I just put a new iteration of the Update conference web site live, inspired by and in collaboration with designer Clare Sutcliffe. About a week or so ago, Clare – quite out of the blue – sent me an iteration on the Update site design that I absolutely adored. In organizing Update I'm wearing lots of hats at once and I couldn't do it all without the frankly humbling support and help I've been receiving from my friends.

For the past few days, I've been incorporating much of Clare's input into the site. Any implementation issues you may encounter, of course, are entirely my doing.

Here are the main points that Clare helped me evolve with the design:

• Panel overlays. Collecting all interface elements in the panels into a horizontal panel at the left. This has helped to create a much stronger grid and makes it easier to skim the site. It also leaves more space for copy and creates contrast for the section titles.
• Cleaned up the header. The old header used an image that I love and use in my presentations – the look of wonder in the little boy's face reflects the sort of magical experiences I know we – as designers and developers – can create. However, as Clare pointed out, it said nothing about the conference. The new image says mobile – which is what the conference is about. Adding the white overlay under the title helps contrast it against the photo. To this I also added a blur to the photo itself under the overlay to increase the legibility of the title and draw attention to it.
• Tidied up the ticket bar. I don't know what I was thinking when I created the ticket bar but, in hindsight, it definitely wasn't aesthetics. Clare's design cleaned that up and added another little mobile touch.
• Workshop panel backgrounds.Clare mentioned that the background on the Workshop panels just wasn't working. So I recreated them. They're much more vibrant and representative now.
• Half-size panels for the Brighton Digital Festival and Twitter visually distinguish them from the horizontally-scrollable full-size panels.
• Whitespace. The panels now have room to breathe and the whole design benefits from that.

When working on the first iteration of the Update web site I was concentrating mostly on getting the interactions working well (and across desktop, iPhone-tier, and iPad-tier devices). The second iteration brings with it a much needed visual overhaul. The third iteration will bring additional content and hopefully a few more usability enhancements. I only wish I had more time to work on the site in addition to actually organizing the conference itself.

I hope I'll get some time to go into detail on the changes between the first two iterations in a future post.

And, here's a huge thank-you to Clare – without her initiative, this update would not have been possible. I'm hugely enjoying collaborating with her on the site.

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!) :)

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.

Update: sorry everyone, the event sold out in under 24 hours but there is a waiting list you can sign up to in case anyone drops out. Thank-you all for your overwhelming interest and here's looking forward to seeing a bunch of you there in March!

Watch as Sarah Parmenter and yours truly pummel Andy Clarke and Remy Sharp in the first Geek Ninja Battle Night in Brighton this March.

It's Web vs. Native, as we explore the myriad of options open to digital creatives designing and developing for mobile devices.

Come join us for an evening of talks, debate, and drinks at the first community event organized by Geek Ninja Factory. Tickets are just £10 and already selling like hotcakes.

(Actually, they're selling like hotcakes would sell if they were tickets to this awesome event.)

Reserve your place today to avoid disappointment and possible exposure to Hungarian Hairy Hamster disease.*

* We would like to take this opportunity to inform you that you won't really catch Hungarian Hairy Hamster disease if you don't attend this event. In fact, Hungarian Hairy Hamster disease is no laughing matter and we profusely apologise for even mentioning it in the previous paragraph. We promise never to mention Hungarian Hairy Hamster disease on this blog ever again (or at least until the next post, whichever is sooner).

I love to teach and I had a blast this year while teaching my 3-Day iOS SDK course for iPhone and iPad at venues around the world. And, based on the feedback, the students had a blast too.

So, for 2011, I'm taking the training to a new level: introducing Geek Ninja Factory.

Via Geek Ninja Factory, I will be teaching two courses in 2011 (and I have some other surprises planned too). These are a new 1-Day course called the iOS Mojo Dojo and a 3-Day course titled iOS SDK Dojo.

The 1-Day iOS Mojo Dojo starts out by introducing the iOS platform, including the various devices/generations and lays out the design limits and features of each, tying them in to the various frameworks in the iOS SDK. You get handy design-related tips and tricks before we move on to hands-on examples that compare and contrast the major tools and technologies for developing iOS apps. These include web standards (HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript), web + iOS-specific frameworks (JQTouch), creating native apps using web technologies and PhoneGap, using JavaScript to create native apps with native components (Appcelerator Titanium and NimbleKit), other technologies (Corona, Unity3D, etc.) and a quick glance at native development with the iOS SDK (Objective-C and Cocoa Touch with the Xcode tools).

The aim of the 1-Day course is to introduce you to the iOS platform and give you a wide overview of designing and developing for it so that you can make intelligent design and technology choices when embarking on your next app.

