Last night our Creative Director, Michael Griffith, was asked to speak at the May Conclave of DalMob, a group of mobile development enthusiasts who are platform independent.

DalMob provides a rousing forum for discussion and resource-sharing for all aspects and tasks related to software and creative development for mobile devices.

Rather than writing out Michael’s awesome preso notes here, how about viewing it yourself?  However, here are some thoughts Tweeted from the talk:

• Learning to design for mobile is NOT the same as the web
• No, Mr./Ms. Client, you can’t take your content from the iPhone straight to the iPad “just bigger.”
• Embrace the HIG (Human Interface Guidelines)
• Love thy Designer, Strategist, Creative, Developer, etc… as Thyself
• Do not turn your web site into an app.  Apps that succeed?  Look at TED

Thank you, DalMob, for the invitation and I know some of the Bottle Rocketeers will be back for the next meeting!

photo by Jenni Leder, outstanding Art Director @_BottleRocket

On Saturday, April 30th, from 10am to 4pm, the Developer and Creative teams here @_BottleRocket hosted our first Developer Bootcamp for IT college students around the Dallas area.  Our goal for hosting these events quarterly is not only to help build the iOS community in Dallas, but also to lay a foundation for Dallas to become the epicenter of magnificent mobile minds.  Plus, we’d like to identify potential Interns for our paid Summer and Winter term programs.  Maybe these kids will be future “Rocketeers” one day soon?

photo by Jenni Leder, amazing Art Director @_BottleRocket

One of our head developers, Doug Russell, lead the teaching and here’s his re-cap  and next steps from the event for those who attended.  And, those of you who wish to take the “Tweet Rocket Challenge” below, whether you attended or not, we look forward to your results!

Before you write anything take a few minutes to gather some information. Skim through Apple’s docs, consider picking up a book, try to make a project and get it to do something.

Here are some resources we recommend:

Apple
Beginning Videos
Beginning Docs
Learning Objective-C
Creating an iPhone App
Stanford
Developing for iOS (Stanford)
Books
Big Nerd Ranch Guide
Programming in Objective-C 2.0
Blogs
Cocoa Design Patterns
Cocoa Samurai
Cocoa With Love
CIMGF

Tweet Rocket
Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to make an iPhone app that parses a Twitter search feed.

1.  Create a project using the Navigation-based Application template.  Call it TwtRkt.  This template will create a project with a navigation controller hosting a table view controller called RootViewController.  RootViewController is where we'll be doing most of our work.

2.  Assign the provided loading screen and icon.

3.  Add JSONKit (provided at camp on Saturday) to the project and import it into RootViewController.

4.  Download twitter search results from the URL:  http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=iOS as NSData using NSURLConnection as an asynchronous process.

5.  Parse that data into an NSDictionary using JSONKit.

6.  Populate the table view with the array stored in the parsed dictionary with the key @"results".  Relevant Fields: * Who sent the tweet * The content of the tweet * How long ago was the tweet posted (or when it was posted)

JSONKit
URL Programming Guide
NSDictionary Class Reference
NSNumber Class Reference
Table View Programming Guide
NSDateFormatter Class Reference

EXTRA CREDIT:
1. Download and display avatars for the users who posted the resulting tweets

2. Thread your networking (most especially your image downloading)

3. Add a refresh button that goes to get fresh tweets using the return refresh URL

4. Progress indicator while download is happening.

5. Make it a universal (iphone/ipad) app

UIActivityIndicatorView Class Reference

Threading Programming Guide(NSURLConnection on a secondary thread has to be synchronous, not asynchronous)

DO NOT

1. Use NSData, NSString, etc initWithContentsOfURL: methods. These are not the best or even really an ok way to do networking. 2. Do any UI work on any thread other than the main thread.

DO: Ask questions… If you run into trouble or need some clarification, feel free to contact Doug:  doug(dot)russell(at)bottlerocketapps(dot)com

photos by Jenni Leder, awesome Art Director @_BottleRocket

See more information and slides here:

Finally, huge THANK YOUs to all who attended… We had a blast and hope you did, too!