The course will give you strong foundations in Objective-C and Cocoa Touch to give you a solid start to building your own iOS apps in just three days.

You will be using the latest iOS SDK (iOS 5) and the latest Xcode (4.2).

Tickets are £999+VAT for the three days. If you're a freelancer or a one-person company, use the code IAMAFREELANCER to get 20% off that price.

Find out more information and reserve your seat today as there are only 12 spots open on the course.

Replaced, are they, by the grey (OK, pastel) reality of commercial silos that grant users varying degrees of access to their own data while trying to gleam as much information about them as they can to sell to their advertisers and other interested third parties. And what freedoms remain are under grave threat from legislation like SOPA and PROTECT IP.

How's that for overly-dramatic?

Yes, that was overly-dramatic!

Of course, it's not all doom and gloom.

There is a thriving web standards community actively building, evolving, and furthering the open web, and bodies like the EFF who are campaigning to keep the web open. People–at least in the geekier circles–are becoming more aware of the importance of owning their own data. And, in all fairness, many web services now allow users to backup or export their data.

But what about the URLs used for public pieces of user data?

Who owns those?

Who owns your URLs?

The norm today is that URLs belong to the web service provider.

Case in point: I'm closing my Flickr account in response to Yahoo! hiring PayPal's president as CEO and that means that the URLs for all my photos and sets will now go dead. Anyone who has linked to a photo will now get a broken link. In short, this will break (a teeny, tiny, probably imperceptible) part of the Internet. Regardless of its impact, however, breaking links breaks the Internet.

So what can we do about it?

#myData #myURL

Just like we are beginning to understand the value of owning our own data, we need to understand the value of owning our own URLs.

And by this, I don't mean that we should all host all of our own data. We don't all want to run a mini Flickr, a mini YouTube, etc. We don't all have the technical expertise or the financial means to do so. It's just not practical.

It does mean, however, that I should be able to use my own URLs with third-party services. So, if I have a domain name (e.g., aralbalkan.com), I should be able to tell Flickr to use, say, photos.aralbalkan.com as the root of all URLs to my images and sets. In other words, I should be able to tell web services to use my own URLs as the canonical URLs to represent my own data.

If Flickr had allowed this, for example, I could have uploaded the photos I exported from it either to photos.aralbalkan.com under the same URL scheme or to somewhere else completely different (and used redirects, etc.) without breaking the Internet.

Owning your own data is great, owning your own URLs also is even better.

Let's start demanding that web application developers implement this feature.

Here’s a new little Twitter game for you:

1. On Tuesdays, tag someone whose tweets you admire on Twitter on a given subject.
2. Mention the @person in your tweet and the #subject with a hashtag.
3. In your tweet, tell them that “they’re it” and now they should tag someone else with the same tag (give a link to this post to explain the game – the short URL is http://thelink.is/tt).

The general format of the tweet should be something like:

I love @aral’s tweets on #ux

Tag, you’re it! Now it’s @aral’s turn to tag someone (see http://thelink.is/tt).

#tagtuesday #tt

Here’s an actual #tagtuesday tweet from earlier.

Why?

The idea behind the game is to create a fun game of tag where we discover a chain of people with interesting tweets on different subjects via recommendations from other people. If it takes off, it could provide a nice breadcrumb trail others can follow to discover interesting new Twitter peeps.

Tag, you’re it! Now go tweet your #tagtuesday!

September is going to be crazy.

September is the Brighton Digital Festival, a month of art and technology events organized by the community and coordinated by a steering committee coordinated by Lighthouse Arts and partially supported by the Arts Council. I’m on the festival steering committee, alongside Honor Hager from Lighthouse, Andy Budd from ClearLeft, Laurence Hill from Fabrica, and Jo Roberts from Wired Sussex. Working with the industrious Jonathan Aizlewood, I helped coordinate and design the web site for the festival and I’m deeply involved in a number of the events taking place during the month. In fact, the festival is the reason that my own conference, Update 2011, came into being.

