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Tap Happy: Designing Great iPhone Apps

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 19:45:04 UT

So you've got an idea for an iPhone app — along with everyone else on the planet. Set your app apart with elegant design, efficient usability, and a healthy dollop of personality. Tap Happy takes you from concept to polished interface design with plain-spoken principles and a rich collection of visual examples for designing exceptional interfaces for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Witty, down-to-earth, and irreverent, this guide is for everyone involved in the app design process: designers, programmers, managers, and marketers. At every stage, you'll find a gallery of app screenshots to illustrate best practices and inspire you with innovative designs. Published by O'Reilly Media. May 2010.

Tapworthy App Design at SXSW

Josh Clark — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 00:29:08 UT

I’ve just catapulted myself to Austin for the South by Southwest Interactive Festival, where I’ll spend the next five days grazing brain food by day, beer and bbq by night. It’s geek heaven up in here, a hacker’s hootenanny, a designer’s delight. I’m just saying. If you find yourself in Austin for SXSW, too, do say hello. Heroically dedicated stalkers can follow my schedule at my.sxsw.com (or sitby.us or sched.org if you prefer those flavors). And of course, you can always chase me down by following @globalmoxie on Twitter.

I especially hope you’ll join me for an afternoon of roll-up-your-sleeves iPhone revelations on Monday, March 15. I’m curating the iPhone workshop that day, three hours of nitty-gritty sessions about making kick-ass iPhone apps with yours truly, Joris Verbogt, and Jonathan Stark. We’ll stake out Ballroom F of the Austin Convention Center starting at 2pm.

I’m kicking things off at 2pm with Tapworthy: Designing iPhone Apps for Delight and Usability. It’s a fun talk and a nifty preview of some of the ideas from my new book Tap Happy. I’ll talk about: the elusive ingredients of “tapworthy” apps; why building iPhone apps is like designing a physical gadget; usability gotchas on the iPhone; and how the best iPhone designers turn constraints — limited screen space and fleeting user attention — into advantages for their apps. Along the way, I’ll share some behind-the-scenes glimpses into the design process of popular apps including Facebook, Twitterrific, USA Today, Things, and others.

(Alas, it seems I’m scheduled against a keynote by Twitter CEO Evan Williams; poor guy, I’m sure his talk would’ve otherwise been quite well attended.)

Joris Verbogt of Mangrove made the trip from Rotterdam and follows my fandango with his Objective-C Crash Course for Web Developers at 3:30pm.

Build your first iPhone app in 60 minutes flat. Along the way, you’ll tour Apple’s developer tools and learn the basics of the Cocoa Touch framework. Discover how to use your PHP and JavaScript experience for an informed approach to coding iPhone apps. Apply familiar JavaScript design patterns, for example, to handle interface programming in Objective-C.

My Providence chum Jonathan Stark closes out the show with Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Jonathan will share techniques from his O’Reilly book of the same name:

The free PhoneGap framework lets you build first-class native iPhone apps using just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — an approach that also lets you create Android and Blackberry apps from the very same code base. Explore the pros and cons of this technique as you learn to create native-looking animations with jQTouch and hook into advanced iPhone features (accelerometer, GPS, vibration, and sound) without ever touching Objective-C.

Seriously. This is going to be awesome. Come by and say howdy, and walk out an iPhone code slinger, too.

Tags: conference, design, iphone, josh, speaking, sxsw

Tap Happy: Designing Great iPhone Apps on Bookshelves May 2010

Josh Clark — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 00:00:26 UT

So I’m writing and designing another book for O’Reilly. Tap Happy: Designing Great iPhone Apps hits bookshelves in May 2010, and you can preorder it now or even get a sneak peek at some chapter drafts. Here’s how:

Preorder the book at Amazon or O’Reilly
Subscribe to the “rough cuts” version to read the manuscript as I write it

There are lots of books about making iPhone apps, but this one’s different. This isn’t a code book. It’s not a marketing book. It’s about the design and psychology and culture and usability and ergonomics of the iPhone and its apps. It’s about how to design something awesome, about creating an iPhone app that delights.

Tap Happy chases down the elusive qualities of tapworthy apps: elegant design, efficient usability, and a healthy dollop of personality. The book takes you from concept to polished interface design with plain-spoken principles and a rich trove of visual examples for designing exceptional interfaces for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

And no kidding, it’s a fun read. It’s not just for geeks. Tap Happy is for everyone involved in the app design process — designers, programmers, managers, marketers, and smitten iPhone enthusiasts. You’ll discover practical advice for sharpening your app’s features, creating an effortless user experience, using iPhone controls the right way, and creating your own personality-packed visuals. At every stage, you’ll find a gallery of app screenshots to illustrate best practices and inspire you with innovative designs.

