Apps
My wife is a photographer and when she meets clients she lugs about a very large portfolio case holding a selection of suitable prints for each client. The case is heavy and cumbersome. Sure, the prints are ordered but it can be a pain for her to sift through her portfolio to find particular photographs during a meeting. The situation is a similar problem for thousands of photographers and designers. Far from ideal.
The iPad
The iPad is the perfect device for photographers to present their portfolio to clients. Swiping and zooming through photos on the iPad not only looks amazing on it’s HD display, it enables professional photographers to take their entire portfolio to client meetings in a lightweight device that fits inside an A4 envelope.
Apple’s Photos App
But Apple provide a great Photos App for the iPad already so why not just use that? Here are a couple of reasons.
- What about when your private pics get mixed in with your professional ones?
- What if you want to add a title and description to each of your photos?
- What if you want to import your photos from Flickr or Dropbox and not have to rely solely on iTunes and iPhoto syncing?
iPhoto is a great app for viewing photos and videos of family and friends but when it comes to the professional photographer, you want a bespoke looking app that that looks like it belongs to you. Your Brand. Your Portfolio. Your App.
Introducing Portfolio Pro
Portfolio Pro for iPad, my latest project, is a brandable photo & video presentation app built for photographers, designers & creatives.
With batch import from Flickr, Dropbox and your iPad, Portfolio Pro gives professional users an extensive collection of ways to get their work onto the iPad. The app consists of 3 main sections: home screensaver for featured work, galleries and flippable fullscreen slideshow mode.
Portfolio Management
While Portfolio Pro imports your high res JPGs, PNGs, TIFs, GIFs, MOVs, MP4s and M4Vs you are free to simultaneously drag and drop to rearrange galleries, add names and descriptions to your work (also automatically imported from Flickr and Dropbox).
An Intuitive Experience
Having tried and tested pretty much every portfolio app for iPad in the App Store I can honestly say I think it’s rare to find a portfolio app that is both beautiful to present with and easy to use and configure. That’s exactly what I’ve set out to achieve with Portfolio Pro. Not only does Portfolio Pro look beautiful when presenting your work to clients, making changes to galleries and media is also super-simple and intuitive. Triple-tap any screen to switch between client and edit modes. Check out the video to see it in action.
I’ve set-up a dedicated website for Portfolio Pro here showcasing screengrabs of the app in action and many further details but if you’re already sold already here’s a direct link to Portfolio Pro on the App Store:
Birthday Reminder for Facebook is a beautiful and useful iPhone App that will stop you from forgetting your friend and family birthdays ever again!
I built Birthday Reminder over a period of 5 development days as part of a new book that I’m currently writing for Apress/Friends of Ed publishers. The concept of the book is to teach new iOS programmers how to develop iPhone Apps by building an app from start to finish! It’s very hand-on and a great way to learn Objective C programming for iPhone.
The book (which you can pre-order here) is titled Foundation iPhone App Development: Build an iPhone App in 5 Days with iOS SDK and will be published in September 2012. It covers all kinds of iOS and Xcode features from Storyboarding to Core Data. At the moment it’s all iOS 5 but assuming WWDC announces iOS 6 this summer you can bet that the book will also cover new iOS 6 APIs.
Birthday Reminder works even when you’re offline and will fire local birthday reminder notifications based on your settings.
Import friends birthdays straight from Facebook or the iPhone’s native address book. It’s really fast and intuitive to use.
I’ve featured the app’s birthday cake user-interface and icon design in a number of presentations recently on How to Make Lickable Apps! I’m right in the middle of writing chapter 9 of my book which is all about iOS skinning techniques including the iOS 5 Appearance APIs which are a really awesome new addition to iOS SDK.
Commissioned by West End Studios, I led the iOS Development of a feature-rich conference meeting application for Novartis Global. The app enabled delegates to view their personalised conference diary and network with other 450 delegates and speakers.
I built the messaging system for the iPod app using Apple’s Push Notification technology and a custom local/server cache syncing solution. Although initially the messaging feature was a low priority for the app, it ultimately rolled out into multiple features: Private Messaging, Help Desk Chat, and Ask the Presenter a Question.
450 iPods await collection!
Another great feature of the app were the maps. Google Maps wasn’t a viable option as we wanted delegates to be able to access the maps even when offline and not on site. I developed a PDF rendering solution for this which also enabled delegates to find locations of any event in their diary.
The app enabled Novartis to host a ‘paperless conference’. No print outs were distributed throughout the sessions, plenaries or exhibitions. Instead all events were accessible through the iPod app and delegates could access any event documents directly and ‘send to my email’. Both a cost saving in terms of printing and a green solution.
A substantial effort was made during the development to ensure that the app would run most features offline. With 400+ iPods simultaneously attempting to connect to the wi-fi you tend to run into problems delivering a reliable wireless network. Our app regularly synced with the server and then locally cached all data and images (using Apple’s CoreData framework). The guys at West End implemented a streaming media server to deliver conference movies directly to the iPods throughout the event. However, we had a fallback option whereby even the movies would get cached and run locally if requested by the CMS. This was ideal for help videos for example. The flip-side of data caching is of course the security implications. So we implemented a feature into the CMS that would trigger the iPod to instantly clear the local cache and log the user out of the device remotely.
I was at the conference and able to see the software in action. The feedback was incredibly positive. Even the less technically enthusiastic and more sceptical delegates were won over by the end of the three days.
Martin de Planta, head of Global Learning @ Novartis kindly added this recommendation to my LinkedIn profile:
Nick led the development of an innovative, cost effective and dynamic meeting app. A consummate professional he was able to take a concept and turn into a reality where significantly bigger, household names and highly regarded institutions were not! Do not under-estimate the capabilities of this man. World class was how our most senior executives described his work.