Cory Wiles Blog

Finally after a few years of neglecting some helper classes that I wrote to "ease the pain" of accessing YouTube and Picasa with the Zend Framework I updated my classes and posted everything to GitHub.  Nothing like putting yourself out there as motivation to keep up with your own projects.

It seems that no matter where you go in the mobile development/marketing circles you always find people who are VERY passionate on their views on the future of mobile apps...whether one is better, faster, offers more features, cheaper, has a better business model, etc.  My personal opinion on the matter is that there is room for both and there are instances when most companies need both and others where you need one or the other.  Where most companies make their mistake is that they don't have a mobile strategy, but that is a sermon for another Sunday. This past week, RIM made a pretty bold statement/pot-shot at Apple in regards to this topic.  Liam Cassidy over at Gigaom wrote a very interesting article, Poking Holes in RIM’s Anti-Apple Rhetoric, where he definitely gives RIM some serious food for thought.

I remember the first public speech I ever gave. I was in sixth grade and terrified out of my mind. What makes my experience from most is that growing up I stuttered VERY badly.  I rehearsed my little three minute speech a thousand times and felt pretty confident.  A lot of students wrote their entire speech on note cards and just read. My mom got her first degree in journalism and taught me that one should never do that.  Just make bullet point reminders and TALK to you audience. As such I can't stand when people put a thousand bullet points on a deck and read to me on top of which now I have to look at distracting animations that serve no point. I still follow the practice of having talking points and I RARELY use animations.

In prepping for my talk at this years BarCamp in Memphis I decided to break away from Keynote, which is awesome, but I just don't use 1/32 of its power, and use Google Docs of which I am a huge fan of already. The experience couldn't have been nicer. Not only was the interface straight forward but I loved the benefit of being able to access it from any location and machine. In addition,  when I was done I can share it with a click of a button. I don't have to give up control of ownership by uploading it to another service like SlideShare.

Thanks Google for the wonderful option. For the minimalist like myself who don't present like Steve jobs Google Docs is the way to go.

This past Saturday I participate in my first BarCamp here in Memphis. Most of the user groups and conferences that I attend are very technical in nature and while @barcampmemphis did have technical discussions and developers there it was a good mixture of marketing and general interactive as well. My presentation, The Fine Print of iOS Development, was one of the ones voted on to be presented. However, my session wasn't until later that afternoon so I had some time to kill. I went and listened to a few sessions, but what I enjoyed the most about BarCamp was the networking and general conversations between the people in the various industries. Due to the nature of my talk I had a lot of preliminary sidebars with a few marketers which was great because that is who my presentation was geared toward. I made some slight changes to my deck as a result.

One the most asked questions I got was "Why should someone have a native iPhone app instead of a mobile web app?" I gave my two cents for the pros and cons of both, but there was one particular company's experience that I have been thnking about a lot. Not to pop my own collar but I think their experience exemplifies why agencies and marketers should hear my talk. The individual that I was talking to worked for Company A. Company A sells a particular service which currently has some pretty steep competition. Early this year Company A hired Company B to build an iPhone app for their service. The app was submitted in the early summer and has yet to be approved by Apple. I asked why not and person from Company A explained that company b wasn't getting a straight answer from Apple and that Apple keeps changing the rules. At the time I didn't think it was my place to really say anything about Company B because I didn't know them nor their circumstances of the app functionality. It was unfortunate for Company A because they are falling further and further behind their compition as a result of this. In addition, Company A now thinks that investing in an iPhone app is a waste of time and money and that it would serve their users better to just have a mobile web app.

I just pushed the latest updates to github.  In addition, over the next view weeks, of adding in Tabbar Controller support I am also going to move the boilerplate code to something like CWIAdManagerViewController class.  If anyone has any other suggestions or updates please let me know.

In anticipation for the upcoming public release of iOS 4.2, I have updated my Universal iOS App project (iAd Branch).  The project will run on 3.2 and up with iAd support for iPhone and iPad (4.2 only for iPad).

Around the same time that Oliver Drobnik (Formely Dr. Touch) published his blog entry, Custom-Colored Disclosure Indicators, I was also in the middle a client's project where the table view cells each had a different colored uitablviewcellaccessory.  I had to deal with 20 different images for the accessory views (10 for pre-iPhone4 and 10 for retina display).   At the time I knew having to manage the images themselves and the code to display those views was unwieldy and cumbersome.  I took inspiration from Oliver's post to come up with a class, CWCustomAccessoryView, which allows the developer to customize the way the accessoryView for a cell looks which includes the stroke, _>_, and fill color.

The latest project that i have been working on has the CRAZIEST workflow that I have ever experienced.  The app isn't in the app store, but is used as a sales tool for the type of services that their company can offer.  Surprisingly, at least to myself, I was able to come up with my own navigation controls to manage the workflow.  The workflow consisted of various tabbarcontrollers, uinavigationcontrollers, fullscreen views, some with navigation bar, some without.  What ended up being the trickest parts to deal with was handling the transitions between full screen views and views with the navigation bar along with the back button.  My first attempt in the transition worked except for the fact that the back bar item was BEHIND the uinavigationbar titleView.