iOS development
I’ve been developing for iPhones and iPads professionally for a couple of years. The learning curve isn’t so much steep as nearly vertical, but there’s unbeatable satisfaction to be had when you actually get something working.
These a few of the (public) projects that I’ve worked on in the past:
Food Hospital – an iPhone client for Channel 4′s Food Hospital series
A clinical guidance reference app for the National Institute for Clinical Excellence
WeWatch – an iPhone client for Rattle’s WeWatch service.
Writing
Pro iOS Table Views: For iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch is published by Apress in March this year.
From the blurb:
“If you’re an iOS app developer, chances are you’ll be using table views in your development projects. Table views are the bread and butter of iOS apps. With them, you can create everything from the simplest of lists to fully tricked-out user interfaces.
Table views are one of the most complex components found in UIKit. While using them for boring standard user interfaces is quite simple, customizing them can become really challenging.
Pro iOS Table Views takes a task-oriented focus to assist you when implementing customized table views. Although it delves deeply into the Table View API, you can always decide in which level of detail you want to dive in. It’s aimed to be a great reference and customization cookbook at the same time, useful for beginners as well as intermediate developers.
The information is divided into several layers of detail. While the book covers complex customization topics and user interaction techniques, it provides the fundamental basics needed for customization. Both beginners and intermediate developers will find great value in this book as a helpful reference, at hand to quickly refresh their knowledge at any given time.”
It’s available from Amazon in the US and the UK, as well as direct from Apress.
Interesting North
I borrowed the “Interesting” concept from Russell Davies. There had never been one in the North of England.
He said it was okay, so on Saturday 13 November we took over Cutlers’ Hall in Sheffield.
I think it was great.
Fish is brain food and so was this. For £20, you got a day of the best, most leftfield talks. There was a cup of tea of two, a spot of lunch and some free stuff from people who liked the idea, too.
A fistful of brilliant people performed talks on a small stage. They were speaking about Eyjafjallajökull, James Bond as architecture critic, riding side-saddle, losing their mind, feral children, what you can learn from Lego and a whole lot more.
There was loads more, but that’s quite enough to be going on with. There’s loads more over here. Tweets are over here.
Partly inspired by the way that Tom Armitage made Tower Bridge come alive, I’ve been playing around with various ways of exploiting Twitter. Some things work better in 140 characters than others, but it’s fun experimenting. These are a few of the things I’ve been messing about with:
| Shippingcast | As a kid brought up on Radio 4, the Shipping Forecast has a special place in my heart – it’s almost poetry. @shippingcast was an attempt to push the daily forecasts out onto Twitter – it’s been partially successful, but suffers from having a lot of detailed information compressed into 140 characters. You can read more about how it was done here. |
| @riverthames | I used to walk along the River Thames on my way to work, so it was a natural candidate to experiment with. @riverthames takes the tidal predictions and twitters when high and low tides are expected at London Bridge – there’s more about it here. |
| Stock markets | This is about as sensible as my twitter experiements gets – tweeting various international stock market indexes on an hourly basis throughout the day. Just like @riverthames, I made a conscious decision to use the first person to announce the changes – I’m intrigued by the concept of applying personalities to inanimate objects and how that changes our perceptions of them. |
| jocoukshares | Something I knocked up for Laura Oliver at Journalism.co.uk – again tweeting stock market prices, but this time for a basket of media shares. There’s some future developments to come with this that will allow you to choose the shares you want to “follow”, using an XMPP client to handle direct messages to and from the bot. |
| The Pips | This is firmly in the category of “fun, but useless” – a parody of the BBC’s Greenwich time signal that “pips” every hour, on the hour. |
Arduino hacks
Once upon a time I was a (prototype) electronic engineer, back in the days when programming was hard and Real Engineers built analogue circuits. Fast forward the best part of 20 years, and Arduino has made programming microcontrollers easy and enjoyable.
Once it’s easy, you can start doing useful things. This is a bog-standard DAB radio, hacked to make it usable by a elderly and visually-impaired person – power on/off and channel changing is controlled by a single press of a large button, instead of fiddling around with tiny controls.
There’s a few projects I’ve been tinkering with that play around with taking online activity and making it physical – this is an evil plot to stuff an Arduino into the guts of an innocent teddy bear for nefarious purposes.
Photography
I’ve been taking photographs for as long as I can remember. Up until about five years ago, I was exclusively digital – then I realised that because the rest of the world (and especially professionals) were going digital, there was a glut of second-hand analogue equipment on the market. Thanks to the wonders of online retail and eBay, I’ve been able to acquire a collection of kit that I could previously only dream of.
My main gear is Hasselblad medium format cameras – they shoot 6x6cm negatives onto roll film, and are some of the most beautifully-designed objects I’ve ever had the pleasure of handling. Even if I wasn’t into photography, I’d want a Hasselblad camera just to *look at* – they are gorgeous pieces of industrial design. They’ve also got some of the finest Zeiss lenses ever made, and take stunningly clear pictures.
I shoot mainly black-and-white, which means I can process the films myself. Once that’s done, they get scanned on a flat-bed scanner and manipulated in Photoshop, then printed (occasionally) with a Fuji Lightjet.
The beauty of film is that it forces you to slow down and LOOK. The cameras are completely manual, so it’s a much more contemplative process than filling up a data card with JPGs. And there’s a tactile quality about the resulting images that makes digital seem very sterile. I find it very difficult to articulate, but there’s an analogue blurriness about an image composed of silver crystals which makes them feel as if they’re only tangentially connected to the real world. Digital’s fantastically convenient and easy, but it’s just a bit too real for my liking.
All my pictures get posted onto my Flickr stream.
