Wednesday, May 25, 2011

RestKit - Getting Started w/ examples on iPhone

The lectures provided by Stanford University on iTunes offer a great start for anyone looking to kick-off iPhone development. Yet they leave a gap when it comes to driving the UI with an easy to use WebServices library. And the thought of "rolling your own" can be scary. This is where RestKit fills in the gap by providing an Objective-C framework that makes it easy to send/receive JSON messages and much much more...

If you want to quickly get some hands-on time with an iPhone simulator and all the features that RestKit has to offer then have a quick peek here.

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Inkscape - Some discoveries are only made on mac

For those who leave the comfortable realm of Windows behind and enter the rather strange and initially maddening world of the Mac, the only thing that can possibly hit harder than not being able to use the keys and shortcuts like before, has to be the glaring lack of some MSPaint like utility.

Well, you may quickly find solace by going out and downloading either Gimp or Inkscape.

My personal vote would lean heavily towards Inkspace because of the abundance of excellent resources and tutorials when it comes to getting started with this tool:
  1. inkscape-class-day-1
  2. inkscape-class-day-2
  3. inkscape-class-day-3
  4. inkscape-class-day-4
A lot of screencasts are available as well.

Afterwards to get your creativity flowing use the following two awesome tutorials to create some mac/iPhone icons of your own:

Saturday, May 14, 2011

Top 10 Mouthwatering User Interfaces

  1. chinesepod.com
  2. binarynights.com - makers of ForkLift2
  3. opscode.com
  4. notableapp.com
  5. screencast.com
  6. linkedin.com - It is lower on the list because with all the clutter that has been added since its launch has actually taken its UI value downhill.

Friday, May 13, 2011

Lightning fast iPhone mockups with LucidChart

With any kind of design work the very first challenge is picking the right tool for the job. After evaluating many tools that were listed as Top 10 in most people's lists, there was only one that really met (nay exceeded) all the requirements for usability, slickness, polish & collaboration ... when given the skill level of a complete newbie ... and that tool is LucidChart.

Without further ramblings, here's a video glorifying the beauty of working with Lucidchart ... all in under five minutes.