akosma software

iPhone & iPad Developer Contest: win an iPad!

2010-03-10T12:54:59Z

As a part of the DevDay for iPhone in London and Geneva you will have the chance to win one of three iPads!

These are the rules and conditions:

It has to be a new application (for iPhone, iPod touch, iPad or, even better, all of them at once) not yet available in the Apple App Store;
The deadline for registering for the contest is April 1st, 2010;
The deadline for submitting your application is April 25th, 2010;
Only one application per registered developer;
The application will be tested by the Jury (composed by members of the program committee for the DevDays);
The Jury will provide developers with the UDIDs of the evaluation devices.

The application will be judged using the following criteria:

Originality;
Usage of the mobile platform in general;
Usability;
Experienced quality;
Visual design;
Online and offline capabilities;

Do you want to participate?

Submitted applications can be of any category, for example games, weather, news, finance, anything else!
To register for the contest please send an email to contest@trifork.com
The winners will be announced at the conference in London and Geneva and at iphonedevday.com just after the conferences.
The three best applications will be rewarded with an iPad Wifi 16GB!

Dev Day for iPhone is a dedicated interactive one day conference for software developers and business professionals who want to learn how to successfully build and market iPhone applications. DevDay for iPhone will take place at Dexter House in London, UK, on April 26th, 2010, and in the Geneva Business Center in Geneva, Switzerland, on April 28th, 2010.

Key speakers at DevDay for iPhone include Raven Zachary and Daniel Steinberg, experts in the field of iPhone application development and distribution. Raven Zachary, President of Small Society, who directed the Obama ‘08 iPhone application for the Obama Campaign will provide the keynote presentation. Daniel Steinberg is the editor for the new series of Mac Developer titles and the author of “Cocoa Programming”.

In addition, the creators behind iPhone applications including Stanza, Deutsche Bank, Tag Heuer and Starbucks share their experiences of bringing iPhone applications to market.

Senbei, a Fat Free CRM iPhone Client

2010-02-24T17:10:51Z

I’m a happy user of Fat Free CRM by Michael Dvorkin. I’ve been using it since the start of akosma software to keep track of my projects, clients, prospects and even as a simple to-do list. It helps me as a “corporate memory”, tracking every interaction I have with my clients and partners (phone calls, meetings, new projects, quotations, etc).

As I said many times before, if you are not using Fat Free CRM, you should. A CRM, I mean, not a CMS

But, as an avid iPhone user, I was lacking the ability to use all of this information while I was in the road. I wanted to be able to access my “company wide” address book, check my tasks for the day, or add comments about the latest meetings right from my iPhone. So that is why, in cooperation with Michael and the marketing geniuses of Zerofee (who suggested the name and contributed the icon), I’ve written Senbei, a small, lightweight iPhone client for Fat Free CRM. And not only that, I’ve also made the source code available to anyone with a BSD license, as usual, in my Github account!

Right now Senbei costs USD 0.99 (CHF 1.10), but I will increase the price until USD 4.99 (CHF 5.50) in every one of the next 5 updates. I have new features in the pipeline that I want to add… including an iPad version!

Mobile Marketing & Branding Seminar in Zürich – Save 15%!

2010-02-23T08:46:35Z

Aberla is organizing a Mobile Marketing & Branding Seminar in Zürich, on Tuesday, April 27th, 2010, from 1300 to 1800, at the Renaissance Hotel, Thurgauerstrasse 101, Zurich.

This event will feature presentations from world-class thought leaders, about the strategies required to succeed in the world of mobile applications – not only for the iPhone but also for Android, BlackBerry, and other platforms!

Sumit Rai, Founder of Kulu Valley;
Harald Horber, Plattform Manager Mobile in the CFF / SBB;
Raven Zachary, founder of Small Society and creator of the iPhoneDevCamps;
KC MacLaren, Manager of Retail Consumer Technology for Starbucks.

The inscription is open! As a special offer, readers of this blog can get 15% off the ticket price using the code akosma. Register now!

The Dawn of Couch Computing

2010-02-21T11:30:53Z

I haven’t blogged about the iPad until now on purpose; I wanted to let the waters calm down, as January’s announcement was certainly one that left nobody indifferent.

