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Wanted: An Exceptional Objective-C Developer
We have a very small and talented development team here at Made by Many. We’re technology agnostic, and while we have a very strong Ruby backbone, we regularly supplement our in-house skills with specialists from a range of disciplines. Most often we do this with a trusted network of specialists. But now we are ready to add an exceptional Objective-C developer to our team.
The primary focus for this new role will be – of course – the iPhone and iPad (not forgetting the iPod Touch).
Why would you want to join Made by Many? We’re not like other companies. We are relentlessly focused on user experience through a synthesis of great design and great technology. We have a great client list, and we’re adding to it so fast that we can’t keep the clients page on our website up to date.
We work in a highly collaborative and open way, and individuals can make a big impact here. We don’t have departments or organisation charts. We work in small project teams, using Agile methodologies, in close contact with our clients. Technologists are integral to what we do, and without exception are involved from the inception of every project and at every stage thereafter. We all have strong opinions yet we are all open-minded. There’s a wealth of experience in our team, yet a hunger for new ideas. We believe that technology is a powerful force for good, and we love experimenting with new stuff.
Almost everything about the role is up for discussion, and the specifics will largely be down to the right candidate emerging. Naturally, we will offer a competitive salary and a good range of benefits. Not just the normal ones, either, although we offer those too. For example, this year almost all of us went to SXSWi, with the company picking up the large majority of the tab.
Obviously, you will need to be a very talented developer with a deep knowledge of the iPhone SDK, and a proven track record in Objective-C development. We will also expect you to have a solid understanding of fundamental web technologies, and the fundamental tools of software engineering. Everyone at Made by Many talks to clients, and you’ll need to be comfortable with attending and contributing to client meetings. We’re not looking for code monkeys who shrink from human contact.
We’re really excited about this opportunity, and we can’t wait to hear from candidates. Please send a copy of your CV and a brief covering email to james@madebymany.co.uk along with any questions or comments. Absolutely no agents, please.
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Umair Haque is Confused About the iPad
It’s been a tough month for Umair Haque. First, he conducted the world’s most boring and pointless interview at SXSWi, and now he blogs his extraordinarily muddled thoughts on the iPad.
It’s tough to sum up what he’s saying because it’s so confused. He seems to want the iPad to be more open both physically and in terms of installing apps and content. This is understandable in some ways, but he’s an economist, and his argument seems to be saying that Apple will not succeed with the approach they’ve chosen for fundamental market-based reasons. It’s just that he fails to provide any evidence at all that this is so.
Let’s take it one paragraph at a time.
The iPad’s like an amazing hairdresser — who wants to monitor your bathroom for authorized shampoo, conditioner, and water. By building a device that liberates services, but locks down “product,” Apple’s shooting itself in the iFace. It’s as if Apple wants to step into the hyperconnected network age — but also keep one foot firmly planted in the industrial era.
Hahahahaha! iParadox? iFace?! Those are great gags! Oh, hold on, I think I just pissed in my iPants.
Puerile jokes aside, the analogy is nonsense. Critics of the openness of the iPad (and the iPhone) often conveniently ignore the fact that it has unmoderated access to the entire internet (minus anything written in Flash) through its browser, Mobile Safari. The entire pitch for the iPad emphasises this: “it’s like holding the Internet in your hands”.
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Content design with cojones
Or so I tweeted whilst watching the recent Apple keynote. A month later and I don’t think I could have been more wrong.Immediately after the iPad’s reveal, the interweb rippled with an argument between two tribes, those that want a computer that allows them to tinker under the hood, and those that don’t care about getting their hands dirty – they just want to email, surf, watch and listen. For me, this isn’t the interesting debate. It’s how the speed, screen size and controlled environment of the iPad now means that content design on screen can finally come of age and grow some balls. Big ones.
Or so I tweeted whilst watching the recent Apple keynote. A month later and I don’t think I could have been more wrong.
Or so I tweeted whilst watching the recent Apple keynote. A month later and I don’t think I could have been more wrong.
Immediately after the iPad’s reveal, the interweb rippled with an argument between two tribes, those that want a computer that allows them to tinker under the hood, and those that don’t care about getting their hands dirty – they just want to email, surf, watch and listen. For me, this isn’t the interesting debate. It’s how the speed, screen size and controlled environment of the iPad now means that content design on screen can finally come of age and grow some balls. Big ones.
Your content isn’t the same as my content
There are some sites that people check two or three times a day. BBC News is one of them for me. However, out of the 50 or so articles on their home page in the morning, I’ll probably only read around ten stories. As I check back during the day, there’s a law of diminishing returns, in fact every time I visit I usually end up reading half as many stories as I did the previous time.
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Time for a reassessment of the human-computer interface
A great blog post by Lukas Mathis has been floating around Twitter for a few days now. In it he talks about the removal of features in software development. Specifically:
If you don’t pay attention, what started out as an elegant, simple application that perfectly solves a single problem, can quickly turn into a huge behemoth of an application that solves a ton of problems, but solves all of them poorly.
This, and some other tweet comments, got me thinking about the iPad (who isn’t?) and how I believe it’s a glimpse of the future for how we interact with personal computers.
In the 35 years since the arrival of the personal computer we’ve been on a continuous upward trajectory of feature enhancement and specification bloat. It’s not just the software, it’s infecting the very machines that we run the bloated software on.
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Apple Needs a Good Syncing Story Quickly (Or: How We Need that Syncing Feeling)
Now that the dust has settled from the latest application of the Reality Distortion Field and we are all salivating at the chance to get our hands on the iPad, it’s time to think about how all of these devices will work in our day to day lives.
I’m a fully paid up member of the Apple devices fanboy club. I carry an iPhone and a 5th generation iPod with me wherever I go (even the largest capacity iPhone is nowhere near enough to store even a third of my music collection), I have a MacBook Air for holidays and overseas trips, a 17″ MacBook Pro for work and a huge
cheese graterMac Pro at home for media storage and its raw computing horsepower.I love all of these devices for different reasons, but one thing I don’t love is the difficulty of keeping them all up to date with the latest versions of my data.
Posts Tagged ‘ipad’
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