I'm teaching my iPhone & iPad training course in the UK in September. The three-day class, titled A Modern Introduction to iPhone & iPad Development will take place in Brighton on Stepmber 15-17, 2010.

The class size is limited to 10 students to ensure that you receive personal instruction.

"I had an immensely useful couple of days, and now feel a lot more up to speed than I could have hoped for compared with purely using a book or web-based reference guides." – JP Jones, CTO, econversions.co.uk.

Now covers iPhone 4, iOS4, and Xcode 4!

Why "a modern introduction?" Because you will be using the latest tools and learning the latest development techniques. Objective-C and Cocoa Touch have a rich legacy and many ways of doing things – some good, some bad; some easy, some hard – I separate the wheat from the chaff for you and teach you a solid and easy-to-learn workflow for developing apps using the very same techniques I use myself to make critically-acclaimed and top-selling iPhone apps like Feathers and 'Avit.

The course aims to get you started in building bulletproof apps that are easy to maintain and don't suffer from memory issues or crash.

Places are limited, sign up today!

For more information, and to sign up, visit the course page for my A Modern Introduction to iPhone & iPad Development workshop.

(There are only 10 tickets in total and if you're one of the first three to sign up before September, you'll shave a cool £100 off the ticket price with one of the early-bird tickets. Previous courses have consistently sold out within a couple days, so do hurry if you want to attend.)

Last Wednesday, I gave Twitter a break for a few days so I could examine its impact on my life. The experience has been rather enlightening.

Here are a few things I discovered about myself, how I use Twitter, and how I want to use Twitter:

Losing a sense

In my article titled 10 Trends for 2010 in Netlash's Online Trends 2010 book, I wrote:

Today we are all cyborgs.

We have been cyborgs for quite some time now. Do you wear a wrist watch? You are a cyborg. The watch may not be implanted in your arm but it doesn't need to be either. Your watch "extends your physical abilities beyond normal human limitations" by letting you know exactly what time it is at any given moment.

I only realized how much of a cyborg I had become when my iPhone 3G got stolen earlier this year. It was a week before the iPhone 3GS was to come out so I thought I could hold out a week for the new phone. I was wrong. It took me one day (yes, just one day) to buy another 3G. Why? Because I felt that I had lost vital senses that I had begun to rely on. Senses like Perfect Location (the ability to know exactly where I am and how to get anywhere via Google Maps and the built in GPS), Infinite Knowledge (the ability to query the world's knowledge-base on any subject at any time), and Omniscience (the ability to know what my friends are doing anywhere in the world at any given time via Twitter). These are senses that have become as important to me as Sight, Smell, Touch, and Hearing; they extend my consciousness and abilities beyond the limitations of my physical being.

So, giving up Twitter for a few days robbed me of one my senses but that wasn't entirely the hardest bit. I could compensate for it by actually calling friends up or emailing them or (brace yourselves), actually talking to them face-to-face.

What I missed most was the inability to share stuff I was learning. I also missed the ability to throw an idea out there and have it be debated by some very smart people.

I tweet a lot of links to things that I find interesting and not being able to do that on a whim was somewhat frustrating. I realize that I've started to use Twitter like a lower-overhead Delicious (this has its disadvantages given Twitter's lack of focus on The Long Now and its limited ability to search through a single account's tweets. Remy's SnapBird is a good third-party solution that makes Twitter more useful for finding links you tweeted earlier and I do still use Delicious.)

I did feel out of touch with what was going on at times but I found that if I needed to find something out (for example, where someone was) I could always look up a specific Twitter page without signing into my account. This made me think about ways of using Twitter on my terms instead of giving in to the demands of the stream.

The heartbeat

As part of my Twitter hiatus, I turned off all notifications and stopped using Foursquare and Gowalla also. Ah, the bliss.

On the one hand, I love notifications. Normally, I have notifications on for Twitter replies, direct messages, Foursquare, and Gowalla. The Twitter notifications alone usually mean that my phone has a somewhat regular heartbeat of notification messages that flash every few minutes. I realize that I had started to rely on this heartbeat. If the heartbeat slowed, a part of me would wonder if something was wrong. The heartbeat can easily become a wonderfully addictive reinforcement – a validation of sorts – that everything is all right and the Internets still loves you.

It's also terribly disorienting and it's too easy to simply lose yourself in the stream and let it take you where it wants to.