Things kick off on the 1st of September with the Semiconductor Private View for their Solar Systems exhibit, curated by Lighthouse. This will also serve as the launch event of the festival. I will be giving a short speech at the event, alongside Honor, Sally Abbott, Regional Director, Arts Council England South East and Councillor Geoffrey Bowden, Cabinet Member for Culture, Recreation and Tourism, Brighton and Hove City Council.

The next day, I will be attending dConstruct, a web conference organized by ClearLeft. I spoke at dConstruct twice and I’ve attended every one apart from last year’s (when I was called away to Oslo to present the opening keynote at Frontend 2010).

On the 3rd, our speakers will begin to arrive for Update 2011 and during the day on the 4th Team Update will be busy setting up the Brighton Dome and taking pre-registrations for the conference.

On the evening of the 4th, Update 2011 will kick off with the Royal Banquet, the pre-conference dinner for speakers, sponsors, and select guests, at the Royal Pavilion. Starting with a champagne reception, followed by a private tour of the palace, and culminating in dinner in the Royal Banqueting Hall. (Although the conference has sold out, there are still a few special tickets left for the Royal Banquet and for some of the workshops.)

The 5th is Update day. The conference, which takes place at the Brighton Dome, features inspirational keynotes from some of the top names from the worlds of iOS, User Experience, and Web, Geek Ninja Battles, Tech Beats, a Show & Tell stage sponsored by Monotype Imaging for impromptu community sessions, digital art installations, and live music.

Following the conference, we will be moving to the Brighton Museum & Art Gallery for the A Night at the Museum after-party – sponsored by Microsoft/Ubelly – where the artists will perform extended sets and where we’ll have even more digital art installations (as well as a chance to let our hair down and talk to each other.)

On the 6th & 7th are the Update workshops, where world-famous instructors including Jeff LaMarche, Remy Sharp, Sarah Parmenter, and Marcus Zarra will be teaching classes on topics ranging from HTML5 for Mobile to Appcelerator Titanium, iOS Design, and OpenGL ES.

From the 10th to the 14th, I’l be attending Flash on the Beach. I still remember spending hours on the phone with John when he was setting it up many moons ago and introducing him to speakers for the inaugural event. I even hosted the unofficial opening party at my apartment for 100+ speakers and attendees on the first year and had a lovely time presenting at the conference for several years. I got to catch up with John after my closing keynote at Future of Web Design in London this year and look forward to seeing what he’s cooked up for the conference this year. Flash on the Beach isn’t just a Flash conference anymore, it’s moving away from Flash just like a lot of Flash developers are. (I starting moving away towards the end of 2007. Interestingly, that coincides with the launch of the iPhone and iOS. And I’m damn glad I got to attend the Stevenote at Macworld where he announced the iPhone. Ironically, I presented a session on Flash after the keynote. Ah, memories.)

On the 15th and 16th, I will be teaching two workshops to year 9 and 10 school kids at Valdean School and Longhill School as part of the education track of the Brighton Digital Festival. The education track is very close to my heart as those of you who follow my Twitter feed or who saw me speak about education at the BeBettr event earlier in the year will know and Jamie Wyld from Lighthouse, supported in-part by Arts Council funding, has done a great job in organizing it.

It’s no secret that I feel that tech education in England is terribly broken and that we should be teaching kids to be digitally fluent, not just literate. In essence, we should be teaching kids how to be producers not just consumers of digital artefacts. To this end, in my workshops, I will be teaching kids how to program using a visual approach that is immediately rewarding and lends itself to being shared. I’ll blog more details later.

Following that, I fly to Stockholm on the 17th to teach my iOS development workshop at Cornerstone.

I return on the 22nd, in time to present a keynote on the 23rd at the Improving Reality conference in Brighton.

On the 24th, I plan on sleeping.