The book’s common-sense principles will equip you to ask the right questions throughout the design process to make aesthetic, technical, and usability decisions that will make your app a pleasure to use.

Case studies and interviews with iPhone superstars let you look over the shoulders of the best app developers, following the evolution of app designs from early sketches to finished product. Many thanks to all the breathtakingly bright folks who gave so much time to discuss their process: Facebook’s Joe Hewitt, Iconfactory’s Craig Hockenberry and Gedeon Maheux, Cultured Code’s Jürgen Schweizer, Dragthing’s James Thomson, Gowalla’s Josh Williams, Mercury Intermedia’s Rusty Mitchell — and still more to come.

I’m really excited about the book, one of the best things I’ve made so far. I hope you’ll check it out.

Tags: books, design, iphone, josh, tap happy

“Curating” SXSW’s iPhone Apps Workshop

Josh Clark — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 23:59:40 UT

With March only a few months away, I’m already all atingle for South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi), the annual creative geekfest in Austin, Texas. As a high-proof cocktail of tech talks, late-night parties, design inspiration, and live music, SXSWi lights up all my creative and professional synapses. I’ve attended before, but the tingle is especially tingly this time because I’ll be on the other side of the podium.

This week, I learned that SXSWi is trying something new for 2010: workshops. Each workshop will present three hours of deep, detailed content on a focused topic. The time will be divided into three one-hour sessions, each presented by one or two dazzling designers or clever coders. I’m especially excited about the workshop on iPhone apps — not least because I’ve been invited to organize it, or “curate.” More on that in a sec.

SXSWi’s program has always blended concentrated tech talks with free-wheeling panel discussions. In recent years, though, organizers have encouraged more speakers to tackle the former — the concentrated, nitty-gritty approach — since it delivers lots more learning for the audience than moderated chit-chat. A one-hour talk ups the ante for presenters, of course, since it requires lots more preparation and brainwork. But hey, it’s those big brains that draw people to SXSW in the first place (and OK, sure sure, the enormous quantities of beer and barbecue).

The workshops take this approach one step further by delivering not just one, not just two, but wow! three hours of rich, advanced content from people who know the topic inside out. The three sessions will complement each other, one leading naturally into the next, with the goal of arming attendees with a mountain of ideas and techniques to inspire them in their work. Workshop rooms will seat 200, and I bet we’ll see ’em full.

I’m beyond flattered that I’ve been asked to curate the SXSWi “iPhone apps” workshop. That theme is already too broad to tackle on its own, and over the next few days I’ll whittle that topic down to something more focused. From there, my job as curator is to cull through over 2300 proposed talks to choose three sessions, in consultation with SXSWi staff, to suit that refined topic.

This is still evolving, but at the moment I expect to focus the workshop on interface design and user experience for iPhone apps, an area where techniques and best practices are still evolving. (See this choice interview with Tweetie’s Loren Brichter, for example, for just a taste of how developers are exploring the proper use of touch gestures in apps.) I have a hunch that some version of my own proposed talk, “Best iPhone Apps: Ingredients for Apps that Delight,” will play a role. We’ll see. (And hey, if you voted for my talk, thanks!)

I’m just getting started, so iPhone developers and designers, please do chime in. Drop me a line or leave a comment here about the technical topics that sing to you, particularly those that address design and user experience. See you in Austin!

Tags: conference, iphone, josh, mobile, sxsw

Ready for My Close-Up: September Speaking Events

Josh Clark — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 17:02:30 UT

It's me! Come by for one of my four US homecoming events.

After nearly a decade full-time in Paris, I moved to Providence, Rhode Island, over Labor Day weekend. I’m considering the move to be like opening a new branch office; I’ll be splitting my time between Providence and Paris. I’m looking forward to spending more time in the US, and to mark the move, I’m making several live stateside appearances this month, talking iPhone apps and iWork power tips, and I hope you’ll stop by to say howdy. Here’s the rundown:

Thursday, September 17, 2009

Free webcast: “Best iPhone Apps: The Must-Have Downloads” 1:00 pm US Eastern Time. Join me for a survey of the must-have apps for your favorite glossy gadget. Along the way, I’ll explore how the iPhone is changing our personal relationships to information and computing, as well as the qualities that make a great app. The webcast is free, but space is limited. Register now.
Capitol Macinitosh user group, Austin Texas
7:00 pm. The magic of video conferencing whisks me down to Texas to join CapMac’s iPhone special interest group to for a free-wheeling conversation about what makes for a terrific iPhone app. Join us at BB Rovers Cafe & Pub at 12101 Jollyville Rd., Austin, TX. Find out more.

