I’ve been working with a lot of people who’ve been wanting to go freelance – but they all worry about the same thing: money. Money is a scary thing for people, especially when you start getting paid multiple times a day, in amounts big and small.

I’ve decided to offer a new workshop, held here at my flat in London. There are 5 tickets available only – but don’t worry, if this ends up being a popular thing, I’ll open up more workshops in the future.

Some of the topics:

• Dealing with irregular income & setting up a budget
• Creating invoices, estimates and getting paid
• Tools for tracking these items
• Pros and cons of hourly, daily or project rates

I’ll make us some yummy lunch and munchies, as well as offer tea, coffee and drinks!

You can buy tickets and learn more at Eventbright and follow the event on Lanyrd.

There was a lot less sponsor goodies this year, but they were holding some great sponsor activities, including two photo contests. I kissed a gnome in one and threw a canoe with Mitch Canter of Studionashvegas in another.

Some Good Times

I loved hanging out with Courtenay Rogers, who’s I’ve worked with before while she was at Primarily Rye, and has now brought me on the redesign of her new employer’s site, Bone McAllistor Norton. She did a beautiful job of organizing the event.

I also got to meet a Seth Green look-a-like and the guys from Industry Collective, which are a group of fantastic web professionals, who always make the coolest swag and come up with all of the fun Barcamp giveaways. This is where I ended up kissing the gnome. Cross your fingers and wish me well in winning an iPad2…I wants it!

It was nice catching up with some other local freelancers I know well, Brad Blackman and Mitch Canter. It’s crazy how I’m literally 20-30 minutes away from these guys and we never talk!

Build a Native iPhone App in 30 Minutes or Less by Dick Pepper

I got in late to this one, but Dick was just telling us about using hybrid apps, which are apps that are build using HTML/CSS and placed into the Objective C framework, so that you can still have an app in the app store.

If you go this route, he suggested using UI frameworks, like Sencha or Webkit, to get the look and feel of an actual app.

Some frameworks tie into Objective C and are ideal for presentation focused apps. Content rich apps work better in HTML5. The cool thing about doing a hybrid app, is that you only have to support one browser and you can use all of webkit’s features, which makes the code a lot shorter.

UX Leadership: See, Speak Share by Laurie Kalmanson

Laurie spoke of everyday objects that had great UX: like the recent trend for car manufacturers to attach the gas cap to the car so drivers don’t forget it; or when a microwave beeps to alert you to finish food and then stays quiet. She noted that when machines got out of the way and did it politely, that was what a good user experience was. Good UX should be delightful and solve problems. It should also give people things they’ve never seen or imagined before.

Interfaces have beats like songs and in mobile, there are so many ways you can delight and surprise your users. Laurie pointed out some popular apps that have bad UX design, for example, Twitter’s header, Facebook’s privacy settings page and Google’s Gmail header.

The difference between IA and UX, are that IA’s (information architects) create outline focused designs, whereas those focusing on UX (user experience) include the visual design.

Let’s Talk About WordPress by Mitch Canter

A good introduction to WordPress, Mitch talked about reducing WordPress download times. He mentioned that the small additional server load that accompanies permalinks without the numerical date in the URL will be fixed in WordPress 3.3 (yay!). A use of a CDN (content delivery network), while ranging around $40 a month, dramatically reduces load time.

You should also use a caching plugin, which is a static screenshot of the site. He recommended W3 Total Cache. I stopped using WP Super Cache after I redid the portfolio and went ahead and tried out W3 Total Cache with his recommendation. It works right out of the box, which I like.

In WordPress, if you change the title you don’t have to change the URL. If you do however, you should use the plugin Redirection to set up htaccess redirects and avoid 404 errors.

Someone asked if the date in the URL was important to SEO, and Mitch replied it wasn’t that important.

Another user asked if there was an issue with having too many plugins – Mitch said a famously fast site had over 40 plugins installed. It’s not how many plugins you have, but how bloated the code in those plugins are. It’s the external calls to things like APIs that slow a site down.

Best Practices: The Worst Case Scenario by Josh Oakes

Josh Oakes did a fantastic talk on best practices. He stated that best practices aren’t what everyone else is doing, a consensus reality or what you call your opinion to end an argument. Instead, best practices is a standard way of doing things that can be used by people in different situations.

