usability checklist of sorts.

Optimizing Conversion Rates: It’s All About Usability

In eCommerce usability improvements usually have a huge impact on conversion rates. However, usability doesn’t only mean better visual guide or better site hierarchy. It also means a better communication with potential customers using a professional, trustworthy design, delivering the right information at the right time and communicating with users instead of throwing ad-slogans at them.

10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines

Everyone would agree that usability is an important aspect of Web design. Whether you’re working on a portfolio website, online store or Web app, making your pages easy and enjoyable for your visitors to use is key. Many studies have been done over the years on various aspects of Web and interface design, and the findings are valuable in helping us improve our work. Here are 10 useful usability findings and guidelines that may help you improve the user experience on your websites.

iPhone Needs a New Home

The guys over at Teehan + Lax seriously made some awesomerness for the iPhone home-screen. This is a proposed home screen design that I think would work better then what the iPhone has now, which in turn, give you a more seamless experience.

Confirming Passwords is Annoying: Is here a better way?

The defining characteristic of a password field is that it abstracts text as dots. While the intention of this behavior is understandable (it makes users feel secure and protects from prying eyes), the unintended effect is that it creates a usability problem. Users can’t tell if they’ve entered a password incorrectly until after the site’s validation informs them. It’s like typing with your eyes closed.

Convert and the Evolution of a User Interface

An awesome post about the usability design of Convert. Just a constant reminder that experience design is always changing and the finished product is not going to the be the first.

Testled – Usable Usability Testing

See where your users spent their time, what they missed, and where they had problems. Analyse what they typed, where their mouse moved, and even what they are saying and feeling, with data straight from their webcam.

Off the Desktop and Into the World

Great post that “makes you think”. Dane Peterson talks about how Experience Design isn’t just “on a computer” and there are experiences everywhere.

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If you’re going to develop applications for the web, where do you look for software? Do you try and scourer the web for reviews, or do you ask your friends what they use to develop? Maybe you download a trial version and see if it works for you. What if you are new to the industry and don’t have the resources to buy multiple apps, or the friends to draw experiences from? What if you find an app and the workflow is horribly off, and its something that you regret paying for? Luckily, I did some of the hard work for you. I have always been frustrated with the fact that when it comes down to buying software, you have the companies’ beautifully designed web pages, and some quotes, but nothing else to go on. If it’s marketed well, how do you know if it’s right for you?  I selected a few people who are movers and shakers in the industry, and I asked them what they use. For Part 1, we are talking about Mac Coding apps. But don’t worry PC folks, there will be a Part Two (There is also some feedback from Dreamweaver, which is available on PC).

Dan Rubin @danrubin | Site | Some Work Samples

designer, singer, photographer, philosopher, polymath in training; improving the world through design. also, half-English by birth.

I use a combination of Textmate and CSSEdit, and couldn’t be happier with the two. I used to use BBEdit back in the days before editors were cool, but I left it behind the day I first encountered Textmate. For me, using an app is as much about features and functionality as it is about “feel” — I need to enjoy using it, and looking at it for hours on end. BBEdit never quite reached that level, Textmate did the first time I launched it.
CSSEdit is likely the most underrated application on the Mac for front-end developers — it does one thing (CSS), and it does it incredibly well. I’m constantly giving demos of it to people, and they all end up falling in love with it (a similar reaction to people really using a Mac for the first time). My favorite feature is the ability to view a live site, extract its stylesheets and edit them, seeing the effects in real-time on the live site.

I’ve tried Coda and Espresso, and though I love Panic for Transmit (it’s all I’ve used for FTP/SFTP since at least the OS 9 days) and MacRabbit for CSSEdit, the attempt both developers have made to squeeze so many different apps into one interface falls short. The features of CSSEdit haven’t made it into Espresso (and it feels like CSSEdit has been forgotten as well, though I hope that isn’t the case), and Coda’s file transfer feels nothing like Transmit — if both all-in-one apps incorporated the full feature set of their publisher’s exceptional standalone apps, I would be more inclined to fall for them…

The theme for me is simplicity: Textmate and CSSEdit both focus on allowing a limited set of tasks to be performed as easily as possible, and because of that they both succeed.

Niki Brown @nikibrown | Site | Some Work Samples

I’ve been designing since I was a little kid – drawing cartoons, making fake newspapers, and planning my plot to take over the world. (Just kidding). My early interests in design were heightened when I got my first computer, it was love at first sight! I made my first website in 1996, with the help of geocities and word-art.

I use dreamweaver mostly for the instant visual feedback. I tend to use the split view (code & design) since I’m 2 parts designer 1 part coder. I know that the Dreamweaver design view isn’t completely accurate (I still check designs in safari, FF, chrome, and satan…i mean IE) , but it gives me the fastest feedback on how my design looks as I code. I’m also a fan of the auto complete feature and the source formating.

I have also been using Espresso which i got with the most recent Macheist bundle, and have tried Textmate and coda. When I’m on the go with my EEEPC I use Notepad++ mostly because its free and was easy to figure out.

Chris Spooner @chrisspooner | Site | Some Work Samples

I’m a creative Designer, avid Blogger and I’m generally crazy about pretty colours and shapes.

