How To Create Your First iPhone Application

1. Have An Idea – A Good Idea

How do you know if your idea is a good one? The first step is to even care if your idea is solid; and the second step is to answer the question does it have at least one of the indicators of success?

	Does your app solve a unique problem? Before the light bulb was invented, somebody had to shout out “Man, reading by candlelight sucks!” Figure out what sucks, and how your app can make the life of its user more comfortable.
	Does the app serve a specific niche? Though there aren’t any stats on the App Store search, the usage of applications is certainly growing with the explosion of App Store inventory. Find a niche with ardent fans (pet lovers, for example) and create an app that caters to a specific audience.
	Does it make people laugh? This is a no-brainer. If you can come up with something funny, you are definitely on the right track and your idea may be the golden one. Heck, I hit a red “do not press” button for 5 minutes yesterday.
	Are you building a better wheel? Are there existing successful apps that lack significant feature enhancements? Don’t be satisfied with just a wine list, give sommeliers a way to talk to their fans!
	Will the app be highly interactive? Let’s face it, most of us have the attention span of a flea. Successful games and utilities engage the user by requiring action!

Action: Does your app fall in to one of these categories? If yes, it’s just about time to prepare the necessary tools.

2. Tools Checklist

Below is a list of items you’ll need (*starred items are required, the rest are nice-to-have’s):

• join the Apple iPhone Developer Program ($99) *
• get iPhone or iPod Touch *
• get an Intel-based Mac computer with Mac OS X 10.5.5,
• prepare a Non-Disclosure Agreement (here’s a sample) *
• download and install the latest version of the iPhone SDK if you don’t already have it.
• a spiral bound notebook*

Action: Load up on your required supplies.

3. What Are You Really Good At?

What skills do you bring to the table? Are you a designer whose brain objects to Objective C? A developer who can’t design their way out of a paper sack? Or maybe you are neither, but an individual with an idea you’d like to take to the market? Designing a successful iPhone application is a lot like starting a small business. You play the role of Researcher, Project Manager, Accountant, Information Architect, Designer, Developer, Marketer and Advertiser – all rolled into one.

Remember what all good entrepreneurs know – it takes a team to make a product successful. Don’t get me wrong, you certainly can do it all. But you can also waste a lot of time, energy and sanity in the process. Don’t go crazy, reference the checklist below and ask yourself: What roles are the best fit for you to lead? Then find other talented people to fill in the gaps. The infusion of additional ideas can only enrich the product!

Skills Checklist

• Ability to Discern what works/doesn’t work in existing iPhone Apps
• Market research
• Outlining App Functionality (Sitemap Creation)
• Sketching
• GUI Design
• Programming (Objective C, Cocoa) (we assume here that we are creating a native application)
• App Promotion and Marketing

Remember to have contractors sign your non-disclosure agreement. Having a contract in place tells your contractor "I’m a professional that takes my business and this project seriously. Now don’t go runnin’ off with this idea."

Action: Select skills that are a good fit for you to lead. For those roles where you cannot lead, hire professionals.

4. Do Your Homework: Market Research

Market research is a fancy way of saying "Look at what other people are doing and don’t make the same mistakes." Learn from the good, bad and ugly in the App Store. Coming up with creative solutions in the app concept development and design starts with analyzing other (maybe similar) applications. Even if you encounter a lot of poorly designed apps, your mind will reference these examples of what not to do.

Action: Answer these questions:

• What problem does your app solve?
• What products have you seen that perform a similar task?
• How do successful apps present information to users?
• How can you build on what works and make it unique?
• What value does your app bring to your audience?

5. Know The iPhone/iPod Touch UI

If you want to create an iPhone app, you need to understand the capabilities of the iPhone and its interface. Can you shoot a .45 caliber bullet out of your iPhone? No. Can you shoot videos? Yes!

The good news is that you don’t have to memorize the encyclopedic Apple User Interface Guidelines to get a feel for what works and what doesn’t in iPhone Apps. Download and play with as many apps as you can, and think about what functionality you want to include in your product.

Take note of:

• How do well-designed apps navigate from screen to screen?
• How do they organize information?
• How MUCH information do they present to the user?
• How do they take advantage of the iPhone’s unique characteristics: the accelerometer, swiping features, pinch, expand and rotate functions?

Action: Download the Top 10 apps in every category and play with all of them. Review the Apple Guidelines for UI design and list at least 5 features you’d like to incorporate into your app.

6. Determine "Who Will Use Your App?"

We assume here that you’ve already determined that your app will bring value and that you will have a raging audience for your app. Well, fine, they are raging fans, but who are they really? What actions will they take to achieve their goals within the app?