Friday, September 18, 2009

Boston Apple Store: Best iPhone Apps
6:00 pm. Join me at the largest Apple Store on the planet for an hour of conversation about iPhone apps. I’ll run down the list of must-have apps and take a look at ways large and small that the iPhone changes the way we live and work. 815 Boylston St., Boston, MA.

Friday, September 25, 2009

Boston Apple Store: iWork ‘09
6:00 pm. I’m back in Boston, this time to talk about iWork ‘09, with a quick tour of Pages, Keynote, and Numbers, followed by a deep dive into the power features that put Apple’s productivity software into its own league.

Hope to see you at one of these events!

Tags: iphone, iwork, josh

Best iPhone Apps: Picks, advice, and resources

Josh Clark — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 16:18:22 UT

Since Best iPhone Apps hit bookshelves, several publications have asked me to share my top-ten lists for various categories of apps (thanks!). Here’s a selection of those writings from around the web, all tailored to help you unlock the full potential of your iPhone or iPod Touch...

Forbes: “Best iPhone Apps for Creativity”
Pack your phone with an easel, darkroom, notebook, crooning robot and more, with my picks of the ten best apps for scratching the creative itch.
Forbes: “iPhone Apps for Road Warriors”
The iPhone is a device of convenience and context. Unlike laptops, notebooks or messy collections of Post-It notes, your phone rarely leaves your side, making it a handy vessel for bottling brainstorms, managing to-dos and itineraries, or capturing on-the-go information like expenses or billable hours.
“Best iPhone app ever? Book has one answer”
Columnist Gregg Ellman reviews the book and dishes my personal list of top-10 must-have apps. If you could only have ten, these are the apps to get. (Spoiler: Instapaper takes the top slot.)

What do you do with all those apps?

Once you’ve downloaded all those apps, how do you keep them organized? I examined the problem over at the O’Reilly Media blog:

Informal testing here in the O’Reilly laboratories indicates that flipping through the book tends to triggers bouts of deliriously eager downloading. Alas, freshly minted App Store addicts quickly discover that an ever-growing mountain of installed iPhone apps can create more headaches than they collectively solve. Productivity apps become ironic jokes when it takes a full minute of flipping back and forth through screens to locate them; and there’s no fun in a game that you can’t even find. A healthy collection of iPhone apps calls for an equally healthy hygiene regimen for your iPhone. Here are a few pointers for keeping your apps tidy and your data safe.

Among the tips:

Safety First: Safeguard your privacy with a passcode.
Collect Your Greatest Hits: Consolidate your most-used apps on the home screen.
Get Organized: Divide remaining screens by category, task, or state of mind.
Shine the Spotlight: When all else fails, Spotlight can help you find an app in your sea of downloads.
Do you really need ‘em all? Prune unused apps.

For more iPhone info...

Best iPhone Apps website

Check out the Best iPhone Apps website at iphoneapps.oreilly.com for a daily download recommendation, a weekly head-to-head app smackdown, and a growing collection of iPhone tips and tricks.

For a steady stream of iPhone chatter, follow @oreillyiphone on Twitter, where I’ve started steering my iPhone banter. (Those of you following me at @globalmoxie will be either relieved or chagrined to find it largely iPhone-free going forward; adjust your Twitter account accordingly.)

Tags: books, creativity, iphone, josh, press, travel

Vote Early and Often: My SXSW Talks

Josh Clark — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 09:43:18 UT

I’ve proposed a pair of talks for SXSW Interactive, Austin’s fabulous brain-bending shindig about technology, media, and culture—and I need your help. Over 2200 talks have been proposed for 300 slots, and a big part of the selection process is in the hands of the public. In short, I’d like your vote.

My two talks are “Best iPhone Apps: Ingredients for Apps that Delight” and “Nerds on the Run: Tech and Casual Fitness.” I’m super-excited about both of them and I’m planning fun, lively explorations of how emerging mobile technologies are affecting areas of our life that have typically been non-technical. I’ve included details on both talks below.

SXSW is always as much about the attendees as it is about the speakers. It’s an old saw that some of the best info at SXSW is exchanged in the hallways (or parties) outside the talks and panels. The good folks who run the conference have, for several years, acknowledged the importance of audience know-how by asking the public to help choose the talks through a nifty online voting system called the PanelPicker. SXSW even encourages blatant vote-begging like, um, what I’m doing here:

Rallying your friends and associates to vote for your panel proposal demonstrates energy, motivation and organizational ability. And, all of these skills are important when it comes to organizing a successful panel for SXSW.

