November 11th, 2009

iPhone Companion Apps: New Project to App Store in Two Months

ClarusiPhone128.png

Normally, I write a “Postmortem” blog post after each product I ship. However, recently I got the chance to give a talk at CocoaHeads Swindon, and chose to talk about my trials and tribulations when writing Clarus for iPhone (iTunes Link). The other day it struck me that this actually turned out to be a great postmortem, so instead of writing a blog post I sat at my computer and recorded a video of my slides and commentary.

The talk goes through many aspects of designing and building an iPhone companion app, from design to implementation gotchas to non-coding issues such as whether you should even bother with an app, how much it costs to do, and so on.

CompanionAppsImage.jpg

Rough Contents:

  • Part 1: Core Functionality
  • MVC Xtreme
  • Part 2: Syncing
    • K.I.S.S.
    • Establishing Trust
    • Forming a Conversation
    • Bonjour Basics
    • What Can (and Will) Go Wrong
    • Why to avoid NSFileHandle
    • Using CFNetwork Instead
    • Techniques for Transferring Big-Ass Files
    • Performance
  • Part 3: Strategy
    • Think Small
    • No, Even Smaller Than That
    • Know Your Limits
    • Mo Money, Mo Problems
  • Fin
  • You can download a PDF copy of the slides here (5.1Mb).
    You can download the video here (151Mb, 45m 50s).