If it’s a game, maybe they want to beat their high score. Or perhaps they are a first time player – how will their experience differ from someone who is getting a nice case of brain-rot playing your game all day?

If it’s a utility app, and your audience wants to find a coffee shop quickly, what actions will they take within the app to find that coffee shop? Where are they when they’re looking for coffee? Usually in the car! Do present an interface that requires multiple taps, reading and referencing a lot? Probably not! This is how thinking about how real-life intersects design.

Action: Line item out the different types of people who will use your app. You can even name them if you want to make the scenarios you draw out as real as possible.

7. Sketch Out Your Idea

And by "sketch" I mean literally sketch. Line out a 9-rectangle grid on an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper and get to sketching!

Ask yourself:

• What information does each screen need to present?
• How can we take the user from point A to point B to point C?
• How should elements on the screen be proportioned or sized in relation to each other (i.e. is this thing even tap-able?)

Image credit: Cultured Code

Thumbnailing your ideas on paper can push your creativity far beyond where your imagination might stagnate working in an sketching application! You can also buy the iPhone Stencil Kit to quickly sketch out iPhone UI prototypes on paper.

Action: Create at least one thumbnail page of your application per screen. Experiment with various navigational schemes, the text you put on buttons, and how screens connect. If you want to transfer your sketches into digital format, iPlotz is a good tool to check out.

8. Time For Design

If you are a designer, download the iPhone GUI Photoshop template or our iPhone PSD Vector Kit. Both are collections of iPhone GUI elements that will save you a lot of time in getting started. If you’ve solidified your layout during sketching, drawing up the screens will be less of a layout exercise and more about the actual design of the app.

If you are not a designer, hire one! It’s like hiring an electrician to do electrical work. You can go to Home Depot and buy tools to try it yourself, but who wants to risk getting zapped? If you’ve followed steps 1–3, you’ll have everything you need for a designer to get started.

When looking for a designer, try to find someone who has experience designing for mobile devices. They may have some good feedback and suggested improvements for your sketches. A few places to look for designers: Coroflot, Crowdspring, eLance. When posting your job offer, be very specific about your requirements, and also be ready to review a lot of portfolios.

Action: If you are a designer, get started in Photoshop. If you are not a designer, start interviewing designers for your job.

9. Programming

Even though this how-to is sequential, it’s a good idea to get a developer on board at the same time when you line up design resources. Talking with a developer sooner than later will help you scope out a project that is technically feasible and within your budget.

If you are a Objective C/Cocoa developer crack, open Xcode and get started! A few forums to join if you haven’t already:

• Apple Dev Forum
• iPhoneSDK (moderated by Erica Sadun)
• iPhoneSDKForum
• iPhoneDev Forums
• iPhoneSB

If you are not a developer, you know what to do – find one! Specify the type of app you want to produce – whether it is a game, utility or anything else. Each type usually requires a different coding skill set. A few places to look for developers: Odesk, iPhoneFreelancer, eLance and any of the forums listed above.

10. Submit Your Application To Apple Store

OK, so how do you submit your application to Apple Store now? The process of compiling your application and publishing the binary for iTunes Connect can be difficult for anyone unfamiliar with XCode. If you are working with a developer, ask them to help you:

• Create your Certificates
• Define your App ID’s
• Create your Distribution Provisioning Profile
• Compile the application
• Upload to iTunes Connect

Action: If you are a developer, map out a development timeline and get started. If you are not a developer, start interviewing devs for your job.

11. Promote Your App

If a tree falls in the middle of the woods and nobody was around to hear it does it make a sound? Apps can sit in the store unnoticed very easily. Don’t let this happen to you. Be ready with a plan to market your app. In fact, be ready with many plans to market your app. Be ready to experiment, some ideas will work, others won’t.

Strategies for Maintaining/Boosting App Sales:

• Incorporating social media. If your users make the high score on his or her favorite game, it is a good idea to make it easy for the user to post it to Facebook or Twitter. Think about how your app can incorporate social media and build that functionality into your app. At a minimum, set up a fan page for your app on Facebook and Twitter and use them as platforms to communicate with your users and get feedback on your app.
• Pre-launch promotion. Start building buzz about your app before it has launched. E-mail people who write about things that relate to your app and see if they will talk up the upcoming release of your app.
• Plan for multiple releases. Don’t pack your app with every single feature you want to offer in the very first release. Make your dream list for the app and make sure that the app is designed to incorporate all of the features at some time in the future. Then periodically drop new versions of the app to boost app store sales.