The iPad is a disruptive device. Not in the sense of groundbreaking, because there is nothing on the iPad that you couldn’t find in other devices. I mean disruptive in the sense of creating a new blue ocean, a new category of devices where the interaction with the machine is done through a completely different kind of approach. Apple is, once again, redefining the word “personal computer”, setting itself apart from the competition, and making us drool all over again.

The iPad is the dawn of couch computing, with all what this phrase means.

The critics to the iPad are doing the same level of noise you can hear whenever Apple releases a new product. Remember: it all started with Dvorak critisizing the first Macintosh because of the mouse. Then it continued with the iMac not having a floppy disk. Then it was the iPod and its hard drive or its lack of a color screen. Finally it was the iPhone, which has generated as many critics as sales. All what is written around the iPad follows the same pattern.

To help to filter the noise produced by all the opinions, keep in mind the following elements:

We geeks are a very small portion of the human population. A noisy one, but very small anyway. Our opinions are biased and most of the time are not the same as the average user. The iPad is not a device for geeks. This is a device for common people, who want a lightweight computer that starts fast, can be used on a couch, looks beautiful and can even be used to create small documents.
The average user wants to hold in their hands whatever new gadget seen in the movies. One of the best reviews of the iPad I’ve read so far stated that the device is a step in a trend to bring gadgets found in “Star Trek”, “Star Wars” or “2001″ to the market.
The iPad is the ultimate simplification of the user experience. This device completely isolates the user from the underlying hardware. The user interface is the computer. No file system, no files, no folders, just apps, documents within those apps, and as much multimedia as possible: videos, images, sound. The same hardware is used for both primary input and primary output.

Is there a use case for the iPad? You are pretty damn sure there is: right now I’m typing this blog post on MarsEdit on a train. I use my MacBook Pro for that. But I know I would use an iPad instead if I had it. I know designers planning to buy some iPads to showcase their portfolio in them. Not to mention on-demand business opportunities, gaming, social networking, and much more.

Couch computing means more than dumb consumption of media: it is also a whole new relationship with the way humans create and share information. The iPad is the first real electronic canvas, and its übersimplification of the user interface, together with an übersimplification of the distribution of software, will create a whole new market. A whole, new, different paradigm. The iPad is not a computer, it is not a netbook, it is not a laptop. It’s an iPad. The user experience patterns will be different, the use cases are yet unforeseen.

I have been contacted by many clients already to take their iPhone apps to the next level, and some ideas are just incredible. In any case, akosma software is your partner of choice for your next iPad application! Contact us, we’d love to hear about your next idea.

PS: by the way, did you know that in the next Dev Days for iPhone in London and Geneva (if the iPad NDA drops) Daniel Steinberg will talk about the iPad instead of Core Data?

iPhone Dev Day in Geneva on April 28th

2010-02-23T08:46:52Z

Those of you who have been following me for long might remember an article I wrote in my personal blog two years ago (in French, translated here):

Why can’t we have conferences like this one, with mini events like this one in parallel in the French-speaking part of Switzerland? Or even like this one? Or like this other one! Or that one!

For all of you non-French speakers, this blog post is about a dream, about bringing to Switzerland quality speakers, for a world-class conference about technology. Something that this part of the country, at least, was lacking.

Well, my dream has come true: following the success of the 2009 Zürich event, and 2 days after the 2010 London edition, I hereby proudly announce the Dev Days for iPhone 2010 in Geneva, on Wednesday, April 28th, to take place in the Geneva Business Center in Petit-Lancy. The conference is co-organized by Trifork, Hortis and akosma software, and sponsored by none other than O’Reilly.

The conference is built around a double track, one for business people, the other for developers. As for speakers, we are immensely proud and happy to have on stage Raven Zachary (creator of the Obama iPhone app back in 2008, owner of Small Society and one of the most important figures in the iPhone business world in the USA), Daniel Steinberg (author of Cocoa Programming and Zero Configuration Networking, and frequent writer in the ADC site or O’Reilly’s MavDevCenter), and Neelan Choksi (founder of Lexcycle, the company behind the Stanza iPhone application).

Faithful to the “think global, act local” meme, the event will also feature business presentations of local interest, highlighting the thriving ecosystem built around the iPhone in Switzerland, including presentations Frédéric Layani and Nicolas Marion from Tag Heuer, and Jérôme Layat from the Hortis team, who have recently collaborated in publishing an astonishing iPhone application.