So, friends and associates, please take a second to check out my proposals and give them a thumbs-up if you find them interesting. You don’t have to attend SXSW to vote, and voting takes only a moment: You do have to create a PanelPicker account, but registration is quick and painless. Vote here:

...and while you’re at it, please do feel free to add a comment in support of the talk.

Best iPhone Apps: Ingredients for Apps that Delight

Best iPhone Apps: The Guide for Discriminating Downloaders, O'Reilly Media, July 2009.

In Best iPhone Apps: Ingredients for Apps that Delight, I’ll explore the principles, design decisions, and wild-eyed ideas that combine to make remarkable iPhone apps. For my latest book, Best iPhone Apps, I stress-tested thousands of apps. Along the way, I uncovered an alchemy of design patterns, clever insights, and cultural shifts that result not only in useful apps but in genuinely delightful mobile experiences. This talk is aimed at app developers and designers as well iPhone-toting enthusiasts interested in exploring the eye-popping things you never knew your glossy gadget could do. Topics covered will include:

What are the key design patterns of the best iPhone apps?
Why is USA Today the best news app, and what can developers learn from a carpenter’s calculator app?
How does iPhone change the way people work and play, and how do the best apps fit into those new work styles and habits?
What do a global map of public toilets, a Parisian bicycle finder, and a listing of local concerts have in common? What do they tell us about how precise personal context transforms our relationship to information?
What are the most amazing apps you’ve never heard of?
Why are delight, beauty, and all-around adorability especially important in an iPhone app?
How does a hiking app blaze the trail for savvy handling of offline and online usage patterns?
With photo, video, and voice, the iPhone makes typing (and even reading) so last century; how do the best iPhone apps change the way we express and process information?
How do the best apps make clever use of free web services like Last.fm, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, and others, to create rich tapestries of personalized data? What are the pitfalls of using these APIs for developers and users?
Why are App Store reviews so lousy at helping to identify great apps or aiding developers to make them? Who’s the market for the best apps?

Nerds on the Run: Tech and Casual Fitness

One of my favorite iPhone apps, RunKeeper, maps and shares your running routes, letting you add photos and text updates along the way.

In “Nerds on the Run,” I’ll review a new generation of gadgets and online services that are transforming fitness chores into video games, head-to-head challenges, and dazzling cascade of personal stats. Backing this talk is my experience with my überpopular “Couch to 5K” (C25K) online running program, which has helped thousands (millions?) of skeptical, would-be exercisers get off the couch and start jogging. It’s all about introducing fun and usability to personal exercise, making fitness more game-like. Work your body by working your mind in this fun exploration of fitness as tech-enabled play. Topics covered will include:

Why does exercise suck for so many people?
How has the Couch to 5K program persuaded so many people who loathe exercise to start running and actually like it?
How can you transform chore-like work into play-time effort?
How can you get serious about fitness (or any kind of work) by taking it less seriously?
What game-like elements can be applied to personal fitness?
What mobile apps, websites, and gadgets can improve your attitude about personal fitness routines?
How does instrumenting your workouts with a new generation of fitness gadgets and online services create tech-enabled play?
How can you find new motivation by creating a delicous statistical mosaic of your personal fitness progress?
How can social networking and online sharing sharpen your physical workouts?
How do new technologies build upon old-school motivational methods like written exercise journals or running clubs?

Thanks!

Many thanks for taking your time to help my little campaign to speak at SXSW. And hey, please do consider coming to Austin for the show in March 2010. SXSW Interactive is an incredible event, and I’d love to see you there.

Tags: c25k, conference, iphone, josh, mobile, running, sxsw, technology, usability

Buzz for Best iPhone Apps

Josh Clark — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 09:23:02 UT

It’s a tough business making a living from words, code, or anything else built only out of ideas and your brain’s restless ramblings. You work away in isolation, focusing all your energy on crafting something that you hope and trust others will find useful, fun, engaging. But you just don’t know if the thing will actually pan out until you sheepishly push it out into the public. It’s exciting, consuming, thrilling, and generally terrifying.

