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photo credit: @davestone

Disclosure: we get a lot of technical books sent to us from publishers. We tend to review the ones that we like and recommend. Occasionally when a book is truly horrible, we’ll sound the alarm. But if they’re mediocre, we’ll just let them fall in the forest without a sound.

It’s official: the contest is over. The best getting-started-developing-iPhone-applications book is iPhone Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide by Joe Conway and Aaron Hillegass. I really wish I had had this book in hand when I was relearning Objective C and coming up to speed with the iPhone SDK.

If you’re building Ruby web apps (Rails, Sinatra, Padrino, …) and you haven’t tried out Heroku, please do so. Immediately. You can run on the base package, which is more than adequate for a toy or even small business app, for free. It’s great for trying things out.

No need to dork around with Apache, Nginx, Mongrel, Passenger, etc, etc etc… Just a “git push” is all you need. Heroku has basically taken all the mundane crap that just gets in the way and lets you build your app.

First go sign up at http://heroku.com. Also make sure you’ve got an ssh key created for your machine. Github’s got some good instructions if you need them here.

gem install heroku

This will get you rolling. Just type “heroku” for a nice synopsis of what’s available. It will instruct you how to create your project:

heroku keys:add

This will add your public key so that heroku knows who you are.

rails myapp
cd myapp
git init
git add .
git commit -m "my new app"
heroku create "myawesomeappname"
git push heroku master

Now go visit your http://myawesomeappname.heroku.com. Isn’t that cool? Have you ever deployed a web app that quickly before? Now go build something, commit, and git push.

So what’s the catch?

It’s a bit more expensive than other cloud platforms like Rackspace or straight EC2 (which heroku is built upon). For me, and some Pathfinder clients its a worthy tradeoff since we save money on system administration tasks, and gain so much in speed. Also, your first “dyno” is free, which negates some of the cost as well. I feel like most apps (not Twitter, not Groupon) can build to a reasonable size on Heroku and concentrate on the PRODUCT. Once you’re big enough that heroku pricing is a pain, worry about saving some cash. (Let us know if you’ve got this problem, we’ll be happy to help)

You are at heroku’s whim when they’re down. I’ve had an application in production for almost a year now and I’ve only had a handful of short down periods. When heroku is down though, it can be a little rough. There is currently no way to display a branded error page. Your visitors see a cryptic “Ouchie Guy” graphic with some random Japanese text on it. But in sum total I’ve probably experienced 2-3 hours of outages in a year. That’s pretty darn good.

By default you’re on postgresql. Arguably a really nice database, but maybe not one that you’re used to, or interested in. You’ve got options though, as you can connect to Amazon RDS or a multitude of other services.

Use it

These guys have built a brilliant deployment platform. It enables ruby developers, and soon node.js developers to roll out new apps as fast as you can type. All those ideas you’ve got kicking around in your head can be built and deployed with little hassle. Let us know what you build.

Have you heard about the Lean Startup movement yet? It’s is a profound concept that’s having a major impact on how companies are being built, funded and scaled. Pathfinder is a major proponent of this approach: It’s the best way we know how to create successful software products. That’s why we’re sponsoring and helping organize the Chicago Lean Startup Machine Nov. 5-7.

Lean Startup principles, conceptualized in 2008 by Eric Ries, are based on less waste, speed to market and a disciplined approach to testing new products and ideas. The movement has gained momentum and interest, and a series of Lean Startup Machine events puts the principles in action in New York, San Francisco and now Chicago.

Lean Startup Machine Chicago is a weekend-long competition Nov. 5-7. It kicks off with six-minute pitches and presentations. Participants then select ideas and form teams to work on their project for the next 52 hours. On Sunday, teams pitch their business and Minimum Viable Product to a panel of judges for cash awards, mentoring, and $10,000 in legal and company formation services. The event is limited to 60 participants.

Keynote speakers and judges include Brant Cooper, a leading advocate of the Lean Startup movement; Patrick Vlaskovits, VP Business Development at ELC Technologies and co-author of The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development; and virtual speaker Eric Ries, creator of the Lean Startup methodology and author of the blog Startup Lessons Learned.

Registration is $50 and is open to the first 60 registrants. The event is not-for-profit and registration fees are used to cover expenses and the winning cash prize.

Want to get involved in the Lean Startup Movement? Lean Startup Machine Chicago website is here; There’s a Chicago Lean Startup Circle, and the Lean Startup Wiki is here.

I can not overstate the importance of getting some actual User Experience out there quickly for feedback. Mockups being static do not convey that critical aspect of interaction so they don’t pass muster. It often takes development dollars to realize an app was great only in picture format and that to make it a good app you’d need to double the original budget. Ouch.

Amir Khella was so nice to elaborate on how he did this fast and cheap. As far as I’m concerned – case closed – since I work on a Mac and Amir’s solution relies on Keynote.

I’ve gone through a number of home brewed prototyping versions, Omnigraffle, Acrobat Pro and latest being Flash Catalyst. In my opinion, Amir’s workflow gives the biggest bang for the buck and shortest lift off time. Workflow is the keyword here because Keynote is a presentation software just like PowerPoint, albeit a good one.

