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.

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!) :)

Following my talks at the LOGIN, The Big M, NSConference, and Tweakers.net Developer Summit last month, .net magazine asked if I'd like to be the subject of their Reader Q&A section in their next issue and answer questions sent in via Twitter on life, UX, mobile, and everything. I informed them that yes, I'd be delighted to, and this whole adventure eventually resulted in a lovely email from Tanya at .net magazine with the questions that were tweeted in.

(Welcome if you're reading this from the link in the .net article, by the way. I hope you enjoyed it.)

Fast forward to this morning when I decided to write my replies using only my new iPad 2 to see how it holds up to some — albeit lightweight — real-world use. As I do, I will be writing this post, also on my iPad, using the free WordPress app.

The first hurdle (or "even the best web apps still have an uphill struggle when it comes to competing with native user experiences")

The first thing I had to do was to locate Tanya's email and copy the questions from it to Pages. After this, I would pick the questions I wanted to answer, delete the others, and start entering my answers after each of the questions. An easy enough task. Or so you would think.

The first problem was the Mail app on iPad when used with a GMail account via IMAP: it is horrible at searching for existing messages that it hasn't downloaded (ones on the server). So I had to do what I usually have to do, which is to fire up the GMail site in Mobile Safari. This let me find the message but — get this — I couldn't select the whole thing. There was just no way I could make the message scroll while selecting. A basic usability failure if ever there was one. I finally had to resort to using Send To Dropbox to forward the email to Dropbox where, using the Dropbox iPad app, I could select the contents to paste into Pages.

Pages for iPad

For the most part, Pages for iPad worked like a charm. My only complaint is that the word count feature is so well hidden that I actually thought it didn't have one (and cooked up a quick app to scratch my own itch before finding it).

How's that for radical contextualization? WordPress app issues.

Writing this post in the WordPress app wasn't entirely hassle-free either.

The first gotcha was a usability issue. When I started a new post, after entering the title, I tapped into the post body section and the header information entirely disappeared off the top of the screen. I would not have had a problem with that interaction — and, in fact, would have quite enjoyed the additional writing space it provided — if it had provided me with a cue — a landmark — to denote where the information went and a means by which I could get it back. Without either of those, I was left wondering whether it was a bug and I had lost the information altogether. It made me tap off of the text view to see if something had gone wrong. When the text view lost focus, the header information returned, and I was reassured that I hadn't lost it.

Another usability issue was more concerning: I wasn't sure, as I started typing my post, whether it was being auto-saved. This led me to feeling insecure and I started searching for a way to save. As I stumbled through the interface, I found the options screen where I set the status of the post to Draft and hit the save button. A quick test confirmed that the WordPress app doesn't auto-save as you're typing so I keep hitting the Update button every so often, which removes the editor and thereby interrupts my writing flow.

I would implement quite a rigorous auto-save since there's nothing worse than losing data (and it's an operating system expectation on iOS).

Adding images to my blog post

One other usability issue I had was with adding images to my post. The buttons for adding images are at the bottom of the compose window and are covered by the keyboard when you are typing. For one thing, this led me initially to question if the functionality existed at all since I hadn't noticed them prior to clicking in the text box to edit my post. Then, it meant that I had to once more interrupt my writing flow to add images by first manually making the keyboard lose focus, then adding the image, then tapping in the text box to return to editing the text.

Once I realised where to find and how to use the buttons, I was unimpressed by the functionality. It adds some horrible code either above or below your content (instead of where you are in the document).

I would redesign the interface so that the toolbar buttons were in a keyboard extension and so the writing area filled up the entire remaining space above the keyboard in both orientations.

Also, while taking screenshots on my iPad was simple enough (if a bit unergonomic due to the distance between the two buttons that have to be pressed in tandem), I found the simple task of annotating and cropping them to be a big issue. To cut a long story of several fruitless app purchases short, I ended up using the free PhotoPad app which was one of the few I could find that actually showed me the exact image dimensions I was cropping to.