Nowadays I tend to use Coda for all my XHTML, CSS and the odd snippet of PHP. Previously I’d been a Dreamweaver user simply because it’s the app that introduced me to web design so I simple stuck with it out of comfort. It wasn’t until I switched over to Mac that there was a selection of great looking coding apps such as Coda, Textmate and Espresso that took my fancy. I tried out all the demo versions but always went back to Dreamweaver because I’d got used to the workflow and shortcuts. I hated how Dreamweaver took years to boot up, but I also couldn’t get used to an app automatically closing my tags for me right after I’d written it after being used to DWs ‘bracket, slash’ way of working.

Nevertheless, I was still determined to switch to an alternative, so I went ahead and bought Coda on one of their discount days and stuck it out over the first week or so. Now I’m happily typing away on a swish looking app that loads at light speed, I’m also enjoying a whole new collection of features that I’d certainly miss should I migrate again!

Adii Rockstar @adii | Site | Some Work Samples

Entrepreneur, co-founder of WooThemes and general creator of Rockstar Awesomeness!

First thing you’ve got to note, is that I’m not a natural coder and that what I know, I’ve taught myself. So when it comes to choosing a development app, I use whatever works for me, because of convenience; and not necessarily because it’s a hardcore development app. Anyway… When I switched from PC to Mac 2 years ago, I had to find a replacement for Dreamweaver and my best available option at the stage was Coda, which I continue to use to this day. I love the fact that’s it’s simple and uncluttered, as I don’t need much else from my development app. I’ve tried Espresso a few times, but I think I’ve just become to used to Coda.

Chris Coyier @chriscoyier | Site | Some Work Samples

Lead cascader. Head tag closer.

TextMate is the code editor of choice on the Mac. It’s incredibly simple to add in commands that do simple things. For example, I set up command-L to wrap selected text in <li> tags. I write a lot of HTML, so that type of stuff is awesome. But yet, I end up using Coda more than any other editor. I work live right on servers most of the time and having it all integrated with FTP is priceless. I’ve been trying to switch to the ExpanDrive / TextMate combo, which I think will be the winner. What I really want is a merging of the code editing powers of TextMate with the integrated awesomeness of Coda. And to be fair, I haven’t really given Espresso a fair shake yet. I did a little Beta testing but it wasn’t compelling enough at the time to make a big impression for me.

Jeff Croft @JCroft | Site | Some Work Samples

Knowin’ nothing in life, but to be legit. Don’t quote me boy, cuz I ain’t said shit.

For pretty much all of my coding, I use TextMate on Mac OS X. When TextMate first came out, it quickly became my favorite text editor, and the bundle approach to extensibility ensured that it continued to serve my needs, even as I explored different languages. I still think it’s the best overall app for my needs today. However, I do admit that I’ve grown frustrated with the lack of a significant update to the app since it’s original release. It’s still very good, but enough time has passed that it’s time for a refresh. I will note that I’m a big fan of Panic’s software and have considered switching to Coda, especially now that there are Django and Python plug-ins for it, but I have a certain inertia causing me to stick with TextMate — sometimes familiarity rules.

Tim Van Damme @MaxVoltar | Site | Some Work Samples

Designer at Made by Elephant, blogger at Maxvoltar. Will design for a warm bed.

A bit of history: I started with Microsoft Frontpage. As I learned that writing HTML manually was the way to go, I switched to Dreamweaver. After I said goodbye to Windows and started using a Mac, Dreamweaver was terrible slow. I did some research and ended up with a combination of Textmate, CSSEdit and Transmit. When Espresso launched, I didn’t like it at first. Maybe it was because it’s a Belgian product, but I forced myself to use it for an entire week. It just clicked. It combined the simplicity of Textpattern with the sexiness (and a lot of features) of CSSEdit. Another important aspect was the workflow, a reason why I never used Coda (it looks great, and a lot of people say some really positive stuff about it, but it just isn’t for me I guess).

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“User interface design or user interface engineering is the design of computers, appliances, machines, mobile communication devices, software applications, and websites with the focus on the user’s experience and interaction. The goal of user interface design is to make the user’s interaction as simple and efficient as possible, in terms of accomplishing user goals—what is often called user-centered design” - Wikipedia

Over the last few days, I have been trying to submerse myself in as much UI as possible. Why? Because I am on the hunt to cut down my workflow and become more efficient. Everyone does it, but I have made it my job. I have been reading about adding “droplets” to Finder . I’ve  timed my actions and tried to see which methods of production work the best. I’ve deleted apps, re-installed apps, bought apps, deleted apps I bought, etc., in hopes that these applications will allow me to streamline my social networking life, my design life, and my blogging life. Ultimately, I will be able to get more done in less time.

Thoughts

In one of my tweets today, I said, “I have an easier time editing things on the iPhone than on the native app.” Now, this is not always true, but I have started to notice a trend that things (normal app functions) are easier to accomplish on an iPhone. Responses? Dave Kaneda said, “Restraint + context = win.” And according to Graham Smith, “…therein lies the real truth to simplicity in user interface design…”

If people recognize the simplicity in user interface design, why is it executed more effectively on the iPhone and not in the native application? Why do people insist on cramming 65,000 features underneath crazy animated dropping tabs, weird swirls, and whatever else they can pull out of the magic interface hat? 9 times out of 10, I find myself utilizing the simplest and cleanest apps, unless another app is offering something the pretty one doesn’t.