What a month. I’m hugely looking forward to it and I hope you’ll join us for at least some of the events during the Brighton Digital Festival.

Following my PayPal nightmare with the Update conference, I decided to create a site to warn future event and conference organizers that using PayPal could be detrimental to the health of their event: ConferencesBurnedByPayPal.tumblr.com.

I also set up a Twitter account – @paypalnightmare – that will tweet new horror stories as event and conference organizers share them with me and as they appear on the site.

If you have organized (or are organizing) a conference/event and have been burned by PayPal for selling tickets, please submit your experiences to the blog.

PayPal freezing accounts is nothing new. They do it all the time. And they've done it to other conferences also, including dConstruct, and more recently to Remy's Full Frontal.

After keeping our account frozen for two weeks (during which time I had to send them proof that I wasn't a fraudster) they decided to unfreeze it. With a little catch: they implemented a "90-day 100% rolling reserve". What does that mean? It means that they keep all the money you have in your PayPal account for 90 days. So the ticket sales that are in our account now? Over £11K of them? Yes, they'll keep all that for two months after conference. (I spoke to Emmanuelle in their credit review department today who said that they would give 50% of it to me the day after the conference and 25% a few weeks afterwards but I'm not sure I believe them. It says nothing to that effect on the account.) Regardless, I don't know what planet PayPal are living on.

PayPal must inhabit some strange alternate universe where cash flow isn't an issue for businesses. In PayPal's alternate universe, venues and airlines apparently accept 90-day credit terms.

Thankfully, I knew about PayPal's reputation and I had been keeping a voluntary 25% reserve in my account for possible refunds and withdrawing the rest to my bank account on a regular basis. Yes, because of their reputation – because I didn't trust them – I was keeping my PayPal balance as low as I was comfortable with and thus depriving PayPal of interest on my balance too. (In case they need more evidence on how their policies are hurting them.)

So, ironically, because I didn't trust them, they weren't able to ruin my conference. Can you imagine what would have happened if I had trusted PayPal and left all the ticket sales in our PayPal account? We would have been royally screwed.

As is, thankfully, I have enough in the bank to cover the remaining payments for the conference even without the £11K or so that PayPal are keeping hostage. But it makes things more painful for me and means that I have dig deeper into my own pocket. Not what you really want as an independent designer/developer who is trying to stage a beautiful and affordable conference for the local community.

What this whole ordeal has meant is that I've lost several days – days that I could have been devoting to making the conference even better. That PayPal can treat independent businesses and conferences like this is utterly disgusting and unacceptable.

Oh, and I'm not taking it lying down.

As of today, I switched our event to use EventBrite's own credit card system. This wasn't straightforward as I had to create an entirely new event on their system by cloning the old one and then changing its short url to the old one. It means that I now have to manage two event databases for the conference and adds to the administration work involved and complicates registration on the day (we can't use the cool EventBrite mobile app and have to do manual registrations).

From now on, I am not giving PayPal a single penny of my money. Once this ordeal is over and we've received all our money, I will be shutting down my PayPal account for good. (I've been with PayPal for over ten years and our current business account has been with them for six years. During that time, I've put through hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of business through it. So yes, it wasn't millions – and is probably chump change to them – but still, they won't get a penny more.)

Thank-you all for your help and support through this.

Come by next Thursday and have a drink or two on me as we chill and talk about how you can help make Update 2011 even more awesome. We need volunteers, people to help get the word out, and… well, I'm sure you have ideas I haven't even thought of yet.

Space is limited so please sign up today.

Where: The beautiful foyer of Lighthouse Arts and Training
When: Thursday, 7th of July, 2011. 6:30PM for a 7PM start

But the time is perfect for a mobile conference in Brighton, and so I give you the Update conference: the human touch – iOS and beyond.