However, best practices have three problems:

1. Specificity – What happens if you can’t adopt these practices? Best practices can not account for the unique knowledge required for or details of a problem.
2. Baggage – Best practices bring baggage, for example, if it’s your punch list, you might state your goal, go through your list in a straight line and then bring in the assumptions and constraints that your best practice was designed for.
3. Process – Doesn’t inclue anywhere to see if it actually worked. Best practices don’t help you to improve. It makes you really good at seeing problems that aren’t there and tricks you into thinking your work is good enough and needs no improvement.

To keep best practices from ruining a project, consider them, don’t just implement them at the start of a project.

Innovation is a byproduct: Why you don’t have to be innovative to be a great programmer by Jacques Woodcock

A fantastic rambling of a sem-drunk Jacques (hey it was the end of the day!), Jacques spoke about what innovation was and who had it. He said innovation could be a new idea, method or device or the creation of something better accepted by markets. Innovative companies include Apple, Tesla, Google, Disney, Nike and Whole Foods.

He also discussed a few flots: WebTV, AOL, Blockbusters, New Coke, HP Touchpad and the Zune (my contribution!).

What separates innovation from flops is the creation of a better process that solves the problem and has a great user experience. Apple doesn’t invent products, but instead creates a better product.

The US is no longer a product based economy, but is an IP, copyright and patents country. You used to have to invent something to get a patent, instead now you can just detail it on paper and be the first to file. This, unfortunately, covers software and forces smaller companies to compete in a race against larger ones.

Back to Apple! Jacques mentioned that both Android and the iPhone were innovative, they just solved different problems. Apple focuses on UX problems and providing rich features, while Android wanted to provide solutions, features and a quality competitive item.

In order to have an innovative solution, you need to understand the business goals of a company.

glass.Max() = The Rise of the Female Developer/Leader

Moderated by Kenneth White, this was the first talk I’ve ever participated in! It was basically a panel of me and three other great ladies and we talked about getting into the tech field and the issues with being a female in a male dominated sector. I’m still looking for audio or video of our talk, so if you know someone who recorded it, please let me know!

Did you enjoy Barcamp?

Feel free to share your thoughts and photos!

Images by Dave Delaney and Wonderdawg777

The conference, put on by Aral Balkan, was fantastic. I finally got to meet Sarah Parmenter, Jeremy Keith, Geri Coady and Remy Sharp. I also made some new friends, Laura Kalbag and Scott Coello. I also enjoyed seeing the Clearleft office in person and having a long tea break discussing politics and religion with Aral.

I do admit that I missed the first set of talks due to the airline “forgetting” to put some luggage on the plane and the hubby not having anything to wear. Luckily, we made it there by the first break.

Let’s get started on the talks, shall we?

One Web by Jeremy Keith

I’ve read a lot of books by Jeremy, but never heard him speak until this conference. The man is as stubborn and loud as me and I loved it. His talk was very passionate and I was able to follow along. At one point, he even called iOS developers “fucking peasants”. It was fantastic.

Jeremy stated that the web was created to be open, and unlike anything else, you didn’t need permission from anyone to create content on it and that anything could be published. The links were open and you could link from one site to another without asking anyone for permission. The internet’s primary design was universality and was meant to be used on any device or with any handicap.

The problem with native app design is that it takes us back 20 years before the web was born. Native apps may be great, but how long will those resources lasts? When you create content on the web, it lasts for forever, as long as you pay for hosting, but it’s harder to keep content alive when it’s tied to a specific device. All a web needs is HTML, HTTP and a URL.

Back when the web was new, it’s competition came from CD-ROMs like Microsoft Incarta, but the web was able to succeed because of the links and it’s updatability. Today’s competition comes from apps, but it can be argued that because of links, web is really the “killer app”.

The internet is real time communication and it threatens publishers and content controllers like magazines, news providers, music and film makers because it allows anyone to publish. These outlets are excited about the popularity of native apps because it brings back control and exclusivity.

What is the web for? For for fun? For users? Merely to make money (which Jeremy argued, is no better than a prostitute)? The web is meant for humans in order to contribute to a better world.

Steve Jobs once said that you don’t need to be permission to be awesome – but you do with native apps.