What should you learn learn from this experience?

Simplicity is key. Keeping things simple makes for a more satisfying user experience. The reason I can do these tasks better on an iPhone is because the screen is small, the platform is clean, and that creates a more enjoyable experience overall. These constraints force the apps’ to stick to its core features and omit extra fluff.

Your Turn

Do you find this to be true, or am I simply too close to the spray paint? Hopefully this trend will start to receive greater acknowledgment, and we will soon see simplicity in our desktop apps in addition to our mobile apps and engross us in an app where the interface fades away and let you accomplish what your set goal is.

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In an effort to help the community as a whole I am releasing  “An Ever Growing iPhone Resource Thread”. The point? It’s simple. We are all busy. We all need to finds things fast, learn, download and move on. So, I am trying to compile a big list of all things iPhone. However, I need your help. I have started with a small amount articles, downloads and information in hopes that you will share your favorites over time in the comments. Just copy and paste the link in your comment and I will do the rest. On the the content!

**UPDATED**

9/23/09

10/15/09

11/11/09

Articles:

iPhone Human Interface Guidelines

Phone and iPod touch are sophisticated devices that combine the revolutionary Multi-Touch interface with powerful features, such as email and instant-messaging capability, a full-featured web browser, iPod, and, in iPhone, a mobile phone.

The Making of Things iPhone

One of the first major design decisions was to either have a Tab Bar or a Toolbar.

We liked the idea of a Tab Bar very much as it allowed to quickly browse your tasks from different perspectives (by Projects, by Tags, by Due Date, Search, …)

How to Create Your First iPhone Application

What if you had a nickle for every time you heard: “I have the perfect idea for a great application!“? It’s the buzz on the street. The iPhone has created unprecedented excitement and innovation from people both inside and outside the software development community. Still for those outside the development world, the process is a bit of a mystery.

App Store Heresies: Higher Price, Better Ratings. Don’t Discount Your App At Launch

Lower your price, lower your ratings. Lower ratings, lower social proof. Lower social proof, lower sales. That’s my theory, and I’ve got data to support it.

Inspiration:

60 Sleek and Sexy iPhone App Websites

Like most of Apple’s expensive toys, the iPhone is a beautiful piece of kit. Its cool curves and bright display seem perfectly suited to sleek, glossy web design. Here’s a big bunch of lovely iPhone app websites for your admiration and inspiration.

Downloads:

iPhone GUI PSD

Over the past few months we’ve had to create a few iPhone mock ups for presentations. The problem we’ve encountered is the lack of resources to help us design something efficiently. Up until now we’ve used a nice PSD from 320480.com but we still found ourselves having to build out additional assets or heavily modifying bitmap based buttons and widgets.

iPhone PSD Vector Kit

Today, we are glad to release the iPhone Starter Kit, a set that comes with several button elements as well as six different iPhone interface options. This pack may be useful for mobile developers and front-end designers who need a professional way to show mock-ups to clients or to work out ideas. This set was designed by Renee Rist especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

Ultimate iPhone Stencil

This is the ultimate stencil for folks designing iPhone interfaces.

• Contains backgrounds, title bars, buttons, selectors, and other iPhone UI elements

• Text is fully editable on lists, title bars, buttons, and scroll wheels

• Buttons can be resized horizontally by ungrouping, resizing the middle element, and then regrouping the elements back into a single button

iPhone PSD file

iPhone PSD for snapshots, icons, etc… Made entirely in photoshop. Based on the iPhone design by Apple Inc.

Resources:

MobileLex 2009

Sam offers his Keynote slides from MobileLex that highlights:

How I Made an App that Has Over a Million Users

Scrolling Like Butter

Web Services with Cocoa

iPhone Development: The Why and How

I cover what your options are for iPhone development and some tips and resources on how/where to get started. I also speak about how to maintain a good user experience with your iPhone development. Check it out!

The definitive iPhone user interface gallery from Engadget

After getting our hands on the iPhone we set ourselves the irresistible task of photographing every conceivable menu option available to us. So here it is: the definitive iPhone user interface gallery, almost 300 images deep. If you’re the type to obsessively pore over every possible menu, submenu, setting, and function in a new device, this one goes out to you.

Coding:

iPhone View Switching Tutorial

The world of iPhone development can be a bit of a daunting task and irritating at times. I’m the kind of person that likes to do things from scratch as much as I can. So when I headed down this path, I decided to start with the simplest template and create a very, very easy app: creating 2 views and switching between them.

14 Essential Xcode Tips, Tricks and Resources for iPhone Devs

Cutting Through The Clutter

We’ve collected a set of tips, resources, how-tos, tutorials and links ranging from newbie-to-expert to help you wring the maximum amount of productivity out of Xcode.

Learn How To Develop For The iPhone

We’re going to start off with 2 psd’s I made and get those working in an iPhone page. I am using images for the background and header although you could use just straight colors instead of images.

Tools:

Notepod

What’s a Notepod 3-Pack?

Three 60 x 110mm, 100pp Notepods printed on both sides. 80gsm laser throughout with a stiff black strawboard back.

Design Comission iPhone Stencil

- Layout Nav Bar, Tab Bar and Keyboard
- New overlay icons provide cleaner look
- Additional icons
- Overall dimensioning and layout improvements

Quickly sketch out iPhone UI prototypes. Brainstorm your application ideas using our precision cut stainless steel stencil and mechanical pencil.