So the only notifications I'm going to turn back on are going to be Twitter DMs. Everything else stays off and I'll poll Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, etc. when I want instead of having my schedule for the day dictated by the heartbeat.

Cognitive effects

Perhaps the scariest bit was the first time I caught myself tweeting in my head.

My initial impulse, after seeing something interesting or having an experience was to compose a tweet in my head. I realized that I've begun to automatically summarize bits of my day into 140-character chunks.

What does this mean? (IT'S A DOUBLE RAINBOW ALL THE WAY!)

Is it beneficial? Could tweeting in my head be aiding my memory, for example, by making me analyze events in my life as they happen, thereby reinforcing those events in my mind much in the same way that dreams apparently do?

Or am I stripping events of their definition by downsampling them into mere approximations; a string of sound-bite-esque simulacra?

One thing is for sure: Twitter actually affects my behavior and the way I think about and, quite possibly, how I interact with the world.

(Note: The automatic impulse to compose tweets in my head subsided after the first day and disappeared entirely towards the end of the week.)

Other effects

Removing Twitter from my life also had some immediate effects:

• I started (macro) blogging more and realized that I actually like making longer posts and exploring an idea for more than 140 characters.
• I spent more time on the phone, actually talking to friends.
• Friends had to make a greater effort to reach me; and they did (and in the process discovered new things about me, like my phone number).
• After the initial "tweeting in my head" behavior wore off, I began to enjoy an experience for what it was, without wondering if it held interest for a greater group and without necessarily having to summarize it for that audience.
• I started writing in my journal more.
• Oh, and I was also way more productive than I had been recently.

Going forward

All in all, giving Twitter a break has been an enlightening experience. It showed me that while I love Twitter, I'm not a slave to Twitter (and nor do I want to be). It made me realize that I love sharing stuff on Twitter and I love the positive conversations that people have (I've recently seen a large number of people use Twitter as a virtual support structure with very real – and positive - effects and that's really awesome).

I'm not, on the other hand, a big fan of the Twitmobs that can form at the blink of an eye or the endless of string of controversies that can whip entire communities into a frenzy one moment, only to be forgotten when the next, newer, or juicier controversy erupts. They rarely achieve anything of any value and, before you know it, a morning or an afternoon is needlessly lost to the inaccessible ether of the past.

So, going forward, I'm simply going to make an effort to use Twitter more like I want to. Which is something like this:

1. I use Twitter to share ideas, links, and other things that I find interesting or funny. 140 characters is rarely long enough to contain a universal truth or a fully-baked idea and thus my tweets shouldn't be taken as such. If you want to contribute and help evolve the idea, please do.
2. If I see a viewpoint that I don't agree with, I will strive to write a blog post on the subject and respond thusly. If it's not worth my time to write a blog post, it's either not worth responding to or I'm being lazy and Twitter simply isn't the place for long debates as it lends itself to absolutist statements which are usually the worst way to debate the nuances of a subject.
3. Since my tweets are read by thousands of people, I want them to be a positive, informative, possibly entertaining, and ideally inspiring influence. At the same time, remember that you are following a human being not the Techcrunch RSS feed. I have my good and bad days, hopes, desires, dreams, successes, and failures (just like you). If you are not interested in the human behind the tweets, now is a great time to take a moment and unfollow me.

(There you go, I guess that's my unofficial Twitter policy of sorts.)

And finally…

What are you waiting for? Follow me on Twitter already!

The hearts in the illustration are by Dryicons and the Twitter bird is the work of freakyframes.

Both times I attended SXSW I've wanted to stay on for the music festival – I think I'm finally going to this year. One of the cool things about SXSW is that it includes Interactive, Film, and Music under its umbrella but it does feel like the three are still somewhat disperate. Which is surprising to some degree since most web/interactive geeks I know either are musicians or have been involved with film and other mediums in one capacity or other.

So, I was thinking, why don't we invade SXSW Music in 2012 (it's too late for 2011) with a band of our own? A Geek Robot Superstar band or something (I don't know where the "Robot" bit came from, really.)

We did something similar in the Flash world a few years back with my friends and fellow geeks Seb, Chris (Allen), John, Sam, Jared, and Chris (Mills). It was called Phlash5 and we got to rehearse about as many times as we performed. Our debut was in Hollywood of all places, at B.B.King's bar (awesome venue) during FITC Hollywood and we also rocked Amsterdam. (Of course, given that we were dispersed around the four corners of the world, we relied *heavily* on improvisation and performed a set of our songs during the gigs.)

