Danny Turley, designing and developing for the Web & iPhone » iPhone

Benefits of Wireframing

Danny — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 21:01:15 +0000

I have noticed in my experience that often the “Wireframing” stage in the design process is often overlooked by designers and developers, and I have personally been guilty of this in the past as I did not quite understand the merit of it at the time. With experience I have re-evaluated and developed my design process, and realising the best way to succeed is to plan. Wireframing is arguably one of the most important stages in the planning of any project. Wireframing allows the designers to unleash their creative thinking and allow others to visualise how the interface may not only look but also how the user can interact with it (UX), helping others to foresee any complications.

Rapid Iterations

Once you have setup a template for your wireframes, its very easy to produce quick wireframes with boxes and shaded areas to represent placement of content in the interface. With loads of iterations of wireframes it allows the designers to consider all possible ideas quickly and include it to test to see what fits the best.

Sharing is Caring

By producing wireframes, it allows others such as developers and clients become involved in the design process at a very early stage. With their involvement they can help shape the design to help suit the client, and allow the developer to see what is possible and what will not work.

It’s Cheap

It’s cheap for a lot of reasons but there are two major reasons why its cheap. All you need to produce a wireframe is a pen and sketchbook. Another reason is it can save you money in the long run. By involving it early in the planning stages of the build you will be able to save from future complications and will cost you time and money.

Focuses on Content

Wireframing takes the focus off the color and the aesthetics of the interface, and forces the designer to focus the placement of the content, and places an emphasis on what the content is as it will shape the design.

Paper Prototyping

Paper Prototyping is one of the best methods in getting feedback on usability issues and especially an opportunity to involve the user at a very early stage of the design process. Its so simple and quick to work with Paper Prototypes although they its not the same as live testing on the correct platform, but at the planning stages this method can help guide your designs.

Client Engagement

Wireframing presents the opportunity to share your ideas to the client, and for them to offer feedback and share their own ideas. This is a brilliant way to engage the client at the beginning of the process and will lead to the likelihood of the client signing off on the design.

Download iPad Wireframe Template for Illustrator

The Virtual Concierge

Danny — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 23:30:45 +0000

Shortly after finishing off the User Interface for Oblique Strategies, a great opportunity presented itself at one of the master-classes organised by the Multidisciplinary Design staff. We were to asked to work in groups of three, and to collaborate our creative thinking and present these ideas back to the class. The great advantage of working on the Multidisciplinary Design course, is that their is a wide variety of design disciplines, and working together on the project was a lot fun and the ideas we came up with were fantastic. In particular one idea that emerge from the group was the Virtual Concierge iPhone application.

Concept

The concept behind the Virtual Concierge is to target the 5 and 6 star hotels, who are looking to create an experience of exclusivity among their clients. One of the most important roles in creating a positive experience amongst the customers is down to the Concierge. What the Virtual Concierge will do is take that experience to the next level. It will allow the customers of the hotel to have access to the best knowledge around the area and on the history of the hotel. I have some more ideas in the pipeline to continue to develop the product, but for the moment I have drawn up three visuals that I believe will make this application desirable amongst the hotels clients.

User Interface

The Virtual Concierge is still a work in progress, but I have very much enjoyed working on this project, as it has been very exciting so far to hear such positive feedback from tutors and class mates. I would love to hear your thoughts on the Virtual Concierge?

Top 10 iPhone Apps

Danny — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 23:29:23 +0000

Fellow masters student Mr Brian Burns posted a tweet a few days back, letting the world know that he was soon to become a proud of owner of an iPhone 3GS! Although he never does much work anyway! lol only joking, he tweeted the following:

Fully expecting to get no work done tomorrow. Finally taking the plunge… iPhone in the post. Any must-have-app recommendations?

Mr Brian Burns, 22/11/09

Brian got a lot of responses from the Twitter Community, but I thought I could take it a step further and list my personal Top 10 iPhone Apps. I could easily have made it 20 but thought 10 was a fair enough round number considering I currently have 98 iPhone Apps. How do I consider which app is better than the other? That is a difficult question to answer as everyone will have a different opinion on their own favourite applications but I chose mine on terms of how often I use them and of course how beautiful their User Interface was designed. I have organise my top 10 list in reverse order keeping the best to last .

#10 – Tea Round

#09 – Birdbrain

#08 – Bloom

#07 – Postage

#06 – Little Snapper

#05 – Voices

#04 – Tweetie 2

#03 – Weightbot

#02 – Things

#01 – Convertbot

What are your top 10 apps?

What are your top 10 must have apps? It would be great to hear what apps you are using?

Oblique Strategies UI

Danny — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 20:28:50 +0000

Dear Mr. Brian Eno, if you do happen to fall across this web page, we’ll be contacting you shortly. Over the past month I have been working and developing on the User Interface (UI) design of the very first application built by DubbleTap.

DubbleTap — we build apps

DubbleTap is a tiny iPhone & Web Development studio based in Belfast. It is a collaborative project by two Multidisciplinary Design students, Brian Burns and Danny Turley. We have several app ideas in the pipeline, that we are hoping to roll out next year, so watch this space…

What is Oblique Strategies?