Mobile Sketchbook

• 100 pages of to-scale design templates
• One organized place for User Interface Designs
• Get your designs down on the Sketch Book today!

What Not To Do:

iPhone Apps Design Mistakes: Over-Blown Visuals

The development of iPhone applications has recently become a hot topic in the design community; everybody tries to come up with some creative idea, port it into a stylish iPhone-alike application and sell it to thousands of users through the iPhone app store. However, many of these applications are poorly designed and therefore miss the chance of providing users with a truly useful product that users would find worth recommending to friends and colleagues.

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If your new to the app game or just new to a specific platform you have to adapt and learn how to program for a new app. This can be a pain because some coding languages maybe new to you or you may not be proficient in using them. Many common languages/companies have come out with developer centers or SDK’s to aid you in your coding endeavors.

Google Android

Welcome to the Android Dev Guide! The Dev Guide is a practical introduction to developing applications for Android. It explores the concepts behind Android, the framework for constructing an application, and the tools for developing, testing, and publishing software for the platform. The Dev Guide holds most of the documentation for the Android platform, except for reference material on the framework API.

BlackBerry Developer Zone

The BlackBerry® Developer Zone is your comprehensive resource for developing BlackBerry applications.

If you’re new to mobile development, learn the basics of creating cutting-edge mobile applications:

Windows Mobile Developers

The day you bring home a Windows Mobile phone, you can quickly have it working with your Windows PC and use it to access the same e-mail accounts you’ve had for years. Stay in touch with the people in your life—no matter how they like to chat. Don’t miss another anniversary or birthday. Take your music to the gym. Stay entertained while you wait for your kids. Take the picture that would have slipped away. Get it all done with a Windows Mobile phone.

Adobe AIR Developer Connection

Adobe AIR is a cross-operating system runtime that enables you to use your existing HTML/Ajax, Flex, or Flash web development skills and tools to build and deploy rich Internet applications to the desktop.

iPhone Dev Center

The iPhone Dev Center provides access to technical resources and information to assist you in developing with the latest technologies in iPhone OS. Log in with your Registered iPhone Developer Apple ID and password, or sign-up as a free Registered iPhone Developer today.

Windows Developer Center

The Microsoft Windows SDK is a set of tools, code samples, documentation, compilers, headers, and libraries that developers can use to create applications that run on Microsoft Windows operating systems using native (Win32) or managed (.NET Framework) programming models.

Apple Developer Connection

The Mac Developer Program offers a range of technical resources and support for developers and IT professionals innovating with Mac OS X. Power your development from concept to market with technical guidance and information from Apple engineers and experts.

Yahoo Developer Center

Yahoo! Query Language is an expressive SQL-like language that lets you query, filter, join, and update data across the Web. This release includes a grab bag of features and fixes inspired by feedback on twitter, our forums, and requests from colleagues.

Yahoo! Blueprint – Mobile

With the launch of Yahoo! Blueprint 1.1, it has never been easier to build rich, compelling mobile services in record time. Blueprint 1.1 allows you to use simple XML to create applications, sites and widgets that run on thousands of mobile devices. When you use Blueprint, you are using the same technology that we use to build our world-class mobile offerings such as oneSearch, oneConnect and the yahoo.com mobile homepage for your own mobile services!

Web Apps:

Ruby on Rails

Tens of thousands of Rails applications are already live. People are using Rails in the tiniest part-time operations to the biggest companies. Rails was created in 2003 by David Heinemeier Hansson and has since been extended by the Rails core team, more than 1,400 contributors, and supported by a vibrant ecosystem.

MySQL

One of the reasons MySQL is so popular is that it runs on so many platforms. Whether you run Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, OpenSolaris, or some other platform, there is likely a matching version of MySQL. Because each of these popular platforms is unique, so are the installation procedures for them. In this section, we provide links to tutorials that details how to install MySQL on your platform of choice.

Symfony – PHP framework

Symfony is a full-stack framework, a library of cohesive classes written in PHP. It provides an architecture, components and tools for developers to build complex web applications faster. Choosing symfony allows you to release your applications earlier, host and scale them without problem, and maintain them over time with no surprise.

Cake – PHP framework

CakePHP is a rapid development framework for PHP that provides an extensible architecture for developing, maintaining, and deploying applications. Using commonly known design patterns like MVC and ORM within the convention over configuration paradigm, CakePHP reduces development costs and helps developers write less code.

.Net Framework

The .NET Framework is Microsoft’s comprehensive and consistent programming model for building applications that have visually stunning user experiences, seamless and secure communication, and the ability to model a range of business processes.

CodeIgniter

CodeIgniter is a powerful PHP framework with a very small footprint, built for PHP coders who need a simple and elegant toolkit to create full-featured web applications. If you’re a developer who lives in the real world of shared hosting accounts and clients with deadlines, and if you’re tired of ponderously large and thoroughly undocumented frameworks.

With new app platforms popping up everyday I am sure I missed some. What are the ones you use? Tell me in the comments and I will update the list.

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Recently FYA had the pleasure of  being able to pick one of the best in the businesses brain, Garrett Murray. He is responsible for Ego App and one of the creative minds behind Pinch/Zoom. Garrett let us in on what he does and a few things he has in the pipeline.