Action: Make a list of 20 promotional strategies that target the audience for your app. Take action on them yourself or hire someone who can!

11. Stay Focused & Don’t Give Up!

It’s easy when you are working on your first app to get all AppHappy, dreaming up a zillion new app-ideas. Dream, but don’t get sidetracked by new ideas. Your first app needs to make a big splash and getting involved in too many projects at once can dilute your passion for making your first application a success.

Action: Get out there and go kick some app!

How To Use Social Media To Promote Your Small Business

You have a small business and you haven’t bought into the social media craze? Guess what? Silence is no longer an option. People are online talking about your company as you read this, whether you like or not.  If you don’t engage in the conversation, you risk losing your customers. But maybe you don’t have a choice as many small airports do in the State of California and across the United States. Many are owned by cities who don’t give them a dime and yet take money whenever they please. Those city managers force their airport managers to jump through hoops and political red tape to be able to promote their facilities. These airport managers have their hands tied in dealing with counties which just recently decided to launch a website, let alone a social media marketing strategy. So, I was asked by Michael McCarron, Public Information Office for San Francisco International Airport, to speak to the managers of small airports through California about the benefits of having a social media presence, so that they can convince their ‘bosses’ to allow them to open Facebook, Twitter and Google+ accounts, as well as to create blogs.

Here’s part of my presentation. I hope it helps you with your online social media strategy. If You have more ideas, please share them in the comments section at the bottom of the post. The more ideas, the better.

1. ASSESS YOUR ASSETS: The first action you should take before engaging in online marketing or social media marketing and engagement is to look at what are you’re trying to promote. What are your assets? Who are your target customers? It may seem obvious. But, A Bay Area airport had small planes for rent. But business was slow because they were simply targeting pilots trying to rack-up hours. Turns out there was a larger audience they could target through social media, tourists looking for aerial Bay Area tours. Business took-off.

2. SIGN-UP FOR SOCIAL MEDIA: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn. Facebook allows you to create a business page.  Make sure you read the rules for businesses first. You can even ‘create a page’ through your personal account, if your business allows you to do so. That makes it easy for small business owners to manage it. On LinkedIn, every employee becomes your best advocate.

3. FIND A SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER: Managing multiple social networks is daunting. So, before you start posting content, requesting friends and adding followers, sign-up for a social media manager such as Ping.fm and HootSuite. It allows you to manage all of your accounts on one site and schedule your messages to deploy so you don’t have to sit over it all day. It also allows you to review the success of the tweets real-time with click-through statistics. And you can gather all the mentions of your brand, industry or search terms on Twitter through it as well. That’s for the free version. I suggest trying that first. As you get more involved in social media, I prefer SproutSocial.com. You have a choice on plans for nine-dollars to $49. There’s a 30-day free trial to make sure it works for you. What I like is that it allows you to take all of those you follow and the followers and create contacts out of them which you can manage in the system and track engagement. It also has one inbox for all of your messages from all the networks. Plus, it allows you to track check-ins at FourSquare and Gowalla.

4. POST UPDATES: It’s important to have content on your social media pages before you start adding friends and followers. When you try to find friends, they’re going to look at the page to see if they want to follow you. So you need to give them a reason to follow you first. Provide valuable information about the industry. Post pictures of your business or people enjoying your business. On YouTube, post videos of your business, customer experiences, and encourage customers to make their own. You can also ‘favorite’ other YouTube users’ videos and they will end up on your page. If you’re a small airport, posting cool aerobatic videos of the Patriots’ Jet Team is a possibility that would add value to those who ‘subscribe’ to your page. Also, share those videos on your other accounts such as Twitter, Facebook and even LinkedIn.

5. FIND FRIENDS AND FOLLOWERS: Twitter and Google+ are easiest. Search keywords to find followers. On Twitter,  If you’re a small airport, for example, search ‘pilot. You can also search ‘flying.’ Searching your town and surrounding areas as well to find key influencers, news outlets, bloggers and city officials. Also, search for large players in your market. For airports, tryBoeing, Virgin America, United Airlines and Southwest Airlines. If they share your posts, you have the potential to reach thousands.  I suggest adding just a few people at a time.  On Google+, comment on one of their posts immediately. On Twitter, mention them in a post immediately. You can also comment on one of their posts or simply say that you look forward to following their great content.  If it’s a reporter or blogger, give them story ideas and leads that have nothing to do with your business. Get them to trust you. To find fans on Facebook, it’s best to start with real friends and family. You can also pay as little as $100 to have an ad for your Facebook page syndicate across the network for a designated period of time.