Speaking of good old PP, what about the Windows users? Has anyone tried this workflow on PowerPoint or similar?

This post from Ian McAllister prompted a lot of talk at my company. We’re a big proponent of Customer Development * as an approach to new product development, and this seems to be at least a step in that direction.

For new initiatives a product manager typically starts by writing an internal press release announcing the finished product. The target audience for the press release are the new/updated product’s customers, which can be retail customers or internal users of a tool or technology. Internal press releases are centered around the customer problem, how current solutions (internal or external) fail, and how the new product will blow away existing solutions.

If the benefits listed don’t sound very interesting or exciting to customers, then perhaps they’re not (and shouldn’t be built). Instead, the product manager should keep iterating on the press release until they’ve come up with benefits that actually sound like benefits. Iterating on a press release is a lot less expensive than iterating on the product itself (and quicker!).

That sounds pretty similar to the approach Ash Maurya describes for Web Startups, except using press releases rather than landing pages.

One thing I like about the Amazon approach is how it can be used to test the waters inside a large corporation, to see if the message resonates inside the organization enough to build momentum. Customer development is primarily focused on customers and users, which is essential for any new product, but this is an approach to get feedback from corporate stakeholders, essential in any large organization. It’s interesting that this approach works within Amazon. That says something about their culture. I’m not so sure it would work inside Microsoft or Oracle.

I also think Ian is missing the boat when it comes to product development though – perhaps there’s more to it, but it seems that the press release is looked at as a fixed requirement without the opportunity for additional lessons learned. That sounds like a classic product development mistake.

* Customer Development is a four-step framework developed by serial entrepreneur and business school Professor Steve Blank for discovering and validating the right market for your idea, building the right product features that solve customers’ needs, testing the correct model and tactics for acquiring and converting customers, and deploying the right organization and resources to scale the business.

Some of the early steps include: Startups begin with hypotheses about a customer problem or need. Founders talk to customers to discover and validate whether the total solution solves that problem or addresses that need. Many current startups extend that patterns with other tools for generating feedback before they do much, if any development.

1. I need an application to get around constraints imposed by a vendor, whether it’s Microsoft, Apple (iPhone). – They’re going to find a way to block you or sue you before you recover your costs.

2. I want an application that combines the features of Facebook, MySpace and YouTube. – Only a few people have enough money to compete successfully and they know better. However, if you can create a niche (a specific subject or industry) and provide specific differentiators, there are possibilities.

3. I want a social media site to do “xx”, but I don’t have a revenue model. – Commercial quality custom software is relatively expensive. We like to work on products that win in the marketplace and have staying power. We’re willing to work with you to see if we can help you fill out your concept, but you’re not ready for development.

4. I need an application to let users design their own t-shirts, cards, etc. – there are already many applications available – too much competition. I get at least one request for this every month or so. The exception is if it is for a specific company that has a protected market.

5. I need a brochure site. – There are thousands of small firms that can do a good marketing web site at a much lower cost than us. We focus on sites and applications that require backend systems (databases, content management systems, etc.). We can refer you to a good firm for marketing sites.

6. I want to upgrade an existing VB6 application, in VB6 (rather than writing it from scratch in a more up-to-date language). – This would hold true for any obsolete technology. Chances are requirements are out of date anyway. You’re much better off starting from scratch with newer technologies. We’re more than happy to help with that.

7. I need help finishing up a site or application. It is 90-95% done. It just isn’t working right or doesn’t flow well. – My guess is it’s a long way from 90% complete and my guess is there are few, if any, automated tests. We see this a lot with people who have gone offshore to, in theory, save money. It is almost always more cost effective to start from scratch, though there is always some carryover value from a requirements and design perspective. If you understand this, and you have a viable concept, we certainly can help you create a great product.

Another variation of this: I have this green screen application. I don’t want to redo it, just make it look better. – i.e. I just need someone to put lipstick on my pig.

8. I have an application where user workflow and usability are not important. – It may be a good project for some companies, it’s just not in our sweet spot. We look for companies that want to use technology and user experience to create competitive advantage (which is why we do a lot with startups and new product areas for existing companies).

9. I need help with a php (or Python) application. – Again, good for some firms, just not our cup of tea. We’d rather use Rails, .Net or Java for these types of applications.

10. I don’t feel comfortable with the Agile development process. – Fortunately fewer and fewer people feel this way. Business stakeholders generally love Agile because it keeps them involved throughout the design and development process and they are focusing on the business value and in the best position to recognize needed changes. Only in very unusual circumstances would we agree to develop using a waterfall method. We’re more likely to listen to your concerns and figure out how to mitigate any risks you see. When I hear someone say they’ve had a bad experience with Agile, it’s generally because Agile best practices weren’t used.

I bet you have others – send them on and I’ll add them to my growing list. There were actually some much more exciting requests, but I was afraid to publish them.

We know intuitively designing for a touch interface is different than a mouse driven interface. But why are they different? Let’s wrap a little bit of science around these two worlds.