A general UX gripe with the iPad: Undo

Shake to undo works like a charm on the iPhone. This is a tiny device that fits into the palm of one hand. Shaking it involves almost no effort at all and is an ergonomically-sound gesture. Not so with the iPad.

The iPad is the size of about six iPhone 4 placed side-by-side and thus has very different human factors considerations. Lifting this baby off your lap and shaking it wildly from side to side every time you want to undo a typo will, at best, make you look mentally unstable if carried out in a public space.

Apple must implement a better gesture for this important gesture in future versions of iOS for the iPad. I recommend a three-finger swipe to the left (with a three-finger right swipe as redo). It's currently not mapped to any universal gesture on the OS and is relatively effortless to perform and can be layered in as an alternative gesture while still supporting shake-to-undo to transition iPhone users to the iPad.

Since writing this, I've been alerted on Twitter that there is an Undo button on the iPad's symbol/number keyboard but it's not ideal; hidden away like that. I've had an iPad since the beginning and I never noticed it.

Blogsy

I finally gave up on the WordPress app and I'm typing this in Blogsy. Goodness knows it has its own limitations (for example, the code and "WYSIWYG" views look identical initially, making it impossible to know which mode you're in) but it is still light years ahead of the official WordPress app and has lots of potential (or is at least a step in the right direction).

A land of opportunity

So, is the iPad 2 fit for "real work?" Depends. On the app, that is. And what you call work.

On the one hand, you have awesome apps like Garage Band, Pages, Keynote, and Dropbox that you can be really productive with. On the other, there are lots of half-baked apps out there that may have potential but are, quite frankly, rather limited in professional features.

It feels to me like most apps on the iPad have a long way to go before users can be as productive as they are with a Mac. Far from being a negative aspect, this means that there is lots of opportunity here (for app developers who grok UX) to create successful apps.

March is about to become a mad month for me, starting tomorrow (or perhaps it started on Friday, with Geek Ninja Battle Night). Today, I'm off to London, staying overnight at Heathrow (and hopefully attending this evening's NSCoder night in London) before flying to Lithuania tomorrow where, on Thursday, I will be presenting the opening keynote at the LOGIN conference, in front of an expected audience of over 2,000 (no pressure!)

At LOGIN, I'm honored to be appearing alongside some stellar folks including Ben Hammersley, editor-at-large of Wired UK, my good friend and lead developer evangelist at Mozilla, Christian Heilmann, Marc Sands from Tate Modern, Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi of Flattr.com (and co-founder of The Pirate Bay), Shehzaad Shams from Amnesty International, and Adam Somlai Fischer, the lead designer of Prezi.com. Needless to say, there are quite a few sessions that I am greatly looking forward to attending.

The Big M

When I return from LOGIN, it's straight to Bath for The Big M conference where I'm looking forward to catching up with, among others, the ever-delightful Dan Appelquist from Vodafone and my good friend and conference buddy Bruce Lawson from Opera. I'll be presenting there on the 21st and doing a half-day workshop on mobile design principles for iOS on the 22nd.

NSConference

After my workshop at The Big M, it's a train to Reading where, on the 23rd, I will be presenting an opening keynote at NSConference. I wish I could attend the whole of NSConference and hang out with some of the other awesome speakers – like my friend and fellow UX-obsessive Mike Lee, the-one-and-only Mr. Matt Legend Gemmell, Drew McCormack, and the scarily clever Marcus Zarra.

Tweakers.net Developer Summit

I get a night's rest in Reading after which I'm off to Amsterdam to present the opening keynote at the tweakers.net Developer Summit on the 24th.

iOS SDK workshop

I fly back to the UK on the 25th and round off the month with my iOS SDK Dojo, a 3-Day workshop in Brighton wherein I teach Objective-C and Cocoa Touch – sprinkled with lots of real-world and user-experience-design-related tips for iPhone and iPad.

Whew!

What a crazy month.