1. What does your typical day look like?

In general, I tend to spend mornings catching up on email and scheduling out various meetings or calls for the week. I spend time going through all the active projects in Basecamp and checking on progress and milestones, posting updates, etc. I’m not a good morning person, so I rarely ever do anything related to design or development before noon. I tend to spend three or four hours developing/designing/etc during the afternoon, depending on how many calls or meetings I have.

Around 4 or 5PM, I try to get out for a run and a little exercise. Then I tend to go back to work from 6PM to 8PM or so. This aligns pretty well with EOD in the Pacific timezone, where my business partner is, so we can touch base if necessary. Any time after 8PM is time I spend on side projects, going out, etc. I try not to work on anything business-related on weekends wherever possible and use that time for my own stuff.

This all is also completely flexible–one of the benefits of running your own business and working out of your home office is that you can do whatever, whenever. Another benefit is that we tend to have a lot of our internal meetings while playing Zombie mode in Call of Duty: World at War.

2. What are some of the recent projects that you have been working on?

A majority of the stuff we’re working on at pinch/zoom right now I can’t talk about publicly (yet), but I will say a lot of it is related to the iPhone. Recently, we did some work for Lonely Planet, Telstra, Big Think and others.

Personally, I’m still working on various updates to Ego, and some of my other side projects including Prettify. I’m also in the beginning stages of creating a new iPhone application which I’ll be talking about more in the coming months.

3. Ego has an amazing UI which translates into an amazing UX. I bought the app based on looks alone and then fell in love with how stupid easy it works. Was the UI or the UX the driving factor when you made this app or did they fall under the same category?

First, thanks. And yeah, they sort of fall under the same category when it comes to an application like this. Ego is what I’d call a clear case of a utility application. It doesn’t do much (functionally) except display data, which means it needs to get right to the point in a clear and usable fashion. I wanted the widgets to look like they belonged on the iPhone but also felt somewhat unique. Sort of native/non-native if that makes any sense. I took a great deal of inspiration from the OS X dashboard and existing widgets for various tracking services, most notably Mint.

Luckily for me, the process for setting up a widget wasn’t terribly difficult so I was able to attempt to streamline that as much as possible. Little touches like the “Next” button on the keyboard going to the next field in the setup form and then finishing when on the last were simple to implement but made a difference when it came to entering data. I try to keep my eye out for those kinds of little enhancements when developing/designing applications.

And, most of all, *I* use things I write. Hell, I primarily write them for me, so I spend a good deal of time testing/using the application before I ever share it with others. I think that tends to add a bit more polish.

4. From start to finish in the production of Ego what do you think was the hardest part?

Hands down the Google Analytics support. Which is a bit ironic, of course, because it wasn’t even part of version 1.0. Back when I implemented GA support, Google didn’t have a public API. There were plenty of ways to get various bits of data out of GA through scraping and such, and the clamor for Analytics features from users was so strong that I went ahead and implemented a version of it. Luckily, it worked, but only for a time. When you have thousands of people all hitting the site from a specific application Google takes notice and they blocked Ego from scraping the data.

Over the next few weeks I rewrote the feature several times and even got friends to help me rewrite it in various ways. But it all felt like a dead-end. Then, finally, I was able to get into the secret Google Analytics API program and write an officially-supported version of the feature for the application. Two days after that version was released, Google publicly released the API. Figures.

The whole experience was pretty awful, though. There were a few weeks there were the app was getting blasted in reviews, negative publicity, etc. Not fun to deal with. Luckily the feature is solid now and I don’t have to think about it any more. But everything else pales in comparison to that whole ordeal.

5. How many different icon designs did you go through for Ego’s iPhone icon? How crucial of a role does this icon play in the branding of ones app?

I’m really lucky that I had an idea for the application icon right off the bat and didn’t have to do much back and forth on it. The original name of the application was actually Stacks, but a few days into development I was talking to my friend Shawn Morrison about it and he said it sounded like an application for someone with a really inflated ego. He told me I might as well call it what it is, and I agreed and changed the name to Ego. A few hours later while I was sketching out various bits of the UI, I had a sudden idea for the icon which was basically a golden statue of me on the same background the app uses. I sketched it out and made a SUPER rough version of the icon for an example.

Luckily, I had been in contact with Adam Betts years ago related to him doing some icons for an OS X app I wrote (xPad) but never ended up redoing that stuff, but I still followed his work very closely because he’s one of the best icon designers out there. I sent him an email with my sketch and rough mockup, as well as a screenshot of the in-progress app and he loved the concept and UI design and agreed to do the icon. And he did a fantastic job.

6. Its clear by your Flickr feed that you have a clear Mac obsession. What is your overall opinion of the Mac platform for your development? (both web and iPhone)

Yeah, I have a bit of a problem. That aside, I would say that I couldn’t imagine using any other platform for pretty much anything I do, whether we’re talking about web, mobile or app development, making podcasts, editing films, etc. The Mac experience is superior to any other computing platform on earth, hands down. Most of my friends are Mac people, and many of them have to use Windows at work and I can’t imagine the hell they suffer through on a daily basis.

7. How easy (or hard) has the iPhone SDK been to work with?

The iPhone SDK is wonderful. It really is. It’s as if someone went through AppKit (one of the core frameworks used for developing OS X applications) and threw out most of the garbage and cleaned up the remaining stuff. I was beyond pleasantly surprised when I sat down to write Ego, and since then when writing various applications for clients. It feels new but has the stability of the OS X legacy behind it.