Best iPhone Apps: The Guide for Discriminating Downloaders is my latest thrill ride. My new book hit shelves the last week of July, and the response has been incredibly gratifying. According to Nielsen’s sales-tracking service Bookscan, Best iPhone Apps debuted as the #23 bestselling computer book in the US in its first week, and then rose to #17 in its second week. It’s attracting five-star reviews at Amazon and kind reviews in the press, too. Here are a few highlights:

The Boston Globe featured Best iPhone Apps as “The Find” in its Sunday book section.
Tech writer Gregg Ellman called the book “a great help” in his syndicated column, which appears in newspapers nationwide. (He also dishes my personal top-ten list of must-have iPhone apps.)
Blogcritics.org called the book “a must have” in its review.
CIO Magazine wrote that Best iPhone Apps “cuts through all the clutter” of the App Store’s 70,000+ iPhone apps.
Amazon.com featured the book on the front page of its Computers & Internet section.

Many thanks to my pals, readers, and customers for all your help and support over the course of the Best iPhone Apps project. There’s no way I could do any of this without you. And stay tuned! The project continues over at iphoneapps.oreilly.com, where you can vote for your favorite apps and, very soon, enjoy a steady stream of fresh app reviews. More editions of the book are planned, too; the book’s already at the printer for its second print run, with a bunch of updates to keep it fresh.

Tags: books, iphone, josh, press

Best iPhone Apps: Reinventing (and Designing) Books in the Web Era

Josh Clark — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:43:57 UT

My latest book, Best iPhone Apps: The Guide for Discriminating Downloaders, hit bookshelves this week. I’m proud of it for lots of reasons—fun content, tight writing, colorful design, and a topic that’s at the bleeding edge of consumer computing. Most of all, though, it’s been especially exciting to be part of an experiment in publishing by my publisher, O’Reilly Media, in an effort that company chief and big thinker Tim O’Reilly has called Reinventing the Book in the Age of the Web.

O’Reilly (whether you’re talking about the man or his company) has always been uniquely forward thinking about the intersection of books and technology. And so, yes, O’Reilly Media distributes books online as PDFs, ebooks, and iPhone apps; it allows online access to its entire back catalog via the Safari Books Online program; and you can even read books right from their earliest drafts through the company’s Rough Cuts program.

But those innovations are all about format and distribution. The typically savvy thing about O’Reilly’s latest experiment with Best iPhone Apps and others is that we’re exploring how technology affects not only form but content—the way we read and tell stories. As Tim wrote in his “Reinventing the Book” post, the web has made episodic content comfortable and familiar; blogs, Wikipedia, and Twitter feed us brief dispatches that depart from traditional, long-form narrative. So when Tim and Sarah Milstein wrote their terrific bestseller The Twitter Book earlier this year, they purposely embraced this approach, even writing and designing the whole book in PowerPoint for its idea-per-slide format. Tim explains:

Now, you might ask, how is a book authored in powerpoint a web publishing experiment? It boggles the mind!

The web has changed the nature of how we read and learn. Most books still use the old model of a sustained narrative as their organizational principle. Here, we’ve used a web-like model of standalone pages, each of which can be read alone (or at most in a group of two or three), to impart key points, highlight interesting techniques or the best applications for a given task. Because the basics are so easy, there’s no need to repeat them, as so many technical books do. Instead, we can rely on the reader to provide (much of) the implicit narrative framework, and jump right to points that they might not have thought about.

Perhaps the biggest driver, though, was the need for speed. We couldn’t imagine writing a book about twitter that wouldn’t be immediately out of date, because there are so many new applications appearing daily, and the zeitgeist of twitter best practices is evolving equally quickly. So we needed a format that would be really easy to update. (Again, modular structure helps, since new pages can be inserted without any need to reflow the entire document.) We plan to update The Twitter Book with each new printing.

Each page tells its own tale, featuring a single app review.

As Tim noted in a pair of tweets, my Best iPhone Apps book is very much modeled on The Twitter Book. Instead of a sustained narrative about getting the most from your iPhone, the book dedicates a page (sometimes two) to an individual app review. It’s a collection of bite-sized content appropriate to a collection of bite-sized mobile apps. Every page is its own self-contained tale, a review of a single iPhone app, complete with full-color graphics and screenshots wrapped in a gorgeous design (if I do say so myself).

I don’t mean to make this sound more grandiose than it is. Best iPhone Apps is essentially a catalog, a format that’s not itself anything new in publishing. Yet a catalog is distinctly web-like in its bite-sized, indexed approach to content. It’s a format that matches up with the way people consume content today. (Speaking of catalogs, the influential counter-culture Whole Earth Catalog is often credited as a conceptual forerunner of the web. However, the Whole Earth Software Catalog, a computer spin-off not entirely unlike Best iPhone Apps, was a business flop in the mid-1980s, an idea before its time—or more specifically, an idea before the web, an important element of what I hope will be my own book’s success.)

