Shameless plug alert.

Digital Outlook London have some pretty funky jobs up for grabs. And the best bit is, you get to work with me!If that doesn’t swing it… we also have great benefits, multi-coloured beanbags, a room with fake grass, an indoor bike rack, the full Xbox Rock Band setup, table football, an inflatable moose head, an office in LA and free beer. What’s not to like?

The jobs are…

• Creative Developer
• Senior Designer
• Art Director
• Junior Designer
• Microsoft Xbox Social Media Editor

Creative developer will be Flash based, working on games, funky stuff, Unity 3D, microsites and even iPhone content if you’re up for it. You’ll be sat right in among the designers and other devs so it’ll be a good giggle. So if you’re sparky, want to get lots of training, work on really cool content and are looking for the next step, drop me an email and I’ll do the rest.

Senior designer will be working on all the cool stuff we do at Digital Outlook; Disney, Pixar, Xbox, Mr. Men, iTunes, Universal, Miniclip, games, Facebook and all that. really looking for a bright designer. Someone who isn’t satisfied doing the usual banking, corporate nonsense and wants to roll their sleeves up and make a difference. You’ll be passionate about your craft, games, entertainment, movies and especially the kids and teen audience. Also, if you’re quiet, don’t like a laugh or shy away from karaoke, look away. If you’re still here, contact me!

Art Director is essentially the same as the above but with a fair bit of experience under their belt and someone looking to make Creative Director in a company that will actively help you achieve your dreams. You’ll have been there and done that but will also be sensitive to those that haven’t… including the clients, who will look up to you to hold their hand and inspire them. Yes you can wear a funky shirt. Yes you can lead brainstorms. You can even hang up an inflatable gorilla head to go with the inflatable moose we already have. The role is yours to shape. You guessed it, if it sounds interesting, let me know.

Junior Designer will probably be a year out of Uni… straight out of Uni but has a dose of reality already… or someone who’s never been to Uni but really want to climb the ladder, experience one of the cooler companies in the industry and develop their skills in an area that has soul. If you’re into games, love Photoshop, like Flash, fiddle with After Effects or get off on coming up with bonkers ideas for willing clients… Digital Outlook has a Mac and a nice seat with your name on it. We have PC’s too if you prefer.

Social Media Editor will help deliver and develop Xbox’s social media strategy across loads of social media platforms, as well as doing all the editorial and content updates, user engagement, moderation, and reporting. It’s 3-5 days a week, based in the Microsoft HQ in central London and obviously would be perfect for anyone into social content, gaming, writing and working in a job that would make your mates properly jealous. This one is time sensitive though so if you’re interested, get a shift on and let me know.

Check out the Digital Outlook site for a basic overview of what we do and if you like what you see, just drop me a line (and ideally a CV) and if the planets align, an interview awaits! It may be the best thing you do in the next 5 years. :)

Some of the jobs are here too. http://www.digital-outlook.com/jobs but we’ll hopefully update that in the next few days.

Just watched Lee Brimlow’s quick demo of Flash CS5 saving out an iPhone app. Watch it!

Now, first things first, we’ve made a few iPhone apps at Digital Outlook already in native Objective C and although I’m nowhere near being even remotely classed as a developer, I have been on a basic iPhone dev course and have spent a good length of time debugging and mildly fiddling with the existing apps we have. I’ve made a few simple apps myself so I’ve got a fair understanding of how it works I guess.

I’ve also go a VERY acute understanding of the process and costs involved in creating a native iPhone app from scratch from within an agency. At the beginning, they said “take a Flash app, budget the coding part, double it and add another half”. Cool. Nowhere near. Without going into detail, it seems iPhone App development isn’t quite as simple as it’s made out to be. Yes, your developer may know Objective C, applying it to the iPhone development environment is another thing. Us Flash guys could only stare on as seemingly simple issues took days and weeks to resolve.

So the fact that the Flash SC5 release will compile to iPhone is immense news for me, us and probably every digital agency and Flash freelancer on the planet. Sure there are things it can’t do. Sure you get a bundled app that you can’t ‘add to’ in the native development environment. Sure you can’t use the camera and a few other api’s. And it may be a bit slower than a native app, but take it from me, I’ll take all of those on the chin for the ability to get a creative idea onto the iPhone and into the hands of the world’s mobile consumers.