Here's looking forward to seeing some of you on my travels and to making it to April in one piece. :)

Photo credit: NSConference: Stefaan Lesage (from his NSConference 2010 - Day 1 review from CocoaHeads Belgium).

So, to upload the 140 or so photos, I downloaded Flickr's desktop uploading app, Flickr Uploadr and dragged my set of photos in. Upon dragging them in, I realized that they were in the wrong order. They were listed in reverse chronological order, which the last taken photo at the top and the first one at the bottom of the window. In the top-left corner of the app, I saw a message telling me that they were "currently ordered by date taken" and that I could drag and drop if I wanted to re-order them.

Here, the app was telling me that I had two sort options. Either reverse chronological (as was the default) or custom (where I had to drag and drop the photos manually). Not wanting to reverse 200 photos manually, I ran a Google search to see how others had solved the problem. Interestingly, I found this forum post dating from 2008 that informed the Flickr team of the issue. The resolution there appeared to be that it's not a bug but a feature because Flickr is a photo blog and that's the only ordering they were willing to support. I also found a post by someone suggesting that I manually drag each photo to the Flickr Uploadr in the order I wanted them to appear.

Needless to say that infuriated me a little.

These were photos from an event and they told a story of sorts. They needed to be in chronological order. I vented my frustrations, as you do, in a tweet:

Harsh words, perhaps. But this is the effect bad user experiences have on people. Some people blame themselves. Others get angry. If people have enough bad user experiences in a day – they end up having a bad day. That's the power we have as user experience designers and developers. We have the power to make someone have a good day or a bad day.

And yes, I know this specific instance is very much a first-world problem but imagine if I had to use Flickr Uploadr every day as part of my job. Or imagine someone that does have to use a piece of software that is entirely unergonomic. Going beyond simply infuriating people, badly-designed software can actually harm people physically. (Based on numbers from five years ago (PDF link), RSI was costing the UK economy £5-£20 billion alone – I would love to study how much of that is based on bad software ergonomics.)

So, to get back to the story: several people tweeted suggesting that I use iPhoto or the web uploader. It was Aegir Hallmunder who tweeted the next piece of the puzzle:

Really? But that's not what the app told me (it told me I had two options for sorting my photos. I would expect the web site to offer the exact same two options). So I went to the Flickr web site to see. And lo and behold, Aegir was right. I could sort the photos in my in whatever order I wanted to.

This, actually is even worse UX. Why? Because there is an inconsistency.

If the app didn't offer any sort options whatsoever, I could understand it. It would still be confusing but at least I could view the app as a dumb uploader. I would think: "OK, I drag the photos here and they get uploaded. I guess I should be able to change things on the web site."

But that's not the case.

The app appears clever. It gives me the feature to order my photos. It just doesn't give me all the options that the web site has. What this makes me think – because I see the desktop app as a complete app and not as some sort of hybrid that shares parts of certain features with the web app – is that Flickr itself doesn't let me order my photos in any other way.

Now, before you think I'm simply dumping on the app, there are parts of it that I do like quite a bit.

For one thing, it intelligently handles updating of multiple selections. When I select multiple photos, the Tags box changes to read "Add to existing tags:" and lets me add tags to all selected elements. It is similarly clever about other attributes that you can change in multiple selections. The bit that I do not like about multiple selections is that the settings are applied when you deselect. Since there is no undo (another UX gripe), I would expect this action to require a more outward expression of intent (e.g., a button press) to persist.

To bring the story to a conclusion, after learning from Aegir that I could reorder the photos on the Flickr web site, I proceeded to upload the photos to Flickr only to see that they were appearing in the correct (i.e., chronological) order in the set. I kid you not. So, after all that, it did exactly the opposite of what it told me it would do. Oh. My. Goodness!

Talk about being a bad communicator. If Flickr Uploadr had been a person, I would have said he was having a laugh with me.