6. ENGAGE FRIENDS AND FOLLOWERS:

Cory Colligan who used to be head of marketing for California Bouquetfriended me on Facebook. When she asked to be my friend, she typed a personal message, saying how impressed she was with my work and how she’s enjoyed watching my work evolve. I couldn’t remember where I knew her from. Was it a television station, radio station, or was it from school? I wasn’t sure. I was too embarrassed to ask. And she seemed harmless. So, I confirmed her friend request and wrote her a note back thanking her for her feedback and saying that I look forward to connecting. She proceeded over the next few months to follow my videos and stories. She engaged in great debates and conversation with me as well as my friends. I knew just days after I added her that I didn’t know her personally. But I was so impressed with her and the relationship we’d developed over the months, that when I was traveling to her town, Fresno, I suggested we have lunch. When I arrived she had a full basket of goodies from her shop, including the best dark chocolate covered strawberries I’ve ever tasted, waiting for me. Since then, I have been a regular customer and am quick to share her products on my page.

So, your first priority should be building that relationship with people, not pitching your service or product.

Give them story ideas and leads that have nothing to do with your business.

Share their links on your wall and/or comment on them. Wish them a Happy Birthday. Birthdays are big on Facebook. Always acknowledge them. Maybe even offer them a discount coupon for a birthday treat via Facebook.
On Twitter:
Retweet their stories and comment on them! Reply to each and every message. Keep the conversation going. Get them to trust you. For example, one of my favorite Twitter followers is @heykim. She is an amazing example of how to do it right. She has thousands of followers. But she has even more friends. She friended thousands of people little by little and engaged with them, retweeting their tweets, commenting on their tweets, checking in on topics those folks had tweeted on days before. Now, she’s constantly in conversation with folks like Morgan Fairchild, Alyssa Milano and Kathy Ireland. Alyssa Milano even just shared a linked @heykim posted tonight about how Twitter has transformed over the last five years. Who would’ve thought? She’s not famous. The key is she knows how to engage. Even more, she’s authentic. And she never misses a #FF (Follow Friday). On Friday’s many people share with their friends, their favorite people to follow, encouraging others to follow them as well.
Google+: It’s a cross between Facebook and Twitter. It’s great because you can create circles of certain people you want to target for different reasons. It makes it easier to post certain promotions to one group vs. another.LinkedIn: The best way to engage with potential customers is by joining industry groups and starting group discussions.
Very important: Do not ask for help/favors from people until you’re friends or at least warm acquaintances with them. And the #1 way to become friends is to offer tons of help/favors without expecting anything in return. In the words of Michael Ellsberg, Forbes Contributor and Author of “Self-Educated Millionaires: The Seven Skills You’ll Never Learn in College, “Networking is a *long term* activity – it CANNOT be done for short-term results. Follow these basic concepts, and you’ll be ahead of 99.99% of the knuckleheads out there who are botching their networking attempts online!” Also, a great book to read is by Brian Solis, Principal at Altimeter Group, “Engage: The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web.”
7. STAY CURRENT: Get alerts sent to your phone when folks engage with you via your social networking sites – at least in the beginning – that way you respond quickly.

The Top Ten Lessons Steve Jobs Can Teach Us - If We'll Listen

1. The most enduring innovations marry art and science – Steve has always pointed out that the biggest difference between Apple and all the other computer (and post-PC) companies through history is that Apple always tried to marry art and science.  Jobs pointed out the original team working on the Mac had backgrounds in anthropology, art, history, and poetry.  That’s always been important in making Apple’s products stand out.  It’s the difference between the iPad and every other tablet computer that came before it or since.  It is the look and feel of a product.  It is its soul.  But it is such a difficult thing for computer scientists or engineers to see that importance, so any company must have a leader that sees that importance.

