Craig Hockenberry: “What happened next though, surprised us in a very good way. David started using Xcode.”
I love stuff like this. It’s neat to see how folks approach development inside their shop. Most of the post is not surprising. Their approach is the same as every development shop I’ve ever worked in. Divide and conquer where it makes sense. He didn’t go into their unit test process, but does mention he was able to test his code with his own test application. This is important and mostly overlooked by most developers.
Like I said, it’s mostly basic stuff and common practice, until you come to the line I pasted above. THEY GOT A DESIGNER TO USE XCODE! That’s amazing and it looks like it allowed them to move their application forward without interrupting the developer or frustrating the designer because the developer was too busy to be fussed with a tweak to the UI.
When I’m coding I like to get the basics in place and skin later. It’s easy to do, why not give it a bit of time before you go off and do it, right? Well, if you can get a designer to do the work, why not? It’s a brilliant idea and UIAppearance seems to make it even easier to deal with this kind of stuff. I’m looking forward to using it some day.
Craig also mentions another thing I really love about The Iconfactory.
“We are well aware that people are going to complain about missing features: push notifications and streaming are obvious examples. But so are trends, and video support, and in-line photos, and… well none of that matters. We believe in building opinionated software.“
I love that. They managed to build a client that is perfectly suited to how I use Twitter and they did it by building it how they would use it.
The Iconfactory is definitely one of those shops I’d give my left arm to work for. True story.