A few months ago I wrote an OS X desktop application for a client (for the first time in about 6 years) and, after using the iPhone SDK, it was really rough. I just kept wishing I was building an iPhone app instead.

8. When did you start pinch/zoom?

We officially launched pinch/zoom in May of this year. We (Brian Fling, the other founder, and I) had been working together on various projects over the previous year and had been talking about creating a company together and things finally lined up for that in the beginning of 2009.

9. I noticed that the pinch/zoom site redesign has launched and shows an awesome apple feel (as well as iPhone). Were these conscience design decisions made to represent the fact that you live in the app world?

The design credit for pinch/zoom’s website goes completely to Brian. The design direction was definitely taken from our motivations and goal to design and develop lovely applications for the web and mobile devices. We’re both big fans of the iPhone and Apple in general, and we get a lot of our inspiration from their design work. We wanted our website to convey to potential clients the kind of design we enjoy and specialize in.

10. What is some insight that you would like to pass down to some up and coming app developers?

The best insight I can give: Become a workaholic. That sounds terrible, but it’s true. You have to keep doing it, all the time. Play with different technologies, build things, take existing applications apart, learn. I’ve been doing this for nearly 10 years and I still end up playing with side projects nearly every day.

Connect With Garrett?

Personal Site | Pinch/Zoom | Twitter | Blog/Stream

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Six Central is a new client proposal and organization and management tool that is just fresh out of the blocks. It just recently launched (within the last 12hrs) Earlier Wess and Ryan took the time to answer some questions about their app and what some of the inside scoop is.

Who is the team behind SixCentral?

SixCentral is comprised of 3 members: 2 developers and 1 UI designer. The lead developer, Wess Cope, has over 10 years of industry experience with a vast knowledge of many different languages including Python, the primary language of SixCentral. Sean Kerr also has over 10 years of industry experience and has most recently been involved in the formulation of D, an entirely new programming language.  Ryan Scherf handles all aspects of user interface and experience design.

Who designed the web app and how did you decide to settle on the final design?

As noted above, Ryan Scherf was responsible for front-end design and development. There were really two simple objectives to the interface:

1. We didn’t want anything too ’stark’ and ‘boring’. We realized that we would be marketing to designers in the short term, and felt that we needed an application design that would make us stand out against the competition.
2. The product needed to be easy to use. Since our target market was freelance designers, we could not assume that they were extremely technical or savvy, so therefore needed to ensure the experience was easy enough for any demographic.

What is the main reason that you came up with a Client Proposal Organization & Management System? (i.e. others made a bad stab at it, there isn’t anything else in the market etc.)

The idea actually came about as Ryan went off on a rant about not having an automated way to manage his freelance business. There is really not tool exactly like ours in the market (although one conveniently ’sprung’ up as we started developing). The niche seemed too critical to pass up, so we threw up a landing page with some ideas and immediately had hundreds of people asking about it.

What were some of the pitfalls that you ran into during the building of this app?

Our biggest pitfall was always time. All 3 of us have full time jobs and families, and trying to find time at the end of the day to work on the application was really a struggle. We really started off on the right foot and released our first beta in a month, however we lost steam as the day jobs started demanding more time from all of us. Staying on track while life was happening around us was really tough — but we somehow pushed through.

What is your monetization for this service? (advertising, monthly plan etc.)

To monetize the application, we plan to provide two separate plans: a free plan, and a subscription plan for $10/month. The free plan will be limited to a lower number of interactions with SixCentral, while the pay plan will have unlimited access to all of the features and interactions. This was as much of a fun and team building project as it was to make money, so we are just really excited to launch it and move on to the next project.

Managing client proposals is something that has to be kept secure. How have you addressed this situation for SixCentral?

Each client is given a private URL, based on and created by the SixCentral user. For example, a client like Apple could potentially receive a URL like: http://username.sixcentral.com/apple. Once a client goes to their client login page, they will have to use their e-mail address as well as a password created for them by the SixCentral user to log in.

We also plan to use a secure socket layer or HTTPS for a secure connection to the user.

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The screenshots of your applications look amazingly clean and simple, how does this relate to having a great UI and ultimately a great UX for the end user?

We feel that the UI is the most important part about building any app. Sure, the technology is pretty cool behind the app (Django), but without an easy-to-use and simple UI, the users won’t come back. As we mentioned above, this is especially true with our target market of freelance designers, as generally we as designers are very opinionated and have an eye for when things are right or wrong.

One of the options that SixCentral has is Follow Up reminders. How crucial is having follow up reminders so you don’t let potential clients and potential business slip through the cracks.

As freelancers, we are generally awarded the luxury of missed or slipped deadlines and usually it goes unnoticed. However, unless you have an amazing memory, we all forget certain items each day. Our follow-up reminders were designed to help you stay on track, whether you are managing one client or dozens. Keep on track with your timelines will show your clients a professionalism and timeliness that they may not have experienced before with other freelancers.

Automation of your proposal process is going to be a great way to streamline your proposal process and keep you on task and not wasting time shuffling through papers. How did you manage to pull this off successfully in this app?

