Nic Wise

There are many ways to make coffee, from the ancient "boil everything together and serve" method, which is very much like current Turkish / Greek coffee, right up to multi-thousand-dollar espresso machines. All of them have one thing in common: pass hot water

iOS 7 is a strange beast. I've gone thru the various stages of "grief" over it, starting with a hefty "WTF" through to where I am now. Visually, on the surface, it's a huge change and not in a direction

Leonie and I have decided to do something about the level of exercise we get. We are fairly active - we cycle to work most days, go to the gym a couple of times a week, walk a lot, that kind of thing -

The phrase Google is getting better at design faster than Apple is getting better at services[1] Is an old one, but is becoming more and more true as time goes on. Google now has what amounts to a HIG, which is (IMO) both

After a month or 2, my talk from Xamarin Evolve is up! Fast UI Creation with MonoTouch.Dialog This talk covers the basics of UITableView-driven applications - which are most iOS applications - and how MonoTouch.Dialog can speed up the creation and maintenance

I've finally got around to updating the look of my site. I moved from Wordpress to Octopress a while back, which was fairly painless, but I stuck with the original layout and theme as it worked for blogging, which was mostly what I wanted.

Is the New Google Interface Flat? The design scheme, while not completely flat, is almost flat and could evoke a whole new design trend of its own. I'm VERY much enjoying the new Google+ and the recently updated Google iOS apps - Maps and

Wow. Just wow. What is Sketchmine? Sketchmine is a list of free .sketch files designed by the sketch community. So. Many. Awsomes.

In my Evolve talk, I had a slide which talked about inspiration, and some good sites to get it from. Personally, I use dribbble, Behance and Pinterest the most[1], but some times things come in from twitter[2] and various other sources, in

Things have been a bit quiet around here since I got back from Xamarin Evolve. Mostly because when I got back, London decided to do its best Austin impression and get warm and very, very blue-sky'ed outside, so we have been taking advantage of

I've put my slides from my talk at Xamarin Evolve up on Speaker Deck: The source is also up on GitHub if you want to follow along. The Xamarin folk have said the video will be up in a week or 2. Evolve was

Next week, I'll be talking about MonoTouch.Dialog at the Xamarin Evolve conference in Austin, TX. It's been a while since I last presented anything to a proper crowd (I don't count workmates as a crowd - too friendly), so I've been doing some

Ray Wenderlich[^1] has a list of 25 ios performance tips, most of which apply to Xamarin.iOS just as much as Objective-C. This article gathers together 25 tips and tricks that you can use to improve the performance of your apps, in the

I'm happy to say I'm speaking at Xamarin Evolve next month in Austin, in the company of some pretty awesome people. I'm going to be talking about MonoTouch.Dialog, especially how to make custom elements, and how to not have them look like the

An Antipattern: In software engineering, an anti-pattern (or antipattern) is a pattern used in social or business operations or software engineering that may be commonly used but is ineffective and/or counterproductive in practice :: Wikipedia Mobile, being a new area, is generating its own

... is out. OK, except it's not, because it's not shipping until the end of April, but at least Samsung announced a ship date. Ars Technica review iMore review Let me start by saying that Android is growing on me. I have a Nexus 4,

A couple of nice design posts for your Friday viewing pleasure: Pttrns has had a bit of a content upgrade, with loads of new apps showcased. You can drill into the type of interaction you are looking for (login, lists, capture, checkin etc), and

Xamarin Studio 4.0 was recently released, and as a lot of people might have started using it, I thought it might be a good idea to do a cheat sheet (or default key map) to give you an easy to find list of

The quick stuff Tope over at AppDesignVault has a cheat sheet for getting your app reviewed on the major websites (TUAW et al). I plan on try his tips when I'm done with the major rework of Trip Wallet that I'm nearly done with.

It's all very exciting. Oh wait. That's something else. This isn't very exciting. But it is very useful. I've needed a decent progress HUD in my apps for a while. I was using ATMHud for a while, and while that works, it doesn't take

FreeAgent just announced they have released automated bank feeds: Sometime back in the late Cretaceous period we announced that development had started on Bank Feeds. Since then, tectonic plates have shifted, civilisations have risen and fallen, and all the while, work has continued inexorably

TL;DR: An especially good tutorial for Objective-C from RyPress, which covers all the basics, without being too basic. Over the years, I've used a few languages, starting with Pascal and Delphi then Java and C#, amongst others. Objective-C was always an oddball language

It appears that the UICollectionView is getting some well deserved love. UICollectionView is a successor - or just a well designed sidekick - to the UITableView, and provides a great way to display a list of items and let the user scroll thru them

There has been lots of talk about the Apple share price recently, around how its gone from around $700 to $500 in the past 3 months, all with very little apparent reason. Gruber has a number of very good pieces on it if you

Leonie and I finally got to see The Hobbit this weekend. We've been busy since it came out, but as we know a few people who've worked on it, I wanted to see it "how it was supposed to be seen": High