Tapku

I’ve comprised a list of the best sources for information on developing applications for the iPhone. I share sources great for the actual code part of creating an app as well as the business side of the experience. For the coding part, it goes without say, the best places to start out at are the Sample Codes at Apple developer site and Aaron Hillegrass’s Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X (aka the cocoa bible).

Developer

• Cocoa Dev Central – Scott Stevenson offers great tutorials objective-c basics as well as Quartz. While these tutorials aren’t iPhone specific, the basics apply to equally to Mac and iPhone development. Relevant articles: Learn Objective-C, Intro to Quartz II
• Apple Blog XML Tutorial – This short tutorial gives an good example of an iPhone app. Its a great tutorial to get yourself aquatinted with the iPhone after working on building Mac applications. 
• Furbo.org - Craig Hockenberry’s personal blog gives both development and business advice for the iPhone. Hockenberry is one of the chief architects behind the Twitterific application, and notorious for the ‘Ringtone App‘ article. Relevant articles: [REDACTED], Bootstrap
• mattgemmell.com – This blog is not really focused on the iPhone, but Matt offers a lot of free code that code be really useful for projects. Most notable for the iPhone is the MSTwitterEngine which takes care of interacting with the Twitter API. Relevant articles: iPhone Developer Complaints, MGTwitterEngine

Business Side

• AppCubby – AppCubby’s blog offers a few lengthy articles on the financials of their applications and the financial viability of the App Store. It’s always great to hear insight in this area especially when their is a trade off between lower prices and visibility of the application. Relevant articles: The Experiment, Financial Realities of the App Store 
• Tap Tap Tap – These guys are behind the popular Where To? app. The blog began give good insight on creation process of the app and marketing advice, but since the developers have parted ways and sold the most popular app. As a result the blog has dried up in terms of pertinent info in terms conducting business. Relevant articles: The easy way to get into the iPhone app game… buy a proven app, The design session

Apple recently announced it will unveil the new iPhone OS 3.0 on March 17th, just over a year to the day that Apple made its iPhone roadmap presentation where Steve and company presented how the iPhone was moving into the enterprise arena and how developers where going to create third party applications. And although the Apple likes to release news on Tuesdays, they apparently forgot the 17th is St. Patrick’s Day (or don’t care). Of course speculation is already formulating on various rumor sites. This release must be pretty special to garner the sole attention of an Apple keynote considering this keynote comes off the heels of the new iPod Shuffle.

Here is a list of things I’m looking to see at the keynote:

1. Turn-by-turn GPS directions
2. Push Notifications for 3rd Party Applications
3. A mention of iTunes DJ (formally Party Shuffle)
4. Safari 4.0 for the mobile device
5. Voice Commands (Speed dial)

I’ve seen a bunch of iPhone usability tips, but I have a quick tip I’ve seen nowhere else. If you have your music playing and the iPhone locks out, instead of needing to slide to unlock the phone to change the current iTunes track, you can instead double click the home button. The play, forward and previous buttons will appear on the screen. You can also adjust the volume on screen or via the buttons on the side of the phone.

People ask me all the time what “Tapku” means. In short:

Tap + Haiku = Tapku

I’ll start with the meaning of tap behind first. Back when I was thinking of a name and logo, tap seemed like a popular keyword for many iPhone companies (too many now to name). Call me a victim of conformity or just a copy-cat, but tap signifies a user gesture on the iPhone screen. Other options were been touch or pinch, maybe even shake, but ultimately tap was the way to go.

That leaves us with haiku. While I don’t pretend to be some expert on this style of Japanese poetry, I do think the ideals of something that is simply structured and conducted with a rhythm is a very good description of everything a great iPhone app needs to be. As Apple themselves hark, a great iPhone app needs to be devoid of many of the bells and whistle you expect to find in a desktop application. The goals of an app must be clearly define and executed in the most elegant way possible. This need for a user experience that is simple and intuitive makes Haiku a great word to describe the goals of the company’s applications. And thus, we have the name Tapku.

Hey World, I’ve been meaning to start a blog for Tapku, but I just haven’t gotten around to it…. until now. While I don’t have real design for the blog yet, I have a lot of ideas of what to write about. These ideas will come out soon enough! In the mean time though, there’s To-Do Lists and my Twitter. I’ve just put up a sneak peak of an upcoming iPhone project. If you have a moment, tweet @ me! I’d appreciate it.