In any case, a world-class, unique event, without any doubt the most important iPhone-related event to happen in Switzerland in 2010. We hope to meet you there and share some interesting insight about the iPhone business!

For any inquiries about the event, don’t hesitate to contact Geeta Schmidt (+ 45 87 32 87 87, gsm@trifork.com) or myself.

Skills Matter Presentation

2010-02-05T07:51:57Z

Yesterday’s presentation in the Skills Matter meeting is available in Slideshare!

Tips & Tricks for iPhone Application Development (London)

View more presentations from Adrian Kosmaczewski.

Update, 2010-02-05: The kind guys at Skills Matter have also published the video of the whole conference; check it out!

nib2objc featured in Softpedia

2010-01-29T10:59:56Z

As the title suggests: check out the official nib2objc page in Softpedia!

Talking at the Skills Matter Meeting in London Next Week

2010-02-23T08:47:15Z

Preparing the path for the amazing iPhone Dev Days 2010 in April, next week I’ll be giving some tips and tricks about iPhone development, in London!

This will happen in the Skills Matter’s meeting, at the The Skills Matter eXchange, 116-120 Goswell Road, London EC1V 7DP, on Tuesday, February 2nd, at 18:30.

I hope to see you there! The event is free so don’t hesitate to come by.

EasyTableView for iPhone Prototyping

2010-01-17T15:46:02Z

Our first blog post of 2010 presents a tool that we’ve been using internally and that might be useful for other people.

As you might have experienced, prototyping applications in Interface Builder is fine as long as you don’t deal that much with UITableViewController instances. Prototyping user interfaces with tables and navigation is not as easy as drag-and-dropping some components, and you usually have to implement a small UITableViewController subclass from scratch yourself, including some kind of navigation logic.

Enter EasyTableView, a set of classes inheriting from UINavigationController and UITableViewController, ready to use in your own projects, to quickly simulate interfaces using navigation and tables. I’ve been using this code in several prototypes, and it allows me to quickly craft navigation-based applications loading several different tables. The AKOEasyTableViewControllerDelegate protocol allows other classes to be notified of taps on cells or on accessory buttons.

The code is available, as usual, in Github with a liberal BSD license.

The code snippets below show how to use the classes:

NSArray *data = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:@"first", @"second", @"third", nil];

AKOEasyTableViewController *controller = nil;
controller = [[AKOEasyTableViewController alloc] initWithStyle:UITableViewStylePlain];
controller.title = @"Easy Table View";
controller.delegate = self; // AKOEasyTableViewControllerDelegate...
controller.dataSource = data;
controller.autoDeselect = YES;
controller.accessoryType = UITableViewCellAccessoryDisclosureIndicator;
_navigationController = [[AKOEasyNavigationController alloc] initWithRootViewController:controller];
_navigationController.dataSequenceFileName = @"Sequence";

With the code above, the freshly created AKOEasyNavigationController will load the file “Sequence.plist”, which itself references other plist files in your project.

Data can be loaded in code (as NSArray or NSDictionary instances) or using external plist files, through the dataSourceFileName property of the AKOEasyTableViewController class. The formats of the data in the plist files is the simplest you could imagine:





	Roger Federer
	Rafael Nadal
	Novak Djokovic
	Andy Murray
	Juan Martin Del Potro
	Andy Roddick
	Nicolay Davydenko
	Fernando Verdasco
	Robin Soderling
	Jo-Wilfred Tsonga
	Fernando González
	Radek Stepanek
	Gael Monfils
	Marin Cilic
	Gilles Simon

The plist files can also be NSDictionary instances, with a “title” NSString key, and a “values” key of type NSArray; in this case, the controller is shown with several different groups. AKOEasyNavigationController requires the AKOEasyTableViewController class, but you can use this last one independently as well.

Feel free to clone the project, use it in your own projects and send me any feedback you might have. Enjoy!

Season’s Greetings

2009-12-24T17:24:12Z

Whenever you are, whichever language you speak
akosma software wishes you happiness and health for 2010!

Thanks to Claudia for the artwork and to Omniglot.com for the phrases