I can’t wait for CS5 to drop but in the mean time, here are some of my observations from native iPhone development from my Flash perspective.

• Objective C may look like AS3 but it works in a whole different way. From declaring variables to having a .h header file to your .m main class files. Don’t even think of using a ‘Trace’ or C ‘Print’ command. Underestimate the differences at your peril… but don’t be scared either. If I can do it, so can you! (No, seriously, I’m not that clever).
• Debugging already written code is really easy when you know your way way around. Moving graphics, font sizes, swapping sounds, changing text etc. are all pretty straightforward with a simple search to narrow down the location to work on.
• The assets are held externally to the project, so changing graphics, movies, audio etc. is simple too, just swap out the file and recompile.
• The graphics are just plain old JPEGs and PNG files, so your designers are more than up to the job. It’s just like a Flash project as far as that goes.
• If you have time / money, put a rough Flash demo together first. Changing your mind and feature creep during production can be slow and costly.
• The iPhone development suite is really slick (unlike Android I may add!). The on-screen emulator is great and allows you do test it (with a few exceptions) without needing an iPhone or a developer account.
• If your app uses accelerometers, cameras etc. the emulator will fall short as it’s can’t ‘emulate’ an accelerometer. You can get around it by installing an app on your phone to transmit the accelerometer data to your mac, then add a little code to your iPhone build to receive the data and substitute the values in the emulator. Here’s an example of screen-capturing the emulator using this technique. See the Accelerometer Simulator by Otto Chrons for more.
• The icon is VERY important. Make sure you spend time on it. And by the way, the glassy shine and round corners are automatically added to your icon on the phone itself. You can switch the shine off though, but not the corners.
• If you don’t have them in-house, freelance iPhone developers will charge you anywhere from £250-£500 a day.
• If you shop around and do your research, you soon find out that the cheap way to get an iPhone app done is to go ‘off-shore’. South America, China and India are all much cheaper than your average LA, London or New York dev agency. However, they do come with the usual health warnings about production values, creative sign-off and time-zone / communication problems.
• If you have the money and it’s your first app, get someone local to hold your hand and learn from. If not, make sure you have scoped the project within an inch of its life. After the project, budget for an extra half-day for your iPhone dev to explain what he/she did to your Flash dev team. Shame to pay all that money and lose all the knowledge.
• Memory management is now your problem. You have to allocate memory and release it as you go. This is one of the big areas that Apple check when you submit your app to the App Store. You don’t have to allocate actual memory size as in assembly language, but you do have to ‘manage’ closely.
• Do register with Apple and get a developer account. You can get the dev environment for free and start compiling but you can’t transfer anything onto your iPhone without a developer license and associated provisioning files.
• While I mention it, the process to authorise your computer and set up your first app is a bit of a faff. Still not 100% sure I understand it but the instructions on the Apple site are clear enough to get you started.
• The app submission process is pretty simple and the time taken to get a response is anywhere from 2-4 weeks. I know the guys at Apple and even they can’t affect this process, so don’t ask! However, in general, if your app is basic and doesn’t have any advanced functionality such as external database calls or live data, you go into a ‘less risky’ pool, and are generally through in less time. If you are rejected, you go to the back of the queue.
• Make sure you look at what everyone else is doing too. Download everything remotely related to compare. Look at the top 3 in each category too, there’s a reason they are there, whether it’s the content, the execution or the user-interaction. It’s all vital knowledge.
• The ‘Games’ category is the most varied and the most competitive. Before you assume your first app should be a game, consider that it will be up against the EA’s and the Need for Speed’s of this world. If you’re not in the top 20 pretty quickly, you pretty much free-fall until you become all but invisible to the regular browsers.
• To charge or not to charge? 59p says “Aaaah, hell, why not”. £2.99 says “This better be good or I’ll tell everyone it’s a rip off and rate it 1 star”. Initially, you need to go for ratings, so consider an introductory low rate then change it if you see an appetite and good ratings. It’s easy to change the price on the fly.
• And finally, if you can wait until April 2010, consider using Flash CS5! :)

I had a fiddle with the Apple iPhone developer kit last week and it was a relatively painless experience. I had an app, albeit a useless one, up and running within an hour, like so. Apple applied the same philosophy to their development tools as they did to their consumer-facing products. It was fun, simple and even a Visual C newbie like me could figure the basic out.

