Archive - June 2014

Change can be incredibly difficult to sell to your users. They have their set ways of using your product, with months or years of experience guiding them towards accomplishing tasks. When you pull the rug out from under them by making your software look and behave differently, you upset their expectations, reset their muscle memory, and face an uphill battle to convince them of the greater utility of what you have created.

Take the Office 2007 Ribbon fiasco, for instance. Personally,...

SCLAlertView-Swift

If you've been around the iOS world for a while, you've undoubtedly heard folks grumbling (or you've done some grumbling of your own) about the typical state of Apple's sample code. Don't get me wrong, there are occasionally absolute gems, like UIImage+ImageEffects (which has probably been added to half of the apps on the App Store today...), but it seems like these are few and far in between. One of the biggest omissions, in my opinion, has been the lack of sample code from Apple demonstratin...

DZNEmptyDataSet

The Apple of 2014 is clearly not the same company that it once was. Tim Cook said back in 2011 that Steve Jobs' last words of advice for him were, "never ask what [Steve] would do, just do what's right." The modern Apple is a company that is ruthless about reinventing itself. It releases lower margin products that cannibalize sales of higher margin cash cows. It creates expansive redesigns ...

I spent all of last week in San Francisco for Apple's 25th Worldwide Developers Conference, and, like many others, I was absolutely floored by what I saw. In two ways, I think this was the most important WWDC I've ever experienced.

First, and perhaps most importantly, are signs of Apple opening up. This manifested itself in myriad ways, ranging from the speed at which Apple posted WWDC session videos, to the relaxation of the NDA around topics discussed in the keynote, to some of the...