Geek Ninja Battle – or Jeremy Keith vs. Everyone Else

This WAS the best talk of all, which was more like a debate between Jeremy Keith and everyone else on the panel. The other members were Aral, Kevin, Martin, Matt and Seb. Basically, the battle was about which is better, native or web apps. Jeremy being a hardcore web-only kind of guy, basically ended up arguing with everyone, especially Aral, and there was seriously a part where I though punches were about to be thrown. It truly was a battle and quite entertaining (and informative of course). It’s interesting to see how we all geek out over little stuff like this that the rest of the world never thinks or cares about.

Aral asked Martin, who works at Microsoft, why we should use their new Windows phone. Honestly, I thought the guy gave a pretty weak answer, which basically boiled down to “you can build apps quickly and we’re a big company”…riiiight…..

Matt, and iOS developer, thought it was important to just make the commitment to get something out and that it was more about delivery than the type of platform you used. He cited the example about how when you subscribe to a newspaper on the Kindle, it’s automatically delivered every morning.

Kevin, a Titanium developer, suggested that native was better, because in web it’s difficult to integrate with the phone’s system and all of its features. He suggested using something like Titanium, which is a cross-platform tool and allows you to be more productive by creating one app for all platforms.

Jeremy Keith said it was important to not focus on one platform and limit your user base, but to create a progressive website that can be accessed by everyone, even crappy browsers (at this, he pointed to Martin, the Microsoft guy). Jeremy said that by creating a baseline that worked for all devices and browsers and then enhancing it for a few, it gave you a competitive advantage against those that created an app for only a select few. He also stated that what you’re getting natively on apps now, is what will soon be the future of the web. He also stated that we need to stop trying to make web apps look native, in order to avoid confusion.

Seb agreed with Jeremy Keith’s view that progressive enhancement was a great tool for mobile, but that it’s limited and not for interactive apps.

At this point, it was less about questions from Aral, and more about a huge debate between Jeremy and everyone else. Aral and Jeremy debated about optimising for features, not devices, to which Jeremy disagreed with both. Aral brought up the issue of making money from web apps, which is not as easy to do as native apps are. Jeremy stated that making money this way is outdated. Not sure how I feel about that!

Angry Exorcist – Seb Ly Delisle

This talk was a step-by-step on how to make an Angry Birds clone in under 30 minutes using the Corona SDK. You can find the source code at Seb’s website and follow Seb on Twitter to find out more about this hilarious project. Hopefully, he’ll post a video of how he did it, it was fantastic!

Design Challenges – Sarah Parmenter

Sarah Parmenter laid out 10 design challenges that you’ll face as an iOS designer.

1. Fluid design – She stated how important it was to make sure your designs are able to be stretched and to watch out for gradients and the slicing of buttons and background elements.
2. Use familiar behaviors – A great touch reference can be found at Luke W’s website.
3. Clean up your environment – Properly name your groups and layers, keep folders neat and keep a scratch folder for all the elements developer’s will need, like buttons.
4. Progressive disclosure – Hide actions that don’t need to be shown. Clients often don’t like this, but users do. For example, the pull down to refresh action.
5. Tap targets – Make sure they’re big enough for fingers to push without accidentally hitting something else. The minimum hit target is 44×22 pixels.
6. Orientations – Users have a preference for using either landscape or portrait, so don’t force them to use one or another. Make sure your app is flexible and can adapt. A popular layout technique is using 3 columns in landscape mode and 2 in portrait.
7. Keep designs relevant to its OS.
8. Beyond human interface guides – Know the limits of the OS, even the smallest actions and gestures matter.
9. Retina display – Don’t ignore the retina display, it only takes basic math to do. A trick is to use shapes in Photoshop, as this allows you to resize the PSD easily without distorting it.
10. Automator – There’s an add on you can find online for adding the suffix to the file for the retina display to work.

Arse Over Tit or “How designers/developers have perfected the art of making things backwards” – Relly

I wasn’t too big a fan of this talk, I’m not really interested too much in content myself and Relly talked much too quickly so it was really hard to understand her.

Relly noted that content strategists normally don’t come into a project until the end. She asked, “What if books were made like apps?” You would first decide to make a book, choose a format, design a cover, pick out fonts, figure out the type of paper you’d want to use, pick a title….and then come up with the subject and content of the actual book??