We’ve broken out Proposals into 5 main pieces: Overview, Purpose & Goals, Process & Deliverables, Pricing Specifics and Other. This allows the user to be completely organized in terms of having a structured framework for their proposals, as well as the flexibility and vagueness to where the sections are left for interpretation. We have also implemented Textile, so the markup within each section can become as rich as they’d like in terms of bulleted lists, bold text, etc.

The key feature for Proposal automation is the ability to import previous Proposals to where you can simply just duplicate an older proposal (or perhaps a proposal template you have created). The idea is that you would create a single Proposal template that you could then in turn duplicate and use time and time again.

Have you pursued/will you pursue an iPhone counter part to this app? Why or Why not?

We do have plans to create versions of SixCentral on different mediums in the future using our custom API. An iPhone app is a bit tricky because of the heavy content that could perhaps be included with each Proposal. We’re examining different ideas of read only views, or even allowing for you to comment on your different projects, but not necessarily pump the full functionality of SixCentral into an iPhone app — it’s just too complex.

Need More Six Central in Your life?

Here are some places you can connect with the brand and the guys from the interview.

Site | Twitter | Ryan on Twitter | Wess on Twitter

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In this video we are going to talk about Brand Consistency Online. Branding is key to keeping your app consistent and so is communication. We are looking at a brand called Unblab that launched a splash site, then an updated in-depth site explaining their app. After that Unblab disappeared from twitter and stopped making updates for a period of months. Now they are back with a new site and another app to boot. However, the branding did not stay the same and is not as clean and crisp as it was before. Following the video in the post there will be questions for you to answer and have a discussion about if this hurt or helped the brand.

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Questions:

Did the disappearance hurt them networking with their key customers since they didn’t tell anyone where they went?

Will the rebranding after such a long time hurt the brand?

Is this a good example or bad of how to work on an app?

How should Brands handle this situation?

Links:

unblab.com

Old Site Design

Old Splash Design

Unblab on Twitter

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Price points can make or break a great application. This applies for web apps, iPhone apps, Mac apps, PC Apps etc. etc. If you don’t know where to price your app according to how much time you put into it, how much its actually worth or how much it is compared to your competitors you are flying blind. Here are 10 posts to read that will help you price your app.

Ask 37signals: How did you come up with pricing for your products?

37 Signals answers a question from a user in depth: “I am developing an internet product and I am rapidly approaching the point at which I will need to set a pricing scheme for this product. Problem: I have no idea what to shoot for! I have done some research which shows a wide range of similar products with varying pricing schemes. When 37signals was developing Basecamp, how did you come up with pricing?”

How To Figure Out If Your iPhone App Will Get You Rich (AAPL)

“As a number obsessed techie and ex-management consultant, market sizing and research were a big part of my launch preparations for Exit Strategy NYC. Since launch, I’ve received many questions from people struggling to estimate the market for their iPhone app ideas.”

How not to price your app

“How much to charge for your web application is a question with no right answer. You will never make everyone happy. Nor should you. I firmly believe that if you hear no complaints about the price then you are not charging enough.”

Kevin Hale: Converting Free Users to Paid Users

Slide presentation from FOWA Miami with great content and background information on brands and converting users from Free to Paid.

How To Price Your App: Learning from Basecamp

Five years worth of screen grabs from Basecamp’s pricing chart. This allows you to see what they changed and how they advance their quality and their technology.

How to Price your Web App

“Pricing is always somewhat of a black art, and a subject about which there is precious little written with regard to web applications. It’s something I’ve always been fascinated by. The question of how to price our web application, Litmus, was subject to countless hours of discussion. Here I’ll discuss some common factors and hopefully help spark some ideas which can help you decide upon the price of your own application.”

AppStore Secrets

“We’ve published the presentation we gave tonight at the New York iPhone Developers Meetup, based off of our first 30,000,000 application downloads”

App Marketing 101: Pricing your iPhone App – Art and Science

“We’ve published the presentation we gave tonight at the New York iPhone Developers Meetup, based off of our first 30,000,000 application downloads”

Pricing your Web App

“What ingredients are needed to market your Web 2.0 Application? A quality marketing site, well written content, decent networking skills, unique product features and benefits, understanding your target market, etc.”

Pricing Round Up:

Did you find any of these links useful? Do you have any other links on pricing that are more useful? Drop them in the comments for discussion!

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As you may have read Fuel Your Apps went to Awesome Inc over the weekend for a Mini App conference. The content was amazing and learning and sharing were the key things that participants and speakers engaged in. The conference was divided into Four Tracks where you could learn General things, iPhone Beginner, iPhone Experienced or technical. While being there they encouraged popping around from session to session to engage and take as much benefit as home as possible.

Noah Kagan – Facebook @noahkagan

The conference kicked off with a Keynote from Noah Kagan who dropped some science on the people in attendance. Even though in the US all we think about is iPhone and some BlackBerry’s thrown in there 50% of the the rest of the world is on a Symbian OS phone. So there is more mobile development out in the world besides iPhone apps. Kagan talked about how he used to work at Facebook and created the Your Pimp Name apps. Kagan talked about the new “lazy web” where a user doesn’t have to update their devices they do it automatically to show their location or status. Auto location updates have caught on the most in urban markets through devices such as Boost Mobile. Noah Kagan then talked about how in the net 5 years in mobile marketing you will start to see much more GPS based advertising and has a hunch that most everyone will have a smart phone in the next 5 years.