For those of you who have not heard of Oblique Strategies before — just as I was only a month ago, I have taken a quote from the interview with Mr. Brian Eno about Oblique Strategies:

The Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in a number of working situations when the panic of the situation – particularly in studios – tended to make me quickly forget that there were others ways of working and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach. If you’re in a panic, you tend to take the head-on approach because it seems to be the one that’s going to yield the best results Of course, that often isn’t the case – it’s just the most obvious and – apparently – reliable method. The function of the Oblique Strategies was, initially, to serve as a series of prompts which said, “Don’t forget that you could adopt *this* attitude,” or “Don’t forget you could adopt *that* attitude.”

The first Oblique Strategy said “Honour thy error as a hidden intention.” And, in fact, Peter’s first Oblique Strategy – done quite independently and before either of us had become conscious that the other was doing that – was …I think it was “Was it really a mistake?” which was, of course, much the same kind of message. Well, I collected about fifteen or twenty of these and then I put them onto cards. At the same time, Peter had been keeping a little book of messages to himself as regards painting, and he’d kept those in a notebook. We were both very surprised to find the other not only using a similar system but also many of the messages being absolutely overlapping, you know…there was a complete correspondence between the messages. So subsequently we decided to try to work out a way of making that available to other people, which we did; we published them as a pack of cards, and they’re now used by quite a lot of different people, I think.

Brian Eno, interview with Charles Amirkhanian, KPFA-FM Berkeley, 2/1/80

Pen and Paper

My iPhone Stencil Kit came in handy and was fun to use when I started my design process off with some paper mockups. When starting any new project, I believe it is essential to start the design process off with some old pen and paper, whether it may be simply making some notes, brainstorming, or sketching — it really does focus your thinking, and helps develop your ideas.

The UI

User Interaction Flow

Feedback

If you any thoughts or comments, I would really like to hear them and to get some feedback on User Interface of Oblique Strategies would be great! Thanks

Resources for developing iPhone Web Apps

Danny — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 23:03:17 +0000

I have been thinking of doing a post like this for a long time, and over the last 6 months I have seen a large number of iPhone related posts appearing all over the web, but I didn’t come across a post that collectively brought you a list of reliable resources on, how to develop a Web App. This post brings together around a years worth of bookmarking, and reading that I did in preparation for developing Performa Sports. I am not a fan of posts that have 100s of links so I have condensed the contents down to the resources that I found really useful, and hopefully you will to.

Download the iPhone SDK

This is a really obvious resource but also the most important one, if you are really interested in developing for the iPhone you must download the iPhone SDK, as although you may not want to be a native developer, programs such as the iPhone Simulator and Dashcode are great tools to get you started building your web app.

Reading is Good!

In my opinion books are one of the best resources for learning a new language, and I have read a lot of books over the last few years to help develop my skills as a designer and a developer. When it came for me to develop my web app I needed some expert help from a book, and I have listed 3 books below that I strongly suggest you should have a look at:

iPhone in Action
Developing Hybrid Applications for the iPhone
Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript was Fireballed.

Native Web App Frameworks

When I was developing the web app for Performa Sports, I was curious to search the interwebz to see if it was possible to port my application onto the App Store, and I came across PhoneGap. PhoneGap allows you to port your web application into an Xcode template, and uses HTML and JavaScript to turn your web app into a native app, it’s a really nice framework but it is largely still in development, and I think they are waiting for approval on version 0.8 from Apple any day now. The developers behing the PhoneGap project (Nitobi) have released an Adobe Air application, called the PhoneGap Simulator.

PhoneGap was the framework I experimented with but it may not be the best choice for you, and I have listed some other native web app frameworks below that are worth checking out:

Web App Frameworks

I have experience working with a few Web App frameworks, and because I am a jQuery fan, one of my favourite’s would be jQTouch developed by David Kaneda. With Performa Sports I couldn’t find the framework that was right for the project, so I developed my own but I took a lot of inspiration from jQTouch and the Magic Framework developed by Jeff McFadden. There are lots of really good web app frameworks out there that can be useful to you, I have listed some of them below:

Who to follow on Twitter…

I thought it might be a good to compile and share with you some of the people I follow on Twitter that are always tweeting about the iPhone and sharing great links:

iPhone Stencil Kit

Danny — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 07:10:18 +0000

I am big fan of Twitter and every now and again I come across some amazing things, and I would consider myself a bit of sneezer (according to Seth Godin, Purple Cow), and I love trying and testing out new things. I came across a tweet from @danrubin about an iPhone Stencil Kit from Design Commission. My first reaction was this is cool, I must get myself one of these to help me sketch up some quick prototypes of iPhone Apps, so I did.

My iPhone Stencil Kit arrived about a week or so of placing my order, and I am looking forward to experiment with the kit. I quite like the some of the touch-points from Design Commission by including a pencil and their business card. From the website you can download the letter or A4 sized printable template to quickly start your mockups on.

Links of interest…

When I come across something really cool that has been specifically designed for the iPhone it goes straight into my bookmarks, and below I have listed some links that I have recently bookmarked and think they are well worth checking out…