You can’t make a hit app, but you can think up a plan for one. You’re only as good as the components you make and writing doesn’t scale. Relly suggested breaking up the large content projects into smaller pieces in order to get through them. She reminded us that the plan is not the work.

Ronald Wayne

Apparently there’s a third founder of Apple–I didn’t know that, did you? He met Steve Jobs while working at Atari (and Steve wrote my favorite game, Breakout). Ronald has never owned any Apple product, so he was present with an iPad 2 by the Update crew.

“We are designing for humans and they are central to what we do”

Beyond Delicious – Joachim Bondo

Delicious apps are those that devs put extra work into the UI. They’re the apps that users recommend, love and purchase.

1. Make code more beautiful than the UI. Delicious apps go beyond skin deep and into the code.
2. Under-state, Over-deliver.  Move focus from the user interface to the user experience.
3. Quality takes time. Respect users by taking your time in development.

The Digital Nature – Anna Debenham

Studies show that students who use tech are better with their studies. Unfortunately, schools are more likely to over-monitor the students. For example, a teacher couldn’t show his students the “view source” feature in the student library  because it had been blocked by the school for “security risks”. Over monitoring of students pushes them to hack their way around the systems.

Computer science isn’t taught as a standard in the UK, instead they teach how to use the software, but not how it’s made. Interest in software development is lower than ever. Today’s software and hardware focuses on hiding its design, because it’s thought to be too scary for users.

You can view the slides of this talk at maban.co.uk/dn

Geek Ninja Battle 2 – Design Challenges

Consisted of Joachim, Cennydd, Relly, Sarah, Remy and Aral.

Aral asked, “What are some of the unique design challenges to mobile?” Sarah answered that less is more and you should try to strip out the process to only three or four screens to make it easier for the user. Cennydd asked, “What do you mean by mobile? It could be the property of the device or user. Is the person using his iPhone at home mobile, or is the person using his laptop on a train mobile?”

Aral then asked, “What about ergonomics then?” Cennydd replied that ergonomics are limited, there’s a big difference between touch screen and using a keyboard and mouse. Anything more than one touch on a real mobile user is difficult to do. Joachim said to always strive for simplicity. Only put five buttons or less in the toolbar (which is in the Apple user guide).

“What are some copy restrictions?”, Aral asked. Relly said that the “people don’t read” belief actually depends on the context. Consider what the main task of what they’re doing is and how to let them get to that chunk of information. Mobile is “not what we can cut out, but what makes the most sense” to show.

Aral turned to Remy and asked him what some of the development challenges were? Remy said that if the app isn’t designed to be on the desktop, then it’s designed to be mobile. He recommended using libraries like jQuery mobile for quicker developer, although he also suggested using barebones development. If he can use a library to accomplish what he’s doing quickly though, he’ll use that. Apps should be as small and lean as possible. Cennydd said context is king in theory, but difficult to figure out in reality. Only way to figure out is by extensive researching.

The Things of the Future – Cennydd  Bowles

Many of the things of today don’t do anything. We plan for obsolesce now and we create a lot of crap and artificial demand. We;ve become complacent and allow advertisers to talk to us like idiots, making a dilution of value.

The audience is changing, however, only 12% of consumers have high opinions of big business. People are now more connected and can find out the truth about your products easily. They’re no longer satisfied with the consumer role. The web builds societies, educates and frees us.

The things of the future will:

• Be human and consider how products talk with the user.
• Mobile phones will have sensory input
• More clues for designers to interact with
• Tackle wicked problems like energy consumption, health and financial management.
• Disrupt by uprooting existing way of doing things

Sites are now cross-channel where media, form and function are now separated. Users don’t see why they should be different from being in-store to on the web or in an app.

Designers should now forced to think about the entire lifestyle of an item and create fewer, better things.

Photos from the Update Conference & Royal Dinner

I again want to thank all of you who made it possible for me to come here! It was fantastic!

I want to give special thanks to every single one of you who donated, and will be contacting all of you guys soon in order to start scheduling in the ads, coding time and other goodies I offered in exchange.

I couldn’t have done this without all of you and am flabbergasted and surprised that all of this was accomplished through the social web. Even some of the big names were able to jump in and help with RTs and donations.

