SecondConf: Sketching for Developers

SINGLE TRACK conferences seem to be all the rage. Limited attendee slots, focused topics and one track that everyone can enjoy together. SecondConf, like Madison Ruby, is one of the new crop of focused, single-track, small conferences with the right recipe.

On Sunday, I was honored to speak at SecondConf, on the importance of sketching in app development. I shared sketches I created for developer Chad Sellers, while designing Pear Note for Mac and iPad. I offered a variety of tips and ideas to encourage indie developers to start sketching too.

I've posted a PDF of my presentation deck (2.5MB), if you'd like to check it out.

Thanks Dave and Amy Kinney for the opportunity to be part of SecondConf!

Fusion + Carbon Ads Productivity Bundle

TEN APPS and services aimed at better productivity are now available for $29.95 in the Fusion + Carbon Ads Productivity Bundle. Purchase these separately and you'd spend over $360, so it's a pretty great deal.

The bundle includes:

1. Evernote Pro
3 months of Evernote premium note service with apps for major platforms.

2. Strongspace
15GB of storage for a year with weekly snapshots for rollback access.

3. Sparrow Mail
Simple, Twitter-like mail app to keep your emails brief and manageable.

4. Carousel
Instagram viewer for the Mac with save-out to the Mac and iPhoto.

5. Alarms
Manage alarms in one place with support for iCal and Growl.

6. Flow
1 year subscription of this cloud-based task tool for the browser and iPhone.

7. Koku
Personal finance app for the Mac with a fresh approach to money management.

8. Grasshopper
Virtual phone system with toll-free or local numbers. $100 credit.

9. Nottingham
Clean, lightweight and useful Mac note app with Simplenote sync.

10. Inbox Assistant
Inbox tool extracts key info from emails for tasks, events and more.

Pick up the Fusion + Carbon Productivity Bundle for just $29.95, a pretty sweet deal. I love the use of Gerren Lamson's Prova typeface on the bundle website.

Pear Note for iPad UI Design

FOR SEVERAL MONTHS, Pear Note developer Chad Sellers and I worked through concept sketches, mockups and development builds of Pear Note for iPad, prepping it for app store approval.

Last night I was excited to hear Pear Note for iPad was approved and is $4.99 for a limited time. Check out Chad Sellers' Pear Note for iPad post and TWiT's iPad Today #62 Podcast at 13:00, for more details.

In this article I'd like to share a selection of sketches and screenshots of the application with a few notes for some reference on the development process.

Concept Sketches

As with other projects I work on, sketches are an important way to capture and explore ideas that can be shared with clients, like Chad.

From an initial phone call, I began exploring ideas about how the main UI might work, capturing the ideas and notes with ink on paper:

Later in the process, I sketched concepts for icons and formatting menus, exploring ideas of how these items might work and look:

These kinds of sketches are great for getting ideas out in the open, and worked well for Chad to review and comment on.

From these loose sketches, Chad was able to see several options quickly and I was able to take that feedback and my sketches to create Photoshop mockups.

Final Screens

Here are samples of final Pear Note screens, with elements in place.

Horizontal Recording - Pear Note in recording mode, capturing both audio and text entry via on-screen keyboard. Note the added keys along the top of the standard keyboard to provide quick access to common actions in Pear Note:

Horizontal Playback - Playing back the captured text and audio, which is synced. Had fun connecting the light blue color in the play button and playback scrubber handle on this one:

Vertical Notes Playback - This shows Pear Note for iPad playing back a Pear Note recorded with video, audio and slides on the Mac version:

Vertical Rich Text - A sample of the rich text options in Pear Note:

Final Thoughts

I'm pleased with how the interface of Pear Note for iPad turned out. Chad and I were able to attain a clean, simple to use app and I think our working through ideas and communicating throughout the process made the difference.

Currently the app supports text and audio recording, with text/video/audio/slide playback in version 1.0, though Chad has goals to add features over time. This was a big project, and I applaud Chad for limiting scope to get the app out, rather than holding it back for every feature.

Buy Pear Note for iPad

For a limited time, Chad has priced Pear Note for iPad at $4.99 - a great deal for a tool that can record audio and sync it to your text notes. Pear Note works great with or without a bluetooth keyboard and can sync files via Dropbox. In testing I've found the app a great tool in meetings. Check it out.

Resources

Fruit Blog: Pear Note for iPad
TWiT: iPad Today #62 Podcast
App Store: Pear Note for iPad
Macworld: Pear Note for iPad
App Advice: Pear Note Arrives On Your iPad

A Clean Start

OVER LABOR DAY WEEKEND, I made a clean start on my 13" MacBook Pro. Over the past few weeks I'd become aware of OS slowdowns, system quirks and a variety of little issues. A fresh start was in order.

