FutureProof Retail

Right now (and for the past three years) all of my energy goes into making mobile self scanning a reality for everyday shopping at www.FutureProofRetail.com

Mobile self scanning is both a personal and professional mission. Professionally it is the cheapest fastest and most pleasant method of in person shopping for both shoppers and retailers. Personally, it is an opportunity to unlock an enormous amount of wasted time in communities all over the world – by some estimates the combined time spent waiting at a average grocery store exceeds 216 years per location every year – that’s 3 human lifetimes of effort from people like you and me being spent standing by the magazine racks, waiting while our items are rung up and swiping / tapping / inserting our legacy payment methods. With 33,000 grocery stores in the US alone, a full conversion to mobile self scanning will save 99,000 human lifetimes of effort per year and even more globally. If that seems as crazy to you as it does to me, join me over at FutureProofRetail.com

Photoshop iOS Save Script

This nifty script by Tristram Hogben saves regular and @2x versions of your image at one go.

Goes in your Photoshop Folder / Presets / Scripts /

Once re-opened, should show up in File -> Scripts -> iOS Save

To use: Assuming you are working at 2x scale, when you would be ready to save, run the script. It will ask you where and what to save the files as. Give the base name of the file, do not include the extension. It will automatically generate: <filename>@2x.png  and <filename>.png

EDIT: Check out Michael’s comment below for an edit to ensure image sizes are powers of 2

Talking Ted

Talking Ted was built with Ten 5 Studio for NBC Universal to promote the movie Ted, starring Seth MacFarlane.   It charted #1 in Entertainment for over a week and has over 8 million downloads to date.

I designed a flexible interactive animation system for the app, directed the animation team and developed key components of the final app.

  

 

JukeSpot – Spotify Music Apps Hack Weekend

What a hackathon!  Filled with distractions both good and bad (the best one was an open bar each night).  Things got pretty loud, what with the live bands and all (is this a hackathon or a concert?) prompting some unique coping mechanisms – from gchatting 3 feet apart to the seclusion womb (pictured).

Geoff, Alex, Clay, Marc and I built a sweet app called JukeSpot that’s a better jukebox for bars.  Bar owners just run the JukeSpot venue app and then everyone can see what’s playing at nearby bars before they go, and pay to insert songs into the queue.  Of course there’s more bells and whistles, bar owners can control what music is available, paying more can move your song up the queue – and you can even buy out the queue at every bar within 10 miles and rickroll all of NYC (if you can afford it).

  

So how’d we do?  After a disastrous first presentation in which our laptop ran out of battery mid talk we went up again and were able to finish showing it off.  GoGrid awarded us unlimited server usage for a year and we’re enthused enough about the idea to finish it up and get it out there.

We built JukeSpot to use Spotify’s music library since it was a Spotify sponsored event – but in the future we’ll be switching to use the local music library on the bar owner’s laptop or iOS device.

If you’ve got a bar and you’d like to be an early adopter of JukeSpot just comment on this post – and stay tuned for more.  We will be officially available in a few months.

iGrill 2

iGrill 2 was a chance to apply the lessons learned in iGrill 1 – and apply them we did!  I specced the project in extreme detail this time and the new specs, along with new communication approaches, resulted in a much smoother dev process.

This time we’d had a chance to cook with the iGrill and knew all the device’s capabilities going in so we were able to hone the user experience, making it easier while adding more features like a smoking mode, detailed graphing and a special screen designed for reading at a distance.

Geoff designed a new look with iDevices’ chosen colors focussed on maximizing legibility.  Subtle background textures keep the surfaces from feeling monotonous while the UI elements are custom without being foreign.  Overall iGrill 2 was a Continue reading

Samsung Profile

When you hear “year end financials” do you think “playful”?  This beautiful app was built with Corporate Agenda.  It’s actually a conversion of a print book but it’s miles ahead of the pack.  We spared no effort to create the experience of play and wonder – from an all-custom UI to my own game engine powering the living menu at the heart of the app.  Watch the video.

Watch the Video


Reference: iOS Fonts

You’ve got so many thousands of fonts it takes 2 weeks to scroll through the list.  But before you start your font finding adventure take a look at these 58.  These are the native fonts already chiseled into the iPhone and iPad.

Really adds a new meaning to "static text!"

Not all styles are available for all fonts – double check the font names under the family to see what’s available.  When referencing a font in code use the font name and not the family name – for example @”ArialMT” instead of @”Arial”.

Academy Engraved LET
++++AcademyEngravedLetPlain
American Typewriter
++++AmericanTypewriter-CondensedLight
++++AmericanTypewriter-Light
++++AmericanTypewriter-Bold
++++AmericanTypewriter
++++AmericanTypewriter-CondensedBold
++++AmericanTypewriter-Condensed
Apple Color Emoji
++++AppleColorEmoji

Continue reading

iGrill

In the Spring of 2010 entrepreneur Chris Allen was seeking app developers for his bluetooth cooking thermometer project “iGrill.”  I was working on Telephony Media at the time, a contract app-dev studio when Chris found me through a recommendation.

An iGrill in the wild. (iGrillInc.com)

Right from the get-go it was clear that the iGrill would be a neat project.  We were to design and build the iPhone and iPad apps while other companies did the hardware.  We went with a high end kitchen appliance aesthetic and Geoff did a beautiful job of it – it was his first app!

The first big challenge was to Continue reading