Just done the same to Google’s Android developer platform. Wow, what a difference. Where Apple installs lots of applications, tools and nic-nacs to fiddle with, Android can barely bring itself to unzip the scattering of .jar files and nasty looking anonymous files into a snappily named folder “android-sdk-mac-x86-1.0_r1″.

Hmmm ok. Discarding my own “if you need to look at the manual, it’s not very good” philosophy, I followed the ugly-as-hell installation instructions. What a can of worms I’ve just opened. I need to download a third-party development environment such as Eclipse 3.4. I Google it, visit their website but can’t figure out what to download. Eclipse IDE for Java Developers? Eclipse Classic 3.4.1? Don’t know. Didn’t bother… boredom setting in…

Once you’ve installed Eclipse, you also have to install the Eclipse Plugin (ADT) with it’s own set of tecno-babble installation instructions.

So now I’m ready for my “Hello Android” starter experience. I believe the expression in OMFG! How nasty and difficult can they make it?

Ok, what’s my point? My point is the internet exploded because of two things. Creatives and Flash. Before flash, developers used stuff like C++ or HTML. Some used Javascript but on the whole, they smelled of wee and old pastry and knew the names of all the planets in Star Wars. Coders stayed in their cave and designers stayed in theirs. Then designers found a tool they could play with without too much programming. They could make content for the internet that was fun, irreverent, thought-provoking, high quality and cheap. Tradition coders didn’t get involved as ‘Actions’ were too crude to make anything out of. I loved it and so did many others. I made Flash 4 games, sites, I solved problems and people started to see the internet as a fun place rather than a place where games had interfaces made with grey Windows UI buttons. Here’s the first site I ever made in Flash 4 btw, and it ran off text files! :)

The beauty happens when people cross the lines. The epiphany where code and creativity combine to create something greater than the sum of the parts. Content exploded. Games, videos, animations, crazy (and often pointless) websites popped up at an astonishing rate to feed the new demand of the first dot-com boom. I’d been using the web for 6 years before flash came out and in one year, it was astonishing what was happening.

Spool forward a few years and Flash updated its coding engine to Actionscript, then Actionscript 2… and now Actionscript 3. Coders can come to flash from C++, Java etc. and get developing straight away. Unfortunately, flash has started to get too complex for those pioneers of creativity, the bedroom creatives out there. Coders now have a bigger cave to sit in and designers are too busy playing with their iPhones to notice the gap that’s opening up again. Most are too young to know how it ‘used to be’. Those of us that remember know it was a sterile, fractured, dysfunctional and ugly place to be. If someone has an idea, it’s imperative they have the tools to express themselves without barriers. Creativity isn’t just for designers, it’s for everyone. I can’t express how important it is to offer tools to allow those with ideas to create them, to innovate, to inspire and drive the internet forward.

As an example, look at the winners of Android’s $10 million Developer Challenge. I’m sure they’re very clever, but please, these were judged the best in the world!

What Google have offered in this case is embarrassing and depressing. I’m a big fan of a bunch of their stuff but this smacks of slapping their name on someone else’s technology and turning a blind eye to their values. I cannot use their ‘open platform’ as it’s closed to anyone other than hardcore coders. Ok, you can argue that the Apple Xcode Visual C experience is pretty nasty, but the doors are wide open and welcoming. Google has locked theirs, dug a couple of moats and put a huge, angry robot on guard to quickly beat the enthusiasm out of any passer by.

Maybe that’s why they called it Android…

Yep… I make my first iPhone app and it really is that simple to compile. No reason for the Chuck Norris image really, I had to use something. I don’t actually have an iPhone yet so I even find the emulator fun to play with at the moment.

The Xcode development platform absolutely rocks but if I’m honest, I only get half of it. It really is a half and half thing. The half I get is the interface constructor, the UI libraries and so on. The half I don’t get is the slightl weird Visual C syntax of the code. If you know C or maybe even AS2 or 3, some of it will be familiar but the rest is propper strange. Most of the answers to “why?” are “because you have to”. Still, I fully realise its my lack of cleverness rather than Apple’s dev platform. They seem to have done pretty well with it so far.

Anyway, I’m off to get some more skill, so watch this space.