I'd love to see if we can't get something similar together for SXSW and get the web world to vote us in :)

Thoughts? Is anyone excited by the idea or should be Interactive folk keep our musical talents to ourselves and stick to our own bit of the conference? :)

(By the way, if you haven't done so, why not take a moment to vote for my panel: The Art of Emotional Design at SXSW 2011?) Cheeky, I know. But I'll love you like a puppy. [May actually not love you like a puppy - Ed.]

I'm going to be attending SXSW 2011 this year and if you'd like to hear me talk about designing for humans (User Experience/Experience Design/Emotional Design), please take a moment to vote for my panel: The Art of Emotional Design.

(If you have a little more time and if you've seen me speak before, I'd love it if you could leave me a nice comment on the panel proposal page too.)

Thank you all in advance and here's looking forward to seeing you all in Austin next year.

In fact, earlier today, a tweet I saw from Paul Lloyd was the last drop that made me decide to give Twitter a short break:

On the face of it, you might wonder why this tweet of the thousands that pass by my stream daily made me decide to stay off of Twitter for while. I think it was the combination of this morning's Twitter frenzy over the FOWD Rising Stars speakers (FOWDgate, which was pretty much over my midday) and the other Twitter-related experiences I've either been seeing or having lately. It does all get a bit intense. I said as much – somewhat ironically – in my tweet to announce my short break from Twitter:

Twitter has the potential to bring out the best in people (I know quite a number of people who use Twitter to help each other), but it also has the potential to bring out the worst. Nary a day goes by, it seems, without some sort of controversy or scandal erupting on Twitter and then, almost as quickly, withering away to the nothingness from which it came. The Twitter masses are whipped up into a frenzy and then break for lunch or dinner or move on to the next exciting thing, leaving a trail of human damage in its wake.

Reading Paul's tweet, and its accusatory undertones, I decided I just did not want to witness the debate that I assumed would follow. I decided I wasn't entirely fussed if someone on the Internet was wrong. I decided that my world would continue spinning perfectly fine if I didn't get involved in yet another Twitter controversy.

Of course, Paul's tweet was just the drop that made the cup run over – the last thing I'd want is to start a blogversation (see what I did there?) on the specifics.

How I use Twitter

Personally, I love to use the real-time, stream-like nature of Twitter to throw ideas into the stream (most times half-baked, sometimes not) and watch them evolve or die based on the input of others. I love how easily and instantly you can collaborate on ideas via Twitter and also how quickly you have access to different viewpoints and – if you have as lovely a family of followers as I do – to a treasure throve of knowledge.

However, I know that that's not how everyone uses Twitter. And, when you have thousands, if not tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers, the way you use Twitter, how your followers view what you say, and the impact your tweets can have changes. An idea you might be debating might get picked up by a news organization and presented as a debate or controversy. It's easy to forget that you're having a public conversation in front of an audience that could easily fill up a stadium (if not several, depending on your follower count).

I don't know how much of this makes sense to you or how much you can emphatize with. These aren't fully baked thoughts either. I'm just throwing them out there and I'll make sense of them later. (See, I can tell you that in a blog post and you can adjust your expectations accordingly because my thoughts are not flying about in semi-disjointed packets of at-most 140 characters, just itching to be taken out of the context of the stream.)

A tweetless life

I haven't tweeted for over four hours now. Well, at least not on Twitter. I have tweeted in my head. And that's actually rather scary when you catch yourself doing it.

Twitter has fundamentally altered how I interact with the world in ways that I don't believe I entirely understand. A part of me wonders how this affects me cognitively: Is it an advantage in much the same way dreams are, helping me reinforce the memories of my actions by being both actively aware of them and in having to review and summarize them? Or does it make me strip the all-important details from my experiences in order to fit them into 140 characters? Am I merely reporting on what I'm doing or has it begun to actually affect what I do?

I've gotten so much into the habit of tweeting that it's my instinct to share nearly everything I'm doing with the thousands of people that follow my tweets daily. I can only stop and ask myself: what does it mean to do that? What sort of a relationship do we have? And how is it impacting my life?

