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➶ You’ve Either Shipped or You Haven’t
Tom Taylor hits the nail on the head.
You’ve either shipped, or you haven’t. You’ve either poured weeks, months or even years of your life into bringing a product or a service into the world, or you haven’t.
If you have, you’ll know what I’m talking about. You’ll have flicked a switched, cap deploy‘d, or flipped your closed sign to open, and just waited – holding your breath for whatever happens next.
And at that moment everything that’s wrong with it suddenly comes into sharp focus. All your copy is terrible, 30% of the features don’t do what people want, and another 30% aren’t actually useful. All the stuff that you forgot to include, let alone everything you dropped because you just didn’t have time.
You hit refresh on Twitter search a thousand times, waiting for someone to say something. You leave comments on blogs to say thanks to people who liked your offering, and you force yourself to close the browser window on those that don’t.
If you’re lucky, enough happens. Enough sales, enough users, enough nice words, that it all seems worthwhile.
I’d say this post pretty much sums up the 18 months I spent learning Cocoa touch, and bringing Happening to the App Store. To quote Buzz:
Real artists ship.
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➶ Strawpoll: Will you update to iOS 4?
As part of my work on forthcoming updates to Happening, I’d appreciate a general guide to the number of people who plan to upgrade to iOS 4. It’s likely to be a high uptake, I’m guessing.
Even if you’re not a Happening user, I’d love for you to take the time to fill this in - it’s entirely anonymous and takes two whole seconds.
Thanks to any of you in advance who choose to fill this in: if you fancy sharing the poll link, I’ll gather the responses and post a summary at the end of the week.
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Thinking about that HD screen
There’s a tonne of talk about the double-resolution screen that’s rumoured to be coming in the iPhone “HD”: and over the past couple of weeks I’ve been spending a little time thinking about how that affects Happening. I haven’t fully finished the work to prepare the application for the higher resolution screens, but here’s some hints from a relative newbie to help point people in the right direction. These tips aren’t just aimed at any potential resolution-doubling - I don’t after all know what Apple’s plans are for the next iPhone - they’re just good practice.
Custom UINavigationBar Hues
In Happening 1.0, the hue of the navigation bar was a rather bold red. It fitted the original icon, and was entirely set via setTintColor:.
For 1.1 the icon changed and as a result I changed the gradient of the navigation bar to match. The gradient isn’t the standard Apple gloss (setting the standard Apple gloss looked, frankly, terrible) so instead I use a category on the UINavigationBar to set the background image. Whilst this allowed me to set the gradient quickly and easily, a PNG background image isn’t going to scale nicely. So in the next update to Happening, instead of simply setting an image background via the category’s drawRect: method, I actually draw the gradient in code - thus avoiding the resolution dependence.
Lesson: draw in code where possible [or at the very least, use vector graphics]
The Loading HUD
For 1.0, the loading HUD was a fixed pixel size (150 pixels square), with a window-size-relative. Whilst the latter was a good first-step, the fixed pixel size wouldn’t scale appropriately.
Lesson: Don’t use fixed-pixel sizes. And if you’re going to go pixel-independent, go the whole hog: take the time and do it right.
I don’t have all the answers
As Happening is a fairly standard iPhone app, there’s not a large amount of custom drawing to re-think: however a couple of things (including this little item) remain on my hit-list of things to keep an eye on, post-WWDC. Even if you’re unsure what else needs changing right now, those PNG icons should probably be your first port of call and Tim’s article on what 320dpi means for designers should be your second as you await Steve Jobs’ WWDC Keynote next week.
Sidenote: The changes I’ve already made to Happening are entirely behind the scenes - hell, for all the two evening’s changes I made to ensure the application wasn’t using fixed-pixel values, not a single value used has changed - and some folks may now find it hard to justify checking these things as they push for iPhone 4.0 submission dates. But a little time spent going back over the Happening codebase to free myself of fixed-pixel images and values provided a welcome opportunity to revisit and tidy up the code surround the drawing - and that’s always a good thing.
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A small detail in Happening v1.2.1
I’ve just submitted Happening v1.2.1 to the App Store. It’s got a few tweaks in it, along with a small, subtle yet important UI enhancement. It’s one that got filed under ‘I really want it for 1.0, but it’s not a deal-breaker if I have to postpone’, and in amongst the work on getting the new UI and RSVP-ing into place this little change flew under the radar until one weekend when Anna mentioned it in the pub. Last week I sat down to make the change for the 1.2.1 update - and spent 6 hours teaching myself some more Core Graphics, as well as working on the logic behind a seemingly simple display issue.
Here’s the subtle change:
That’s a really, really small change: it’s just the name of the event, right?
Not exactly! The eagle-eyed amongst you will notice that the event name font size has been decreased (by a single point in this case), the name now uses two lines, and the event time / date moved down to accomodate that. In many ways, this is exactly the type of behaviour that Apple uses in the Maps application.
For Happening, however, it’s not as easy as simply increasing the number of lines in the Event Name label: there’s the time of the day and time beneath the name that needs to be moved down too. In the case of the really long event names (greater than 40 characters) I actually downsize the event name font size by a further point, to fit just a little more data onto the screen. That two lines of text at a smaller size means I actually need to move the event time down a further pixel just to ensure the line-heights looked sensible.
All in, it’s just 30 lines of code - and if I do say so myself, I’m actually rather proud of the change. The display of event data continues to be something I’m forever playing with - there’s a sketchbook of ideas next to my bed - and this subtle change finally checks off one of my own irks with my own app. Expect it in the App Store soon.
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➶ TechCrunch Covers Happening
I’m quite proud of this quote:
The Upcoming app Yahoo should have built
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➶ Happening v1.2 is out now!
Happening v1.2 is now available on the App Store. A free update for all you folks who’ve already bought it, the new version’s biggest new feature is the brand-spangling new icon - designed by Mr Dan Counsell, accompanied with a slick new hue in the UI. Happening remains just $1.99 in an App Store near you - for your viewing pleasure, here’s the icon at
lickablelarge size
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➶ What's happening with Happening?
I’ve just posted a quick update on Happening to the all-new Happening Tumblog. More soon!
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About that Seekrit Project
If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you’ll know that I’ve been somewhat-lamely teasing about a seekrit project for quite a while. Whilst it’s not yet ready for submission to Apple (and as such, I can’t yet say when you’ll be able to get your hands on a copy in the App Store), I’ve been dying to start publicly talk about it.
Whilst I’m still being a little vague about the application, to keep up to date with news about the app be sure to visit the website to sign up. The eagle-eyed amongst you might pick up some extra clues on that page.
As you might expect, you can also follow the application on Twitter, and stay tuned here for more news about it soon. It’s been a long time coming, but expect some details early next year.
© Nik Fletcher 2010 ~ Contact