Keeping it fresh

Each chapter has its own app-style icon, and a whimsical iPhone wallpaper image.

So a catalog-style presentation was a logical choice from an editorial perspective, but it also offers an important publishing advantage, too. This modular page-per-app approach means that the book is easily updatable (dropping in a new review is as easy as dropping in a new page), which likewise makes collaboration easy (other authors can contribute a page here and there). Moreover, modular content migrates easily to the web. Look no further than the book’s companion site, Best iPhone Apps, which trickles out a fresh review from the book every day, with content already perfectly suited to the web. The river flows both ways: I’ll be adding fresh reviews to the site which will, in turn, make their way back into the book with each new printing.

The iPhone landscape changes even faster than the twitterverse, with thousands of new apps appearing each month, a process that’s only accelerating. That means that updates to Best iPhone Apps, as with The Twitter Book, are necessary and inevitable. We’re still sorting out the schedule of these updates—it depends on how the book sells—but all of this means that the book is a living organism, both online and in print. It will evolve as the market of iPhone apps continues to evolve, a quarterly (for example) report on the state of the iPhone.

Some will poo-poo the physical book and prefer to stick with the free online version, following it as a daily resource or dipping in for a once-in-a-while search. That’s fine, and I hope people find the site to be a useful reference. But the book has its own special appeal. As Kathy Sierra is fond of saying, “atoms matter.” There are certain print-only benefits of portability, browseability, and giftability that only books can offer, and all of us enjoy the tactile pleasure of a physical object, especially a book as pretty book as this one. Even though the info is available online, there’s something irresistible about the atoms.

These factors mean that much of the project’s success turns on the book’s design—its appeal as an object, its modularity, and the ease and speed with which it can be updated to keep up with the torrent of iPhone apps arriving daily.

Author-friendly design

I wrote Best iPhone Apps in Pages, the Apple word processor. Adding a new page is as simple as choosing a layout template from a menu and replacing placeholder images and text.

What made all of this especially exciting for me personally was that this is my first-ever outing as a book designer. I not only wrote the book but I also crafted the entire interior design—the layouts, illustrations, colors, and fonts. (I couldn’t have done it without the help and encouragement of O’Reilly legend Edie Freedman, creator of the O’Reilly animal covers, and can-do production editor Nellie McKesson.)

The project’s emphasis on speed and turnaround meant that it was important to work with a tool that was author-friendly, an environment that married content and design easily and without distraction. I naturally chose Pages, Apple’s excellent word processor and page-layout program. As I’ve written (at length), Pages is a terrific writing environment, with a combination of style and substance perfect for writing a book like Best iPhone Apps. The entire book was written and designed in Pages using a handful of page layouts, templates that are easily redeployed for new app reviews. Pages makes this easy by letting you capture page layouts and reuse them for new pages, dragging and dropping new screenshots and icons into place for each new app.

I designed an iPhone gem icon for each chapter. Top: Best Apps at Work, Best Apps on the Town, Best Apps at Leisure, and Best Apps at Play. Bottom: Best Apps at Home, Best Apps on the Road, and Best Apps for Your Health.

Not only do the layout and application make it easy to add new apps to the book, but I tried to create a bright, gem-like design that reflects the spirit of the iPhone interface, too. Each chapter has its own icon, reminiscent of an iPhone app; the design of sidebars is inspired by iPhone dialog boxes; quick tips are presented in speech bubbles like iPhone text messages; and the headline and caption font is Myriad Pro, Apple’s signature font.

In the end, it all came together in what I believe is a great combination of form and function. The book offers useful, timely content in an elegant wrapper that happens to be designed to keep it useful and timely. I hope readers enjoy the end result as I enjoyed putting it together. Check it out for yourself.

Tags: books, business, design, iphone, iwork, josh, writing

Perl Critic for BBEdit 1.1

Josh Clark — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 09:20:01 UT

I've just made a quick compatibility update to Perl Critic for BBEdit, a free plugin for the BBEdit text editor that lets Perl programmers check their code against the style recommendations of Damian Conway's book, Perl Best Practices. Warnings are displayed in the results browser just like BBEdit's built-in Perl and HTML syntax checkers.

Version 1.1 adds a compatibility fix for Perl::Critic 1.094 and later. Download the latest version here.

Perl Critic for BBEdit requires Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later. It's been tested against BBEdit 8.2.6, 8.5, and 9.2.1. The Perl::Critic module must be installed.

Perl Critic for BBEdit is free and released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.