John Soward – University of Kentucky @jpsoward

“Choosing a development strategy for your iPhone application” is what John Soward from the University of Kentucky talked about.  There are 3 different dev platforms to explore when you publish an app: Web-app, Application or Hybrid of the two. The reasons to consider are: a Native Application will have access to the GPS as well as be able to use the wonderful SDK apple has provided. However if you design a webclip or a web-app you are not able to use all the full potential of the phone or setup payment through the appstore. There are also many pitfalls to having a webapp/clip. If the user can navigate away from the intended page in any way your app will be rated NC-17 because they could navigate to bad content. This is a challenge because if you are making a kids app for an iPod Touch and its NC-17 its not going to work.

Sam Soffes – Soff.es @samsoffes

Sam talked about his Bible app he developed that has been downloaded 1.5 Million times. Sam then talked about how pricing your app is crucial to the exposure you will get. Bible is a free app and would not have the same exposure if it was a pay app. Sam instructed everyone to keep the pricepoint as low as possible to enable you to have the most users possible. “If you’re not charging for the app and it has ads in it you better have a good reason. Which usually you don’t and you should just go ahead and sell it for .99 cents. “ Sam Soffes stressed over and over the importance of reading the Human Interface Guidelines and how that is key to making a successful application.

Slides

Sam also was kind enough to put up his slides from the presentation if you wanted to hope over and check them out.

Brendan Lim – Intridea @brendanlim

Brendan closed the conference with a talk about ubiquitous mobile. Lim mentioned how one day we may be connected to everything at every moment. Our phones could be credit cards they could store your car driving preferences. Applications and social media as we know it today could be one seamless experience. Much like if you were looking at a hotel that you just booked on your computer when you left the house it would be pushed to your mobile device and you could continue looking from there.

There were several other speakers that Fuel Your Apps was unable to see because of them speaking at the same time, other speakers included

Markus Spiering – Yahoo Blueprint @spieri

Zuv Tarsi – TuneWiki @ztarsi

Brian Slick – BriTer Ideas @BrianSlick

Jake Behrens – The Oklahoma Publishing @withfoam

Justin Raney – Apax Software @jarane2

This was an awesome event put on by the team at Awesome Inc. They have an amazing collaboration space setup for people in the community to use and share in art talks, conferences, gallery shows and work! If you are in the Lexington, KY are you should make it a point to stop by. I recommend you get your calendar out and mark next years mini conference down because this one was a huge success.

Can I Have More Info?

There are pictures and more information about the Awesome Inc. Mobile Mini-Conference (@awesome_inc) on their site. Give them a follow and a big thank you for doing so much for the app community!

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Fuel Your Apps was recently at the Awesome Inc Mini App conference. (Full write-up coming soon.) During this time the app lovers and creators had time to learn and hang out hear stories of others failures and successes. Twitter played an interesting part in this conference as it was displayed on a huge projector. Just by Tagging #MobileLex on a tweet. Without further adieu the comments & opinions:

Whats one reason you should go to an app conference?

These are just nine reasons on why you should to an app conference. What are your reasons? Conferences can prove to be an invaluable asset to your arsenal.  Why? Because who knows when you will need to draw on those connections in the near future. Plus furthering your education is never a bad thing :)

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I’ve started to notice an interesting trend with mobile apps/devices. Since its a device thats in your palm you don’t really think about it being an outward expression of your business or yourself. We all just tend to not treat a mobile email app or text as if you were sitting at your desk. Instead its something we pound out superfast. Here are a few tips to make yourself (and business) look more professional.

1. Take Your Time

Thats Right. I said it. I can’t count how many times I have seen/sent emails, texts or tweets that have spelling errors or have left words out of sentences. Just because you are on a mobile platform doesn’t mean you have this shroud to hide behind when it comes to errors in your documents. You are still representing yourself and your business or both and need to continue to do so in a productive manner. This means to just slow down and take an extra five seconds while typing out a text, tweet or email.

2. Double Check Your Work

After you have taken your five extra seconds with writing your piece of communication read it over! Does it have errors? Does it make sense? Did you leave a word out? All of these are CRUCIAL when it comes to your professional appearance. The last thing you want is a client or potential client thinking you are a few crayons short of the entire box. So double check your work and just like Step 1. This takes an extra five seconds.

3. Remove Your Mobile Email Signature

Personally this is big one for me. The reason I say this is a big one is because I see the “Sent from my iPhone” or “Sent from my Windows Mobile Phone” as me bragging of what tech I have. Your clients and professional contacts don’t care what kind of sweet new gadgets you have as long as you produce what they are paying you for. The second reason I don’t like this is because it looks like your off doing something else. Now that’s not a bad thing that your not in the office but if you repeatedly send emails from your mobile device with that tag your client is going to begin to wonder if you are actually doing work on their project. Also wouldn’t it be more professional to have a business signature with your name and contact info? This way it appears like you are writing from your computer and and your appearance is everything.

Do you have more mobile tips? These are three common and crucial steps that we all are going to have to use as we have more and more technology in our palms and have the capacity to be able to conduct business from everywhere.

(I had a debate yesterday on twitter trying to see if Mac owners could turn of the Blackberry signature so if you know how please pass it along.)