I feel that taking myself off of Twitter for a few days is probably a good way of analyzing that. Not only Twitter but Gowalla and Foursquare also. And I've also turned off all of the various notifications that pop up on my phone. So, at least until Monday, I'm not going to tell you what I'm doing, or where I'm at, or who I'm with. And I have this sneaky suspicion that I will still be doing things and going places and seeing people. And I'm going to try and see what it's like to experience life without sharing nearly every minute of it.

I'll let you know how I get on. At some point.

If you were following some of the tweets this morning, you may have noticed a spirited discussion on speaker expenses following Anna Debenham's announcement that she couldn't afford to speak at Future of Web Design New York and had to pull out of speaking:

My initial reaction – and that of quite a few other people – was that of disappointment. I know what a great speaker Anna is, having seen first-hand the wonderfully-received talk she gave at FOWD London this year. I summed up my initial frustration at the news (as one does, these days), in a tweet:

So what's the story here? Is Carsonified and FOWD evil for not paying Anna's expenses? Does Ryan wear his hats to hide his devil horns? Or is it all good intentions gone wrong?

The Evil FOWD theory

Some of the initial reactions framed the issue as a conference that charges quite a bit for its tickets (~$600 - ~$1,000, depending on whether you attend a workshop) not paying expenses for its speakers. This led a couple of people, including Andy, to denounce conferences that don't pay speaker expenses and to encourage speakers to not speak at such conferences if they don't want to support the practice:

There are two problems with this, though. First of all, nearly all of us in the industry support this practice by speaking at and/or attending what is probably the largest for-profit conference that doesn't pay speaker expenses: SxSW. Remy pointed this out and I followed up with my own tweet on the matter:

Basically, none of us who speak at and/or attend SxSW really have the right to criticise conferences that don't pay speaker expenses or criticise other speakers for speaking at such conferences without appearing somewhat hypocritical. And, as far as conferences go, they're not even the worst offenders: there are some conferences – which charge thousands for entrance – where speakers actually pay the conference to speak. Some conferences are entirely comprised of such so-called "sponsored sessions" and many don't even label them as such. This, IMHO, is a much bigger problem to tackle initially.

The second issue I have with this criticism toward FOWD is that it is actually factually imprecise: FOWD is a two-track conference and Carsonified does pay all expenses (and an honorarium) for 1st track speakers. 2nd track speakers do not get their expenses paid nor do they get an honorarium. Put like that it sounds like there are two classes of speakers.

However, Cat from Carsonified was kind enough to call me up and explain to me their intentions for the second track and – having heard their side – I tend to believe that this whole incident was mostly good intentions gone wrong.

The Benevolent FOWD theory

The 2nd track – dubbed the Rising Stars track – has a very specific purpose: to provide a platform to showcase local speakers at an international conference and thereby give them the sort of exposure – on a global scale – that they would otherwise not have. FOWD tweeted as much themselves:

Given that the speakers are local, expenses do not factor into the equation. My personal opinion is that this is a noble cause that should be applauded (and, in some ways, quite a risk to Carsonified who are giving new speakers a chance and shouldering the risk).

So what happened?

Of course, things are usually never black or white but some shade of grey: In this case, I do believe Carsonified made a mistake but it wasn't, as some have stated, to have a Rising Stars track. And it's not even that they do not pay speaker expenses for their Rising Stars track. Their mistake was to not stick to the mandate of the Rising Stars track, which is to foster and showcase new local talent. In other words, if they didn't have space for Anna in the 1st track, they should have not invited her to speak on the Rising Stars track – if for no other reason other than the fact that Anna isn't local to New York.

(A similar thing happened with me at FOWD London: they didn't have space on the 1st track but really wanted me to speak so I appeared on the 2nd track even though I wasn't technically a "Rising Star" – even though I was local so travel expenses weren't an issue. Denise Jacobs, however, had to publicly raise funds to fly over to London to speak on the Rising Stars track and, regardless of anything else, it just doesn't look good on the conference for a speaker to have to do that.)