Tags: bbedit, perl, software

Now on Shelves: Best iPhone Apps

Josh Clark — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 18:19:46 UT

My latest book for O'Reilly Media, Best iPhone Apps, is back from the printer and should hit bookshelves next week (starting July 28). I'm really excited about this one for all the reasons I described here. The iPhone is already fast making changes in the way that we personally relate to information and our immediate environment, but at the same time, lots of iPhone owners haven't begun to tap the potential of their glossy gadgets. This book and its online sidekick, the Best iPhone Apps website, aims to help.

With over 65,000 iPhone apps to choose from, there's a mind-boggling number of ways to make your favorite device do just about anything you can imagine—and almost certainly a few things you would've never thought of. So while it's not hard to find apps for your iPhone or iPod Touch, it's frustratingly difficult to find the best ones.

Best iPhone Apps guides the way, shining the light on over 200 gee-whiz apps that delight, empower, and entertain. I stress-tested thousands of titles from the App Store emporium to hand-pick apps that will make the biggest difference in every aspect of your life: at work, on the town, at play, at home, and on the road.

Video by Mike Hendrickson.

Capitalize on your time with genius productivity apps, or fritter it away with deliriously fun games. However you use your iPhone or iPod Touch, Best iPhone Apps shows you how to unlock its full potential and make the most of your glossy gadget.

And be sure to check in daily at the book's companion site at iphoneapps.oreilly.com for daily reviews plus the App Smackdown, where you can vote in a head-to-head deathmatch between two similar apps—currently it's Things vs OmniFocus in the to-do list category.

Tags: apple, books, iphone, josh, technology

The Future in Your Pocket, and Why I'm Writing Another Book

Josh Clark — Thu, 28 May 2009 19:32:10 UT

Photo by Stu Spivak.

My elementary school in Minneapolis had the most mind-blowing student assemblies. Sure, sure, most schools of the era shuffled in guest speakers for their captive student audience, but they were usually the stock just-say-no and scare-em-straight folks, with a few career-day types thrown in. Not Harrison Open School. We got a swami. We got a Secret Service agent. I’m just saying: We had great assemblies. But one of them really stuck with me, and I’ve thought about it every few months for the three decades since.

It was 1977. I don’t remember the speaker’s name, but he made music. Electronic music. With big, heavy equipment. His gear filled the stage of our homely auditorium, and he sprang from machine to machine to make this weird music of blips and bleeps and eerie organ sounds. And he knew how to warm up the crowd; Star Wars had arrived in theaters that spring, and he used his outrageously fancy equipment to boom R2-D2 sounds at us, all chirps and whistles.

He owned us: He. Was. Awesome.

At the end of his show, he stepped to the front of the stage. “One day,” he said, “some day in the future, all of you will be able to have a machine that does all this, makes music like this.” Then he pulled out his wallet and held it up. “And it will fit in your pocket.”

I’ll never forget it: “It will fit in your pocket.” I was six years old, and that was the first time I really ached for a specific vision of the future. For me, the future wasn’t rocket cars. It wasn’t living on the moon. It wasn’t even R2-D2. The future was having my own little synthesizer, a computer in my pocket to make stuff.

So I waited for the future. At first, I thought it had arrived in 2001 with the iPod. Bam, music in your pocket, just like the man said. But that was just a player. It couldn’t make anything. It wasn’t a creative device. It wasn’t until 2007 that I realized that it was the iPhone I was waiting for. Apple’s fabulous device is the only thing that has ever resembled my childhood notions of the future. For me, it’s the very first time the future finally got here.

A computer. In your pocket. That helps you makes stuff. People are painting magazine covers, composing music, writing novels, you name it. And of course the phone can also do all the magical things that we’ve already started to take for granted: plucking any information or video from thin air; taking commands by voice or touch; mapping out the world around us. Now we’re talking. This is what the man from 1977 was getting at.

But the future came on so fast that it’s a little overwhelming. After a year of living and working with my prized iPhone, I’m still discovering and marveling at the things it can do. And I know plenty of people who are frankly paralyzed by all the options in the App Store.

So I’m writing a book about it. For the last few weeks, I’ve been working on my next book for O’Reilly: Best iPhone Apps: The essential guide for discriminating downloaders. The book is an authoritative guide to the best, most useful, and most entertaining iPhone apps. Full of colorful and helpful illustrations, this catalog of iPhone gems gives you the lowdown on each app, with brief tips on how to use it. It’s a wildly fun project, a professional excuse to play with my favorite toy and explore the possibilities of the most productive tool I’ve ever owned. And I’m especially excited that I’m contributing to the design of the book’s interior, a first for me.