Annoyances Added Up

My MacBook isn't old. I bought it at the end of 2009 and it's been the best Mac I've ever owned. Because I had to be up and running quickly for work, I used migration assistant after taking it home. This approach worked as planned, but carried forward the digital cruft of several years running OS X.

Lately I'd noticed the little annoyances — slow performance, disk space running low, font oddities and other strange issues. Years of OS barnacles needed to be scraped from my machine and a fresh coat of paint applied.

Diving In

It was Friday night of the Labor Day weekend, when I realized I had a 4 day window to start this cleansing and freshening, so I dove in. Taking a 640GB external USB drive I'd bought to archive files and movies on, I redistributed those files back to the MacBook and a spare FireWire drive, the reformatted the external USB drive to create a bootable backup.

SuperDuper took care of the rest, fixing permissions on the newly formatted drive, and preparing it for backup. I went to bed while SuperDuper cloned my drive, waking the next morning to a perfect copy.

If you're reading this and don't have SuperDuper, go get a copy now. SuperDuper is one of my most valued utility apps.

Resurrecting Lion

In July I upgraded the MacBook to Lion, which has gone very well, Unfortunately, Lion cleans up after itself and deletes the installer once it's installed. In order to wipe and install a new version of Lion on the startup drive of the MacBook, I needed to re-download the installer.

After a quick search, I learned that pressing the option key while clicking the Purchased tab in the Mac App Store turns the Download button into an Install button, which allowed me to reinstall Lion on my drive.

A bit of research turned up articles about Lion clean installs and making a bootable Lion DVD or USB thumb drive from the Lion installer. I backed up the installer image to a thumb drive and created a bootable DVD to work from.

The Cleansing Process

Once I had a clone of my MacBook's internal drive on an external drive, I initiated an Erase and Install of Lion from the bootable DVD I'd created. In 40 minutes, a fresh version of Lion was ready to go on the MacBook.

My next task was re-installing apps I use, rather than moving the whole lot over again. I wanted to start with as fresh and clean of a system as possible — to free up disk space and create a faster, cleaner system.

This approach worked great. By Saturday evening I was installing a variety of my most-used apps, with old app remnants and crufty preferences left on the external drive, in case I might need them later. The system was noticeably faster, with windows snapping open and apps running quickly.

App Installation

Bringing new apps into the system was relatively easy, especially apps purchased on the Mac App Store. In that case, a matter of logging into my Mac Store account revealed a list of apps ready to download.

A few apps were brought over from the backup drive, and in some cases (like TextExpander) preference files were brought over as well.

In some cases it was easier to install apps from disk or download the latest versions from the developer websites. I also found indy Mac app developers do a great job with serial number recovery, which I needed a few times.

After installing Adobe CS5, I intentionally un-installed flash. I'd done the same on the old system and it really helped Safari. I make use of extensions to handle video in Safari and Google Chrome for flash-dependent pages. Learn more about the flash-free approach on Daring Fireball.

I had the idea going into the cleansing, recovering apps would be the most painful part of the process — but it wasn't. I wish I'd cleaned house earlier.

Current State: Awesome

As I write this post I'm enjoying a revived MacBook Pro. With a clean, quick system, I'm using the machine more than before, especially unplugged from the AC adapter and big screen. It's like a new MacBook Pro.

I plan to add notes to this post as I encounter things relevant to the clean start process, and would love any suggestions you may have.

Resources

Shirt Pocket Software: SuperDuper
Lion Clean Installs
Burn a Bootable Lion DVD or USB Thumb Drive
Smile Software: TextExpander
Daring Fireball: Going Flash-Free on Mac OS X

Fusion Ads Network Member

I'M EXCITED and to announce I've joined the Fusion Ads Network, featuring ads of excellent products and services over in the right column of the site.

Thanks go to Chris Bowler, whom I met through my pal Patrick Rhone. Chris invited me to join and I'm honored to be a part of a great network of sites, featuring products and services I'm proud to share with Rohdesign readers.

Fellow Fusion Ad Network Members include many sites I read and admire, including Airbag Industries, Chris Bowler, Cocoia, Elliot Jay Stocks, Frank Chimero, Flyosity, hicksdesign, Jonathan Snook, Maxvoltar, Minimal Mac, Neven Mrgan, Phil Coffman, Shawn Blanc and The Brooks Review to name just a few.

Fellow network members added today include The Loop by Jim Dalrymple & Peter Cohen, The Sass Way with Adam Stacoviak, John W. Long and Wynn Netherland and Tools & Toys by Shawn Blanc.

Joining the Fusion Ad Network means I'll be investing more time into design and illustration process articles, essays, reviews and more, so stay tuned!

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