We have a stellar line-up of speakers from the worlds of iOS, web, and user experience gathering in Brighton at the beautiful Brighton Dome on September 5th, 2011, to present on and debate the hottest topics in mobile today (UX, platforms, and technologies). The talks range from iOS design, User Experience to mobile web, microcopy for mobile, education, and even a hands-on session where you'll be playing with physics engines and particles.

Also, following on the success of the Geek Ninja Battle Night earlier this year, we're going to have geek battles where representatives of different platforms (iOS, web, Android, Windows Phone 7, Blackberry, WebOS, etc.) and different development technologies (native, web, and cross-platform non-web solutions like Titanium, Corona, and Mono) have it out in geek battles.

These sessions will be punctuated by brief "tech beats" where the greats of iOS and web – including Jeff LaMarche, Marcus Zarra, Matt Gemmell, and Remy Sharp – will present their top tech tips.

Finally, the conference will end with an inspirational closing keynote from the multi-talented Mr. Brendan Dawes – who will remind us of things we've never seen. I can't wait!

Following the conference, on the 6th and 7th of September, we are holding in-depth, hands-on workshops on topics including HTML5 for mobile, iOS Design, Core Data, Core Animation, and OpenGL ES (with more to be announced soon, including a workshop on Appcelerator Titanium).

We also have a very special guest: one of the three founders of Apple (yes, there were three) – Ronald Wayne. In fact, we ran a contest last week and 5 lucky winners got free tickets to the conference by guessing our mystery guest.

In case you missed it, don't worry, for today, Friday, 24th June only, you can use the code WINNING to get 10% off the early-bird ticket price on any ticket.

Check out the Update 2011 web site (especially on an iPad or iPhone-tier device as it was designed iPad-first) and book your tickets today to get an additional 10% off the early-bird price!

See you in Brighton in September!

(Update is proud to be part of the Brighton Digital Festival and I'm very happy to be on the steering committee for the festival. September is going to be a great month to be a geek in Brighton!) :)

Mark had written a blog post about how his wife finds it difficult to use some iOS apps because they do not implement a means to increase text size:

I have a particular bee in my bonnet when it comes to accessibility, my wife is registered blind and I am constantly frustrated when she is unable see things (like text on a screen) especially when I know that this is avoidable… What I don’t understand is why there is no way to change font size system wide, or why app developers don’t provide that facility. Yes I know that you can switch on zooming, but honestly – have you tried using zooming on a phone?

So I dutifully retweeted Mark's tweet – as you do – and went on battling with cross-browser issues for the site (you really get to appreciate how wonderful an experience it is to develop for a single platform when you go back to battling with cross-platform development). I also told Mark that in Feathers, you can pinch-to-zoom the tweet text in the main text view. (Goodness knows, having as custom UI as it has, Feathers has a long way to go in terms of accessibility itself.) Mark responded with: "ha! so text scaling is doable. Thanks @aral! care to explain how so others can follow suite?"

OK, Mark (and other iOS devs), here goes: it's actually really easy.

You simply create a pinch gesture recognizer and attach it to a text view. Then you adjust the font size (and hopefully persist it for next time so the user doesn't have to keep doing it every time she uses your app).

It's about as much code as it is to explain in English, so here's a snippet from Feathers:

// Create a pinch gesture recognizer instance.
self.pinchGestureRecognizer = [[[UIPinchGestureRecognizer alloc] initWithTarget:self action:@selector(pinchGesture:)] autorelease];

// And add it to your text view.
[self.myTextView addGestureRecognizer:self.pinchGestureRecognizer];

// ... 