The 3-Day iOS SDK Dojo, in contrast, aims to give you a solid foundation in developing native iOS applications for iPhone and iPad using the iOS SDK (Objective-C and Cocoa Touch, as well as the Xcode toolset, including Interface Builder and Instruments). By the end of the course, you will have the knowledge you need to build your first native app. Far more information on the 3-Day course is available on the Geek Ninja Factory web site.

The next courses are in January 2011 and seating is limited to 12 people.

Check them out today and sign up to become an iOS Ninja in 2011 at Geek Ninja Factory.

PS. As a reader of my blog, here are two special codes for you: use the magic code NINJAWIN to get £100 off the 3-Day iOS SDK Dojo and the magic code NINJAMOJO to get £25 off the 1-Day iOS Mojo Dojo.

I attended both days of the conference and loved the other sessions as well as the venue, and, of course, New York, where we got to see Driving Miss Daisy with James Earl Jones and Vanessa Redgrave, eat at Bubba Gump's overlooking Times Square (what an experience), and enjoy the culinary delights of the excellent The National restaurant (where we had the most amazing Branzino), and knock back a couple of espresso martini's at the W Hotel (they serve the best ones I've had anywhere).

I was also elated that my keynote got some rave reviews. So, as usual, here's a compilation before they get lost forever in the bowels of my Twitter stream (yummy analogy, I know!)

And here is some feedback from my new one-day iPhone Design & Development workshop that I taught at FOWD NY.

The course covered design principles and limitations and compared and contrasted development using just web technologies, web technologies using a framework (JQTouch), web technologies wrapped in a native wrapper (via Phonegap), JavaScript used to create native apps with native components (via NimbleKit), other third-party technologies (Corona and Unity3D), and native development with Objective-C/Cocoa Touch.

The goal of the workshop was to give an overview of designing for the iPhone and to empower students to make the right decision about which – out of a handful of carefully selected – technologies (or combinations of technologies) to use when building their next iPhone app.

Thank-you all again for your lovely, kind words about my talks. It really does mean a lot for me that you enjoyed them.

This intensive course will give you a solid foundation in developing with the iOS SDK (for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch), Xcode (both 3 & and the upcoming 4), and Objective-C. To see a more detailed outline of the course and get all the juicy details, please see the course's web-site.

(If you want to get a feel for how past students feel about the class, check out some recently-tweeted feedback.)

Special offers

As a reader of my blog, you can take advantage of two special offers that are available for this month. You can use one or the other while checking out.

First off, if you are not VAT registered, use the coupon VATLESS to get 20% off the price of the course (this will take the VAT off and a little extra).

Secondly, even if you are VAT registered, here's a little discount for you: Use the code ARALSBLOG to get £100 off the price of the course.

I've been so busy in the past month, doing my courses in Ghent and Brighton and the opening keynotes for Frontend2010 and Over The Air in Oslo and London that I completely missed the email a few weeks ago from .net magazine informing me that Feathers has been nominated for Mobile App of the Year at the .net awards.

The initial round of nominees makes it to the second round of judging based on your votes. So, if you have a moment, please vote for Feathers at the .net awards!

It is hugely humbling to have been nominated, and to be in the presence of such other great nominees: Facebook, Dropbox, Foursquare, Gowalla, Instapaper, Things, Amazon, and WordPress.

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!

The iPhone Simulator is a handy development tool for debugging your iPhone and iPad apps as you develop them. It is not, however, in any way an alternative to testing on an actual device. One of the reasons that the iPhone Simulator doesn't give you the actual device experience is because your Mac's screen is not a touch screen. Until now, if you wanted that, you would have to either test on your actual device or use an app like iSimulate to send touches (and other device data) to your app. While iSimulate and its ilk are still a good alternative, I've found a setup that serves me well for 90% of my debug-time testing: an iPad, coupled with the Air Display app.

Air Display is an iPad app that lets you use your iPad as a second monitor. It actually works really well (I also bought iDisplay, earlier, and did not enjoy the experience at all). To test your app, simply drag the iPhone Simulator to your iPad (make sure mirroring is turned off so that your screen stretches to the iPad). The coolest thing is that because your iPad has a touch screen, you can test your app in the iPhone Simulator with touches instead of mouse clicks.

Of course, this doesn't mean that you shouldn't test as often as you can on an actual device (as the iPad doesn't recreate the ergonomics of the iPhone perfectly). Also, if you need other sensor data (like the accelerometer, etc.) then also consider getting an app like iSimulate to compliment your toolbox.

Hope you find this useful!

If you have time-saving development tricks of your own, please feel free to share them in the comments.