You guys are freaking fantastic! I’m going to do my best with seeing if I can grab some kind of swag from the conference that I can send to everyone who donated.

As promised, the first prize would be listing out everyone who donated anything at all, and again, Nikita and I thank all of you from the bottom of our geeky hearts. I’m so excited to be going!

The Fantastic Donators

George Elias
George Elias
Twitter: @george_elias 

Ash Smith
Ash Smith
Twitter: @ashsmithco 

Krzysztof Wolski
Tejwa 
Twitter: @krisix

Stuart Robson
Always Twisted
Twitter: @StuRobson

Geri Coady
Hello Geri
Twitter: @hellogeri 

Johanna Summers

Sarah Parmenter
You Know Who Design
Twitter: @sazzy 

Hjortur Scheving
Front End 2011
Twitter: @thewebhero

Eric Steele
Ideainator
Twitter: @genericsteele 

Paul Maloney
Paul Maloney
Twitter: @p_maloney 

John Clarke
John Clarke on Zerply
Twitter: @jc1arke 

Kevin Rittershaus
North Shore Web Design & Development
Twitter: @NSWebDesign

Yaritsa Arenas
Yaritsa Arenas
Twitter: @yaritsaarenas 

Remy Sharp
Remy Sharp
Twitter: @rem 

Jose Oliveria, Pedro Paul Jr, Jose Antonio
Netfilter
Twitter: @ppaulojr @javsmo

Phil Zeelte
It’s Phil
Twitter: @philzeelte

David Bushell
David Bushell Does Design
Twitter: @dbushell

Gary Pallett
Gary Pallett
Twitter: @garypallett 

Steve Dennis
Dennis Design Studios
Twitter @sirgeekmaster

Pete Hotchkiss
Substance 001
Twitter: @SubstanceMovies 

Matthew Rogers
Primarily Rye
Twitter @Primarily_Rye 

Aral Balkan
Aral Balkan
Twitter: @aral

Lauren Rauseo
LBK Designs
Twitter:  @LBKDesigns

Brian Scates
Brian Scates
Twitter: @BrianScates

Joachim Bondo
Cocoa Stuff
Twitter: @osteslag

Aral is holding a conference called “Update” and will be featuring some of our favorite people like Sarah Parmenter and Jeremy Keith. It’s hosted in the UK and you get to have dinner in a PALACE. I’ve been dying to visit the UK and am a huge fan of the royal period! The only problem is that it’s pretty much only a month away on September 5th and we’re still broke from the wedding.

Anyways, a few weeks ago, I donated some money to an online friend of mine, Tammy Hart, so she could could to WordCamp in Cali. Her donation drive was completely successful and well done, so I’d thought I’d give it try myself.

I’d be completely honored if you’d donate something to send me and my husband, Nikita, overseas to the Update conference.

How Much Am I Needing?

The conference itself costs $814 for two people with the royal dinner and plane tickets for both of us would be about $2200.

What would You get for donating?

• $1-$19: A special mention on the blog.
• $20-$50: The above&a mention on twitter.
• $50-$99: The above & an hour’s worth of my personal time for training, advice, coding help, or whatever you’d like help on.
• $100-$199: The above & a month’s free ad on the blog.
• $200-$499: The above & $800 worth of coding time,
• $500+: The above & $1500 worth of coding time to code a design of your choice.

What happens if you don’t reach your goal?

All of your money WILL be refunded 100% and I will just have to wait till next year!

I VERY much appreciate all of your donations, and if you can pass this along to your friends, I’d appreciate as well. You guys are fantastic!

For Haiti, us along with a bunch of other generous developers donated money with the Indie+Relief initiative.

It doesn’t seem that there is such an effort going this time, so we’ve put something together ourselves.

From Monday 00:00 until Wednesday 23:59 EST next week (March 21st – 23rd) we’ll be donating all proceeds from Billings 3 and Billings Touch to the Red Cross Japanese relief effort.

You can purchase Billings 3 from us or from the Mac App Store. Billings Touch can be purchased from the iOS App Store via an in-app purchase.

If you’re on the fence about buying Billings, now is a good time to make a decision.

Check out this page we put together for more details.

Together we can make a difference.

Thanks,

AJ and the Marketcircle Team.