iPhone App from concept to product
- 1. iPhone App from concept to product Tips & Tools to get the job done Joey Simhon (@joeysim) CTO and Co-Founder DoAT
- 2. Hello World Growing Internet babies since 2000 Growing real ones since 2008 Passionate about engineering and the culture around it Owned and managed a few businesses Built and architected a few products Bottom line - I must be a Persistent fella
- 3. I got a confession to make
- 4. My name is Joey and I’m a procrastinator “The best part about procrastination is that you are never bored”
- 5. Procrastination = Tools I call it productive procrastination (an oxymoron) I love finding new tools that solve real problems (which I don’t necessarily have) I’ll do my best to share the right tools to achieve what you want, quickly and without re-inventing the wheel
- 6. This is where I come from
- 7. This is what we’ll discuss Concept > Design > Develop > Beta > Release
- 8. Concept
- 9. The Erasable Marker When you start with your first concept, try and envision the core UI element of the product you’re try to build Jot down how it looks & behaves. Verify technical implementation boundaries (and be sure to break some :) ) DoAT - Swiping between live apps Concept
- 10. iPhone Screenshots Take screenshots of things that get you emotional (love it / hate it!) Some of the work was already done for you http://mobile-patterns.com/ (or god forbid http://www.androidpatterns.com/ ) Concept
- 11. Mockups When you need to communicate it to a larger / distributed group of people My tool of choice - Balsamiq Concept
- 12. Design
- 13. Photoshop I’ll settle for paint / gimp / Paint.net for that matter PSD to use - http://www.teehanlax.com/blog/ iphone-4-gui-psd-retina-display/ Design for x2 (Retina) Ziv Meltzer wrote a post ‘bout it http://blog.zivmeltzer.com/post/3628811523/tips-the- design-process-for-ios-apps Design
- 14. Your Hand Reviewing a design on large screens is a NO GO. Do it on your PHONE. Easy solution - Send by email and save image to album Tool - Liveview (for Mac) http://zambetti.com/projects/liveview/ Design
- 15. Don’t forget to RTFM Apple’s UI Guidelines is something you’d want to know by heart when designing http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/ UserExperience/Conceptual/MobileHIG/Introduction/ Introduction.html Design
- 16. Develop
- 17. API and Server Logic Design your API early Use static responses while you do Try and keep as much logic on server’s end - easier maintenance and cross platform future If you work in a distributed manner - document your API, you’ll move faster We created Gondor for this (coming to Apache’s near you soon. NGINXs too) Develop
- 18. Create multiple targets Will allow you to have your team install several versions Will allow you to stage new server APIs as well Will reduce the clutter and keep your logs / analytics coherent Create separate DefaultProperties.plist for each target Do yourself a favor and use git (Didn’t know wherelse to put it so...) Develop
- 19. No such thing as alpha Not always accurate (managed to prove it once... sorta) But you will definitely find yourself with “legacy” POC code running in production Try and draw the line between experiments and THE product Don’t refactor before you’ve hit the ceiling but when you have to - do it like mad Develop
- 20. Incorporate URL Schemes This is the link of the app era Allows you be to be accessed in context? Be sure to communicate it externally so others can use it. Some examples - instagram://camera - launches their camera lastfm://artist/Cher/similar - Cher similar artist radio lastfm://globaltags/rock - Plays rock global tag radio More examples - http://handleopenurl.com/scheme Develop
- 21. Push notification Make sure to at least enable basic (default behavior is launching the app on swipe / View button) Urbanairship is a good starting point http://urbanairship.com Deep links are an important addition, you can respond to launches from push messages Develop
- 22. Metrics Driven Approach Try and collect as many events and params as possible cause you never know what question comes up about user’s behavior Tools - Flurry, Localytics, Google Analytics, Home brew. Most will do event name + KV params We use Flurry - has some disadvantages The matrix is update time | events support | user segmentation | reporting Develop
- 23. Understand iOS Simulator There’s an inherent problem with it - it’s too darn fast and has too much juice Sometimes has weird issues You don’t hold it in your hand Good for coverage testing with different SDKs (e.g. autoplay video on iOS 4.3.x) Develop
- 24. Beta
- 25. Provisioning Beta Versions You’ll start with IPAs sent by email Supporting this is hell (“Yes, drag it to your iTunes, oh you don’t have it.... blah blah blah”) You can try using BetaBuilder http://www.hanchorllc.com/betabuilder-for-ios/ TestFlight is our weapon of choice http://testflightapp.com There’s also HockeyKit (open source too) http://hockeykit.net/ Beta
- 26. Stabilize - Crashes The #1 tool to get you stability and eliminate crashes - a crash reporting tool iPhone logs are worth nothing without the debugging symbols make sure you keep them PLCrashReporter and CREP (“holly crep I got a new crash”) Beta
- 27. Stabilize #2 - Memory Static code analysis - 80/20 rule applies here XCode Instrumentation tools - memory is the thing you’d worry ‘bout most of the time Beta
- 28. App Store
- 29. Text is all you got Think about what you want to write Competition texts is sometimes a good starting point Autocomplete is one you’ll surface Search results is the other They are scored differently Release
- 30. And images too You can get creative here Release
- 31. Take your time Submit when you ready Reject binary if things get messy App approval took ~7 days App updates took 1-5 days Tool - http://148apps.biz/app-store-metrics/ Release
- 32. Monitor iTunesConnect only keeps 14 days of past reports And will only tell you how many downloads/updates A combination of AppAnnie (free) and appFigures (paid) will do the job You can also setup a geckoboard if you want this info and analytics shown together Release
- 33. Respond to user reviews This is a real-life case I had with one of our users Release
- 34. Last bits You can ask for an “expedited review” if you have a good reason - we got an app approved within the day before TC Disrupt Use it wisely and rarely CoreData and version updates - be careful here (and any other local data) WebViews can sometimes allow you to release products faster Release
- 35. Thank You. Joey Simhon (@joeysim) CTO and Co-Founder DoAT