- (void)pinchGesture:(UIPinchGestureRecognizer *)gestureRecognizer
{
	NSLog(@"*** Pinch: Scale: %f Velocity: %f", gestureRecognizer.scale, gestureRecognizer.velocity);

	UIFont *font = self.myTextView.font;
	CGFloat pointSize = font.pointSize;
	NSString *fontName = font.fontName;

	pointSize = ((gestureRecognizer.velocity > 0) ? 1 : -1) * 1 + pointSize;

	if (pointSize < 13) pointSize = 13;
	if (pointSize > 42) pointSize = 42; 

	self.myTextView.font = [UIFont fontWithName:fontName size:pointSize];

	// Save the new font size in the user defaults.
        // (UserDefaults is my own wrapper around NSUserDefaults.)
	[[UserDefaults sharedUserDefaults] setFontSize:pointSize];
}

I hope this helps and I hope seeing how simple it is to implement will mean that more developers will implement this in their apps. Thanks for bringing it to my attention, Mark.

Friday night was Geek Ninja Battle Night, an evening of talks, drinks, and fun organized by Geek Ninja Factory.

I was lucky enough to be joined by my friends Sarah Parmenter, Remy Sharp, and Andy Clarke and over 60 people filled up our lovely Lighthouse Arts venue to capacity to see the talks, have a few drinks, eat some fabulous cupcakes, and take part in a roundtable discussion. The topic: Mobile – Web vs. Native.

Andy "M(alarkey) Bison" Clarke

Andy kicked off the talks with one that wasn't about specific web technologies like HTML5 and CSS3. Instead, he stressed that "to avoid becoming intoxicated by technology, we should take a moment to consider the why before the how."

This was like a breath of fresh air for me as I keep stressing the importance of the "why"s over the "how"s in my talks on user experience. The ways we do things (techniques) are, of course, very important. But the questions that interest me the most are the "why"s. Why did you focus on this aspect of the problem? Why did you implement the solution in this way? The "how"s stem from the "why"s. (The more I think about it, this is just another way to state that we should be doing outside-in design instead of inside-out design.)

The following words from Andy's post on his session sum up his take on mobile web development:

Instead of thinking in terms of ‘mobile design’ or ‘iPhone, iPad or tablet design’, we need only think and talk about design that is flexible, adaptable and ‘responsive’ to whatever demands are made of it. I just call that web design.

You can find the outline of Andy's talk on his blog.

Next up was Remy Sharp.

Remy "Cyclops" Sharp

Remy's talk was on developing mobile applications with web technologies. He talked about some of the common misconceptions about the limitations of mobile web apps (such as the lack of local storage) and used the Gmail mobile app as an example of an exemplary mobile web app. (Interestingly, I did the same in my talk and we hadn't discussed it previously.)

Deconstructing the Gmail app, Remy distilled some general principles from it like "inline as much as you can" and "defer work" and gave some CSS and JavaScript tips, including the advantages of using 3D CSS transforms like translate3d and the iScroll 4 JavaScript library for iOS to create better-performing mobile apps.

Check out Remy's site for his slides from the talk.

Following Remy's session, we had a half-hour social break before Team Native took the stage, starting with Sarah Parmenter.

Sarah "Cammy" Parmenter

Sarah gave us an introduction to designing for iOS and asked Andy up on stage to discuss a current project they were working on where she was designing the native app and Andy was working on the web app (or, as Andy would call it, the "web site") :)

It was hugely informative to have a real-world case study in Sarah's talk and it helped highlight some of the differences in designing for native versus designing for web. One of the main ones, as Sarah pointed out, is that people have different expectations for native apps as they do for web apps. In one example, she stated how a relative of her's was confused when she created a shortcut to a web app on her iPhone's Springboard. Since the app was now accessed like a native app (via an app icon), her relative started imbuing it with native OS expectations that she had previously not had when she was launching it from the browser. You can take this point further, as I did in my talk, to state that web apps should look like web apps, not try to mimic native apps because doing so will create expectations that they cannot meet.

Aral "Ken" Balkan

I had the last talk and in it, I started out by defining the scope of what I would consider a web app for my talk ("that which runs in the browser") vs. a native app (a little harder to define). Native apps are a little harder to define, since, it is an arbitrary designation we make to a certain level of abstraction in the technologies we use to make apps. In the case of the iPhone, apps made with Objective-C and Cocoa Touch using the Xcode toolset are usually thought of as native. And yet, you could also use assembler, or – goodness forbid – binary to create native apps. You can cross-compile to native apps from other languages and frameworks.