Now, again, you might be thinking: wow, what a way to make a mountain out of a molehill. But you have to remember that user experience is about the little things. This was a little thing that annoyed me and made what could have been a lovely experience an infuriating one. And it's OK to get annoyed. If you don't get annoyed by things that don't work – if you don't find fault with the status quo – then you probably shouldn't be a designer. Why would you want to be if you don't want to change things? Make them better? The trick is to channel that anger, that passion, into making things that are beautiful. Things that give people delightful experiences. Things that change the world for the better…

One little thing at a time.

I was honored to be asked, alongside Mathias Dahlström from LastMinute.com and Tim Brooke from Nokia, to mentor Design Jam London 2.

The one-day event, organized by Johanna Kollmann, Joe Lanman, Franco Papeschi, Desigan Chinniah and supported by Mozilla Labs Concept Series, City University London, Fjord, and Geeks of London took place at City University this Saturday.

I can only speak for myself, of course, but – based on feedback on the day and afterwards – I believe it was hugely rewarding for all involved. Personally, I found mentoring ten teams – each comprised of designers with varied backgrounds – a lovely challenge. When I'm consulting, I usually coach a single team at a time and this forced me to up my game and kept me on my toes for the majority of the day.

The teams.

After the introductions, the attendees divided themselves up into ten design teams to tackle – within the constraints of an accelerated schedule – the mobile design problem we presented them with:

Design a mobile service to help visitors to London 'become local' - to discover and connect with the city in a meaningful way.

Exploring the problem domain.

Many of the teams started out by exploring the problem ("what does it mean to be local?", "what are meaningful ways to connect?", etc.), brainstorming, and delving deeper via the creation of user profiles, user journeys, and wireframes. Some teams even found time to do some simple research via surveys and user testing with paper prototypes.

Pre-lunch pep rally: focus, focus, focus!

All teams were asked to do a preliminary stand-up presentation at mid-day before breaking for lunch. While listening to the ten teams present, it became clear to me that there were common issues that the teams were tackling with regard to the problem domain and that there was a common lack of focus on mobile-specific considerations. Some of the teams were proposing whole systems, parts of which would be better served by a web application. Before the teams broke for lunch, I gave them a brief list of considerations and asked them to focus!, focus!, focus! ("quality over quantity") and consider context and ergonomics in their designs. Specifically, I asked them to consider:

• Create data or re-use data (APIs, etc.)?
• Curation or crowd-sourced?
• Real-time or passive interactions?
• Based on local knowledge or visitor knowledge?
• Primarily offline or online?
• One platform or many platforms?
• Context!
• Ergonomics!
• Focus!

It was very rewarding to see some of the teams really take these points into consideration during lunch (see Team 6 - Siux's wiki page, for example) . One of the teams, Hi 5, completely changed their design based on the feedback and ended up creating one of my favorite designs of the day: A "no UI" app called Spidey Sense that warns visitors when they're walking into dodgy areas of town by vibrating.

At the end of the day, there were the final presentations and I was really impressed by quite a number of them; a few of which I believe could actually become successful apps.

Using the tube to learn about London

Based on the feedback during the event and afterwards, the event was really well received with people who had been to the first event commenting that the organizational committee had taken their feedback on board and improved the format considerably the second time around.

FJ tests out an interactive prototype

One thing I would love to see is the creation of two-day jams where designers and developers work together in small, interdisciplinary teams (and with an agile process) to design and develop mobile apps.

To conclude, all I can say is that if you're lucky enough to have a Design Jam in your area, jump at the chance to become an attendee or mentor. I can guarantee you that it's time well spent and a very rewarding experience for everyone involved.

Related links:

• Design Jam Wiki, including upcoming Design Jams.
• Design Jam 2 videos.
• Twitpics from Design Jam London 2.
• Design Jam photos from Flickr.
• Tweets, #djl2.
• Tweets, #designjamlondon.

See the other talks from the conference on the Frontend 2010 videos page and contact me if you'd like to book me to present at your mobile, web, design, or development conference or if you'd like me to present on user experience at your company.

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.