That means I’m neck-deep in iPhone software, spelunking the App Store’s darkest nooks and crannies to find novel, clever, and generally indispensable apps. As I go, I’ll likely note some of them here on my blog, and probably many more via @globalmoxie on Twitter, before the book is published in late July.

But I’d also like to know what your favorite apps are. What apps convince you that the future's here, too? What apps make you unstoppable, or more productive than ever? What apps delight you most, or make you laugh out loud? What app has changed some fundamental way you do things? What app do you use to while away spare minutes (or hours)? Post a comment with the favorites that have earned a place of honor on your iPhone’s home screen.

And hey, this is important. This is the future we’re talking about, after all. And it fits in your pocket.

Tags: apple, books, iphone, technology

Best iPhone Apps: The Guide for Discriminating Downloaders

Thu, 28 May 2009 16:23:54 UT

Best iPhone Apps: The Guide for Discriminating Downloaders

Unlock the full potential of your favorite gadget with my authoritative guide to the best apps for iPhone and iPod Touch. With over 65,000 iPhone apps to choose from, there's a mind-boggling number of ways to make your favorite device do just about anything you can imagine—and almost certainly a few things you would've never thought of. So while it's not hard to find apps for your iPhone or iPod Touch, it's frustratingly difficult to find the best ones. Best iPhone Apps guides the way, shining the light on over 200 gee-whiz apps that delight, empower, and entertain. Published by O'Reilly Media.

Tags: apple, books, iphone, josh, software

iWork ’09 Tips, Interviews, and Book Reviews

Josh Clark — Thu, 28 May 2009 14:49:33 UT

Photo by Felipe Bachomo.

I hit the bricks this month to spread the word about my book, iWork ‘09: The Missing Manual, and even managed to get a few folks to listen as I preached the gospel of beautiful software making our work lives more productive and creative.

iWork is Apple’s suite of elegant, get-stuff-done software: the Pages word processor, Numbers spreadsheet, and Keynote presentation software. It’s a terrific alternative to Microsoft Office, and my book details how to make the most of it—with lots of juicy insights about common-sense document design along the way.

Several kind journalists indulged me and my proselytizing:

Chuck Joiner interviewed me for the MacVoices podcast, and I really enjoyed it (notwithstanding my alarming tendency to say “you know” every few seconds).
Mary Rotman posted a Q&A with me, along with my favorite iWork tips at the O’Reilly FYI blog.
Garry Barker of the Australian daily The Age notes the necessity of The Missing Manual series for understanding subtle software like iWork: “Mr. Clark’s Missing Manual on iWork is full of good advice in easily absorbed form.” (Thanks, Garry! But please, call me Josh.)
Web Worker Daily’s review of my book wasn’t really a review of my book, but nonetheless called it “a great title for acclimatizing yourself with Apple’s lovely working environment.” Much appreciated!

And I’m especially flattered to see that the book is featured this week on the front page of Amazon’s Computers & Internet section, where it’s been bouncing around the list of top 100 titles for the past month. This has all been so much fun, and it’s great to see the book finding its audience. I enjoyed writing it, and it’s great to see people enjoy reading it, too. Thanks to all.

Tags: amazon, books, iwork, josh, podcast, press, software

iWork ’09: The Missing Manual Now on Bookshelves

Josh Clark — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 07:41:15 UT

My book about iWork ’09, Apple’s remarkable collection of productivity software, started shipping from Amazon this week and should be available on the shelves of fine booksellers everywhere starting next week (May 4).

Snap up your copy of iWork ’09: The Missing Manual by ordering the paper book from Amazon or by downloading the ebook from publisher O’Reilly. O’Reilly also offers a nifty discount when you buy both the paper and electronic versions at once. (You can read ebooks on iPhone, Kindle or Sony Reader, or as a PDF on your computer.) If you happen to subscribe to O’Reilly’s nifty Safari Books Online service, you can read the complete book online.

iWork ’09 includes Pages, Keynote and Numbers: Apple’s word processor, presentation software and spreadsheet program. While familiar, these programs do lots of things in new and different ways than their stolid Microsoft counterparts. They make it astoundingly easy to create beautiful documents and presentations. iWork ’09: The Missing Manual gives you the complete tour; the book is comprehensive at nearly 900 pages but, no kidding, it’s also lots of fun. (I can’t imagine that any other software manual has ever featured so many superheroes.) With a uniquely witty style that helps you learn quickly, this Missing Manual explains not only how to use every feature, but why and when, with entertaining and helpful examples every step of the way.

For more info, check out:

Tags: apple, books, iwork, josh