2. To create the future, you can’t do it through focus groups – There is a school of thought in management theory that — if you’re in the consumer-facing space building products and services — you’ve got to listen to your customer.  Steve Jobs was one of the first businessmen to say that was a waste of time.  The customers today don’t always know what they want, especially if it’s something they’ve never seen, heard, or touched before.  When it became clear that Apple would come out with a tablet, many were skeptical.  When people heard the name (iPad), it was a joke in the Twitter-sphere for a day.  But when people held one, and used it, it became a ‘must have.’  They didn’t know how they’d previously lived without one.  It became the fastest growing Apple product in its history.  Jobs (and the Apple team) trusted himself more than others.  Picasso and great artists have done that for centuries.  Jobs was the first in business.
3. Never fear failure – Jobs was fired by the successor he picked.  It was one of the most public embarrassments of the last 30 years in business.  Yet, he didn’t become a venture capitalist never to be heard from again.  He didn’t start a production company and do a lot of lunches.  He picked himself up and got back to work following his passion.  Eight years ago, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and told he only had a few weeks to live.  As Samuel Johnson said, there’s nothing like your impending death to focus the mind.  From Jobs’ 2005 Stanford commencement speech:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

4. You can’t connect the dots forward – only backward – This is another gem from the 2005 Stanford speech.  The idea behind the concept is that, as much as we try to plan our lives ahead in advance, there’s always something that’s completely unpredictable about life.  What seems like bitter anguish and defeat in the moment — getting dumped by a girlfriend, not getting that job at McKinsey, “wasting” 4 years of your life on a start-up that didn’t pan out as you wanted — can turn out to sow the seeds of your unimaginable success years from now.  You can’t be too attached to how you think your life is supposed to work out and instead trust that all the dots will be connected in the future.  This is all part of the plan.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

5. Listen to that voice in the back of your head that tells you if you’re on the right track or not – Most of us don’t hear a voice inside our heads.  We’ve simply decided that we’re going to work in finance or be a doctor because that’s what our parents told us we should do or because we wanted to make a lot of money.  When we consciously or unconsciously make that decision, we snuff out that little voice in our head.  From then on, most of us put it on automatic pilot.  We mail it in.  You have met these people.  They’re nice people.  But they’re not changing the world.  Jobs has always been a restless soul.  A man in a hurry.  A man with a plan.  His plan isn’t for everyone.  It was his plan. He wanted to build computers.  Some people have a voice that tells them to fight for democracy.  Some have one that tells them to become an expert in miniature spoons.  When Jobs first saw an example of a Graphical User Interface — a GUI — he knew this was the future of computing and that he had to create it.  That became the Macintosh.  Whatever your voice is telling you, you would be smart to listen to it.  Even if it tells you to quit your job, or move to China, or leave your partner.


6. Expect a lot from yourself and others – We have heard stories of Steve Jobs yelling or dressing down staff.  He’s a control freak, we’ve heard – a perfectionist.  The bottom line is that he is in touch with his passion and that little voice in the back of his head.  He gives a damn.  He wants the best from himself and everyone who works for him.  If they don’t give a damn, he doesn’t want them around.  And yet — he keeps attracting amazing talent around him.  Why?  Because talent gives a damn too.  There’s a saying: if you’re a “B” player, you’ll hire “C” players below you because you don’t want them to look smarter than you.  If you’re an “A” player, you’ll hire “A+” players below you, because you want the best result.
7. Don’t care about being right.  Care about succeeding – Jobs used this line in an interview after he was fired by Apple.  If you have to steal others’ great ideas to make yours better, do it.  You can’t be married to your vision of how a product is going to work out, such that you forget about current reality.  When the Apple III came out, it was hot and warped its motherboard even though Jobs had insisted it would be quiet and sleek.  If Jobs had stuck with Lisa, Apple would have never developed the Mac.
8. Find the most talented people to surround yourself with – There is a misconception that Apple is Steve Jobs.  Everyone else in the company is a faceless minion working to please the all-seeing and all-knowing Jobs.  In reality, Jobs has surrounded himself with talent: Phil Schiller, Jony Ive, Peter Oppenheimer, Tim Cook, the former head of stores Ron Johnson.  These are all super-talented people who don’t get the credit they deserve.  The fact that Apple’s stock price has been so strong since Jobs left as CEO is a credit to the strength of the team.  Jobs has hired bad managerial talent before.  John Sculley ended up firing Jobs and — according to Jobs — almost killing the company.  Give credit to Jobs for learning from this mistake and realizing that he can’t do anything without great talent around him.


9. Stay hungry, stay foolish - Again from the end of Jobs’ memorable Stanford speech:

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

10. Anything is possible through hard work, determination, and a sense of vision – Although he’s the greatest CEO ever and the father of the modern computer, at the end of the day, Steve Jobs is just a guy.  He’s a husband, a father, a friend — like you and me.  We can be just as special as he is — if we learn his lessons and start applying them in our lives.  When Jobs returned to Apple in the 1990s, it was was weeks away from bankruptcy.  It’s now the biggest company in the world.  Anything’s possible in life if you continue to follow the simple lessons laid out above.
May you change the world.
[At the time of publication, Jackson was long AAPL]

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