Both interfaces, tap or click, use the same three basic cognitive functions. Seeing, locating and acting. In the mouse world, a user sees an item of interest on the screen, locates the mouse to that item and then clicks. In the touch world, the user sees an item of interest on the screen, locates a finger or some part of their hand to the item and then touches the item.

The big difference, arguably comes in the last two steps. Locating with a mouse requires a translation from a movement in the horizontal plane (a table top) to the vertical plane of the screen. Locating on a touch screen is more direct, you move your hand toward what you see. Taking action (clicking) with a mouse simply involves clicking the mouse. Taking action on a touch screen involves touching the screen with a sufficient degree of precision.

Traditionally, we have been conditioned to believe that “minimizing clicks” is the way to optimize an interface. But what is a “click?” It is really the combination of seeing, locating and acting. When we view our mouse and touch worlds from this perspective, the road to optimization may not always take the same path.

Consider a simple interface that splits the screen into a left side and a right side, both of which are active for interaction. In a mouse interface, the mouse must be moved from one side to the other to locate the desired interaction. In a touch interface, each hand could potentially control a side of the screen so there is no overhead to locating. Thus, the same interface in each world carries a different amount of effort.

When designing for touch (or click), it’s important to understand user interactions in terms of seeing, locating and acting. A simple, optimal interface will be designed with regard for all three of these components of interaction.

Stay tuned for more perspectives on Designing for Touch.

photo credit: Jamal Ahmad

Flash has a great function for changing pixels that meet specified color criteria on a Bitmap to a new color: threshold() on a BitmapData object. I learned about this function recently while working on a data visualization project in which the user wanted to be able to toggle a color-coded measurement value on and off. Upon discovery of threshold() the plan was simple: replace all pixels of the chosen color with a similar color, but with alpha reduced to 0. Using the function itself seemed straightforward after reading the documentation, give it a color to match, a matching function (>, <, ==,  etc), and a color to replace with.

There was a small roadblock in using it for our purposes: our bitmaps are transparent. This doesn’t seem like a big problem, but it is because of how Flash stores BitmapData. When an alpha value, e.g. 0.5, is applied to a bitmap pixel the whole color is reduced based on that alpha value. This means that for threshold() to find #FF0000 in a bitmap with 0.5 alpha a value of #880000 must be passed in to it. Not a big deal, right? Just multiply all your colors by the alpha value of the image they’re in. Not the case: if you halve the whole color value at once the values of the less significant bits of the color will be altered by the halving of the more significant bits. Each color channel needs to be extracted from the color, halved individually, cleaned of remainders, and then recombined. Here bitwise operators are your friends:

//A bitwise and will get the individual color channels from the color
red = color & 0xFF0000;
green = color & 0x00FF00;
blue = color & 0x0000FF;

//Divide based on alpha
red /= 2;
green /= 2;
blue /= 2;

//Another bitwise and is used to remove non-related bits
red &= 0xFF0000;
green &= 0x00FF00;
blue &= 0x0000FF;

//Finally, bitwise or them all back together, this is the color as it is actually
//stored in the BitmapData
transparentColor = red | green | blue;

The mask parameter is also your friend in this situation: a mask of 0x00FFFFFF will make the detection ignore alpha values and just look at RGB. Even with colors adjusted I couldn’t get good detection without this mask, even including an alpha channel in transparentColor.

Alright, we’ve toggled a value off, now lets just find the color again and replace it with a non-transparent version…
Except that with an alpha of 0 we’ve now scaled all of the color channels down to 0 as well, how can we tell fully transparent red from fully transparent green? The bad news is we can’t. To turn a color back on we need to keep a record of the original BitmapData and run threshold() on it for each color that we still want toggled off. It’s not an ideal solution, but it works, and at least this is only an issue when alpha is involved.

Take a look at the Glif project on Kickstarter.

Synopsis: Two guys put together a 3d printed prototype of an iPhone tripod mount and stand, make a clever video, post it on kickstarter to raise $10,000, and send a note to John Gruber, and watched their pledges blow up. When I pledged a little earlier in the day they were up to 3285 backers and $82,921 in pledges.

When cleverly applied, Kickstarter can be a great customer development tool for startups. You can test your idea and your pitch, presell product and engage with earlyvangelists at the same time.

And it also shows that this type of approach isn’t just for software startups, but can be used for physical product startups as well.

Hat tip to the Economist for a nice article on the whole thing – worth a read.

Users.each do |user|

  puts user.name

end

Ever wondered about how expensive a simple “.each” on an ActiveRecord object collection is. This essentially means for every iteration of the loop, there is going to be a database fetch. Imagine looping over a collection that has 10,000 records (forget millions..). Yes, I have made use of this very same thing a bunch of times without realising the kind of performance implications this could have. Not until last week I discovered that there was a very less-expensive way to do this.

I was perusing the Rails guides casually looking for something else when I hit upon this. “.find_each”. What does this do? It makes looping over a collection of Active record objects much much cheaper by performing a batch retreival of the database records and caching them. The batch size can be altered by passing in a batch_size param like this “.find_each(:batch_size => 500″).

Users.find_each(:batch_size => 200) do |user|

  puts user.name

end

I have almost stopped using “.each” these days and let “.find_each” do the job.