I’m a big fantasy football fan and I’ve been playing for years. I had my first draft of the year last night so I am officially in fantasy football mode. This year I am playing in two Yahoo! leagues and today I stumbled across a very cool application for my iPhone. Yahoo! has built an application that I know I’ll be using a lot this season. I’ve often struggled with easily managing my team and watching my scores while on the move. This app makes fantasy football team management very simple and puts it in my pocket. Thanks Yahoo!
I recently converted an old PC into a home server. There is a good article over on Life Hacker showcasing the best home server software. I chose Ubuntu Server Edition for my setup. I now backup my important data on the server and share files on my home network. I’ve been thinking lately that I need to use my home server to be more productive with my day to day activities. I’d like to create ways to make my personal life and my development work more automated. I like the idea of having an FTP server to access my files remotely. It makes sense to setup a version control system like Subversion to create restore points for all my data. Maybe I should host all my pictures on the server and share with friends and family? What can I do to automate tasks in a way that makes myself more productive?
If you know of any useful ways to use a home server let me know in the comments.
Being a front end developer by trade, I’m a sucker for a great user interface. I’ve been using Mint.com as a financial management tool for a few months now and I must say I really like this application. The application pulls in multiple accounts from my various financial institutions and provides me with a beautiful interface to see all my data. There are tools that allow you to budget, run reports, search all accounts at once and categorize your transactions but the UI is the real winner for me. If you haven’t given Mint.com a look you should. Their user base has been growing rapidly [ http://tinyurl.com/c7p5gb ] and it’s no surprise. They have created a great application over there at Mint.com and I am happy to support them.
Mint.com [ the best free way to manage your money online ]
As I approach my 31st birthday I find myself having more and more of that backwards facing perspective. Some call it “hindsight”… Looking at the following list of the Top 20 Internet Millionaires under 30 makes me a bit more motivated to get myself on the next list. You know the Top 20 Internet Millionaires under the age of 40. Here’s to your success!
During my daily feed reading I came across a new code editor with some very promising features and a refreshing take on authoring code. As a professional developer I can tell you that choosing a favorite code editor is a daunting task. One editor will do a few things you just love but fall short in other areas. Another editor will provide the power and stability you desire but leave a lot to be desired in UI and usability. At first look, new code editor Bespin seems to provide stability, speed, power and clean presentation coupled with a forward thinking ideology about development in the clouds. What do I mean by “development in the clouds”? I’m talking about using software as a service. Rather than the software being local to your machine, the software is accessed as a service over the Internet making it available to any machine with an Internet connection. Imagine having access to your development environment from many machines without having to install the appropriate software on each one. Bespin takes a stab at providing you with a code editor that is readily available to you as you move from one machine to the next without skipping a beat.
Bespin is currently in beta mode and I’ve only given it a quick run, but I like what’s going on so far and it’s an open source application so we can all make it better. Follow the link below to give it a try yourself and let me know what you think? Once I’ve had a chance to work with this new application in depth I will write another post with more details.
All you need is 5 pens or pencils, 8 or so small rubber bands and an iPhone. Pretty soon you’ll be watching The Office at the office with your hands free to do more work! Your boss will love this idea.. Trust me.
I’ve had an iPhone for nearly a year and a half now and it’s the best mobile device I’ve ever owned. Every week I find a useful way to use my iPhone in the pursuit of making my daily life more efficient, informative and streamlined. I’ve downloaded many great applications for my iPhone. I have organizational apps, streaming radio apps, social networking apps, blogging apps and various others I use almost daily. I often find myself wanting an iPhone application that isn’t available or is not the caliber I’d like. To that end, I think I have good reason to jump head first into developing for the iPhone.
During this series I will discuss the process of building out an iPhone application. I will share my ideas, tips, “gotchas” and suggestions. I will literally be going through the development process during the series so the information should be very relevant and up to date. I will assume that you are not new to application development in general and I will refer to well known development processes without going into detail about those processes specifically.
The first step: getting the idea out of your head
I’ve developed many online applications in the past and I will be applying much of the very same knowledge and experience to developing this application. I’ve always found that clearly identifying the features and goals of the application before even one line of code is authored goes a long way towards ensuring the application’s success. The first step is to document the application so it can be fully explored and vetted. What problems does it attempt to resolve? Who will use it and why? What limitations will the application have on a mobile device? What advantages will it have on a mobile device? Having the idea out of your head and fully written out allows you to more effectively explore the idea and put it to full scrutiny. Often times you will reveal previously unidentified strengths and weaknesses of your planned application during this step, which is why it’s of utmost importance. Significant time can be lost rewriting code and changing direction if you don’t take the time up front fully documenting your idea and it’s purpose.
Create an application summary in which you document the overall idea. Be general but try to explain the idea from end to end. It sometimes helps to write this summary as if it were a story. For instance, “Jack and Jill are long time friends and have always enjoyed staying in touch and updating one another with the latest in their lives. Jill will email photos and small videos to Jack. Jack will write emails and text Jill every few days or so. Jill recently downloaded an iPhone application that allows her to create a time line of her days with images, video, text messages and emails. Jack can subscribe to this time line and get near real time updates when an item is added to the time line…” Get the idea? You can write out your application as if it were a real thing and in use by others. Doing this will also set you up beautifully when developing and documenting use cases for your application.
You will want to create a functional requirements document for your new iPhone application. Functional requirements capture the intended behavior of the application. You can express this behavior as services, tasks, or functions the application is required to perform. This is an important document because you will use it to code against once that time has come. If you keep this information in your head it will be very difficult to ensure you’ve met all the needs of the application during development.
I suggest you develop a user action diagram. This diagram will show the user’s paths as they interacts with the system. The information you are trying to reveal here is how the user will move throughout the application. How does a user go from one step to the next? When a user performs a certain action where to they go from there? What happens after a user does this or that? It is a visual representation of all the paths a user can travel throughout the application. When doing this you will reveal dead ends and loose processes. Remember, you want to keep the interaction with the application very tight. You want your users to flow through every process like water!
During the next post in this iPhone development series I will discuss downloading the iPhone SDK and getting a solid development environment setup. Stay tuned! Remember to follow me on Twitter and continue the discussion. I love discussion.
Welcome to the new look and focus of darrenbuckner.com. It’s been a long time coming. I’m still working out a few wrinkles but we should be all systems go in less than 48 hours! Isn’t this exiciting?
You can read a little more about this site on the about page. My new goal is to write a few posts a week, minimum, and hopefully something more in the range of 4-5 a week. I usually have a lot to say so now I have to get those words into good, informative posts. Wish me luck.
I’ve had an