As part of my talk, I examined a range of tools and technologies for creating apps, whether web, hybrid, native, or otherwise third-party, including Appcelerator Titanium (which I still have not gotten to build even an empty project for me without crashing on either my MacBook Air or two MacBook Pros) and NimbleKit (not having Titanium Developer, it works like a charm), the excellent Corona, and even Game Salad and Unity3D (at two ends of the spectrum of game development tools).

I talked about how "write once, run anywhere" is a myth. It's not about "running" but "running well". Why? Because you have these pesky little things called competitors. You may well get to 90% quickly on a given platform by using cross-platform technologies but how much time and effort will the all-important last 10% take? That last 10% that determines whether your app merely works, or works delightfully well? Will it even be possible to go that last 10%? (e.g., what if you cannot meet the performance of your competitors who built a native app?)

Without competitors, the last 10% doesn't matter and being "first to market" could make all the difference. But when you do have competitors, and if one of your competitors is "best in market" on a given platform, what happens to your product? Then what if another competitor becomes best in market on a different platform by building a native app? Suddenly, you could see your first-to-market advantage being gnawed away, one platform at a time, by competitors who can fine-tune the experience of their apps to specific hardware and operating system combinations.

Of course, it's not all doom-and-gloom for cross-platform development. Far from it. You can optimize the user experience and performance of web apps and other cross-platform technologies. Gmail is great example, and one that I gave in my talk. I love that they don't even try to look native. By "looking web", they avoid creating OS-specific expectations that they cannot meet. And, being Google, and having the resources of Google, they are able to optimize the user experience of their app for different mobile platforms. Remy was able to find at least four different versions of Gmail, each optimized to a different platform.

So "write once, run anywhere is a myth" but "write once, optimize everywhere" is a possibility if your resources permit it. If they don't, you might find the the initial speed gains of cross-platform development are actually outweighed by the time and effort it takes to optimize per platform – especially if you want to compete on user experience. (Which is what you have to compete on these days in the consumer market.)

I ended my talk by saying that "we're all a bit hybrid". And it's true. Web to Native is a spectrum. It's not black and white but a grayscale gradient. You need to make the right choice of tools, technologies, and processes based on the unique needs of your project, the unique skillset of your team, and the unique objectives of your organization.

Download my slides in PDF format (9.5MB) to see the full list of topics I covered.

Debate

The evening ended with a roundtable discussion with questions and comments from the audience.

Thank-yous

I can't end without thanking my lovely girlfriend, Alice Collingwood, for helping me with the design and production of the event. She was also the one who came up with the idea for the cupcakes, which added so much to the event. Alice is looking for a position doing event design at the moment, so check out her site and give her a bell if you want a talented young designer on your roster.

I also want to thank Emma Wickham, operations coordinator at Lighthouse for going above and beyond the call of duty to help us set up on the evening of the event and the whole Lighthouse team for their continued support and friendship.

Finally, I want to thank Victoria Dawe for her beautiful photos of the event, Angel Food Bakery for our lovely cupcakes and Zoli and Exhibit Printing for being so helpful with the printing of our character portraits of the speakers and our Geek Ninja Factory stand (if you want large format printing or art printing in Brighton give Zoli a call – they're one of the few places in town that have their own machines and know how to use them).

Photos, reviews, blog posts, and related links

Here are links to photos from the event, a couple of reviews of the evening I've found, along with related links. If you've written a review or have photos, etc., from the event, please feel free to leave a link in the comments.

• Geek Ninja Battle Night Flickr gallery
• Web or native? A quandary of our design
• Geek Ninja Battle Night: Web vs. Native by MrQWest
• Geek Ninja Battle Night – a review of sorts
• Geek Ninja Battle Night at Lanyrd.