That said, I do believe that they invited Anna because they really didn't want to turn her down and Anna did know the terms she'd be speaking under from the start and was all right with it:

Thoughts for the future

My personal opinion on the matter is that giving local, undiscovered talent a voice on an international platform is a noble cause and deserves applause not scorn. It appears that Anna would also agree with this:

Here are a couple of ideas that might help Carsonified not only avoid such misunderstandings in the future but, quite on the contrary, get some rightfully-deserved praise for giving undiscovered local talent a chance to break into the international arena:

• Make it clear and be entirely transparent about the fact that the Rising Stars track is an attempt to foster local, undiscovered talent. This is a noble cause. You should be proud of it and make it a USP of your conferences.
• Does Rising Stars have to be a track? Why not mix in the Rising Stars talks into both tracks? This will remove any stigma attached to there being a 2nd track – instead, there will simply be two concurrent tracks of talks; equal in stature and with a mix of professional speakers/industry veterans and rising stars.
• Stick to your mandate and criteria for the Rising Stars tracks. Namely, get local talent. It's hard to say "no" to people you know – especially if they're awesome like Anna – but say "no" if you have to.

Oh and about the conference…

I have to say that I'm hugely excited about FOWD New York. Not only is there a rather awesome line-up of speakers (both Rising Stars and Industry Vets) but a little bird told me that there might be a surprise at the start of the second day. Personally, I don't believe little birds (they're notorious for being cheeky little fibbers) but who knows!

Here's to seeing you all on Broadway in November…

A rose by any other name…

I just wanted to clarify this as it might seem like I'm presenting a course called Slide to Unlock, which I'm not. The course is called Aral Balkan's Introduction to iPhone Development and it's an original course, created and taught by yours truly. Slide to Unlock is the name of the series of events held by Little Miss Robot and Gladiator. Confused yet? I was! Hope this clears it up.

September's course: back in Brighton!

By the way, I will be teaching my course back in Brighton in September (15th-17th) and early-bird tickets will be released this Monday (August 16th). There will be 3 early-bird tickets so make sure you get ready to pounce on them because past courses have sold out within a couple of days, with early-bird tickets being snatched up almost immediately.

• ShareKit : Drop-in Share Features for all iOS Apps
  Enabled sharing via Delicious, email, Facebook, Google Reader, Instapaper, Pinboard, Read It Later, Tumblr and Twitter in your iPhone/iPad apps with this open-source library. Has a customized UI, lets you share URLs, images, text, and files… even when offline.
  (tags: Share app iphone ipad open source library code Delicious Email Facebook Google Reader Instapaper Pinboard Read It Later Tumblr Twitter cocoa objective-c programming sdk framework iphonedev opensource sharekit sharing ios mobile social developer apple development)
• Freebie: Vector iPhone 4 PSD File | Psdtuts+
  This download includes a fully scalable vector iPhone 4 PSD file that you can use in your own designs. It was designed by Cambridge-based designer, Hector Janse van Rensburg from Inkpilot.com.
  (tags: iphone 4 vector PSD image screenshots showcase app developer template photoshop iphone4 design free illustrator download)
• TwitterConnect: DDSocialDialog at Under The Bridge
  A Twitter Sign In component that follows the Facebook Connect flow for creating consistent experiences in apps that support both Facebook Connect and Twitter xAuth.
  (tags: twitter xauth facebook sign in log signin login cocoa touch objc objectice-c connect)

Update: Sold out!

My three-day Introduction to iPhone Development course is back and I'm going to be teaching it in August in Gent, Belgium in conjunction with Gladiator and Little Miss Robot.

"I had an immensely useful couple of days, and now feel a lot more up to speed than I could have hoped for compared with purely using a book or web-based reference guides." – JP Jones, CTO, econversions.co.uk.

Following hot on the heels of my courses in Brighton and London, the tickets for my Introduction to iPhone Development course are going really fast (this month's course, which I'm teaching next week in London, sold out within a couple of days.)

In fact, the three early-bird tickets are now gone (after we announced it on Twitter yesterday, before I had the chance to even blog it) and there are only seven places left on the course.

Since the early-bird tickets sold out so quickly, I just created a special code for you guys: use the code STILLEARLY at checkout to get €100 off your purchase. Note: this code is valid for today only!

Update: Sold out!

Sign up to attend Introduction to iPhone Development and get started with a solid foundation in iPhone and iPad development.

I just tested it out (in rather low light too, it's early morning here) while standing on my white throw-rug and it worked like a charm! It didn't work as well on my pine floor with bare feet so make sure you're standing somewhere with lots of contrast (or buy a white throw-rug, they're great!)

Upsies! works on iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 with iOS4.

Lovely idea, beautifully executed and currently on sale at 99 cents/59 pence: Check out Upsies! for iPhone and get those legs moving!