Hey! This is the Daily Overpass! My name is Eric and I make apps! Now today, I want
to talk about why Cyber-Monday is the perfect day to buy all of your computer
books.
So, this upcoming weekend is Thanksgiving weekend. It's one of the days I probably
feel the most homesick throughout the year. It's - so, Thanksgiving is when
families come together. They cook a huge turkey, you know, as a kid, we watch the
Thanksgiving Day Parade on television and people watch Football throughout the
day. Just families getting together. We don't have that here, but the following
day is Black Friday. So, that's a big retail day where everyone goes
crazy at the mall and everyone has their big sale because Thanksgiving is
officially over. And Christmas season has officially began in the U.S. And
then, of course, on Monday we have Cyber- Monday which people go back to work. Now,
in England, we don't have Thanksgiving but for some reason we still have Black
Friday and we still have Cyber-Monday, where people go back to work after the
long weekend, which we didn't actually have. And do all their online shopping
for Christmas. So anyway, if you're a software developer or if somebody who
buys lots of computer books, Cyber-Monday is probably the best day of the whole
year to do that. If you like every type of Monday for like the last 10
years, this is the day that I was load up on computer books cuz like books that
normally would cost like, you know, 20 or 30 dollars, would cost like five or ten
dollars. And all the big publishers like Packt and 8 Press and O'Reilly and
all of that, they would have their big, you know, all of our books are
five dollars. Or all of our books or all of our ebooks are ten dollars. And then,
if we just get load up and I wouldn't actually read them all but I would-
I would have them all. But I wanted to talk about one of them. I want
to kind of give my recommendation if you're gonna be actually doing that this
year. Because this is a book that I read a few years ago. Actually, I say I read
but it's almost like a picture book. And it helps a lot when - especially when
I meet with clients and they come to me with different ideas for
apps or different requirements. It's been very rare that someone has come to
me with wireframes. A lot of times I'll sit down with them in the first meeting
and we'll sketch out a few different ideas in terms of interface design. I
mean, the idea is that once they sit down with you and they talk about their app,
they go away thinking - first of all, they have an idea they've got it gelled in
their heads. Okay, I can see exactly how this would
work. You know exactly how it will work and more importantly, they'll look at you
and think, "This guy's really got it!" Which you do because you've done so
many apps before. You know how they work. But there's this book here called "The
Mobile Design Pattern Gallery". Like I said, it's it's almost like a picture
book. Now, the title is Mobile Design Pattern Gallery and when I was looking
at it initially, I was thinking it was like design patterns like in code, so, in
code we have the (shows the book) like this, The Head First Design Patterns. In code we have
a certain number of patterns that were identified by the gang of four
years ago like the Singleton pattern, the Decorator pattern, everything that's
really geeky stuff and really, really cool . Te kind of stuff that I love to
read about . But this book is more in terms of like user interface design.
So like, you know, what types of navigation can you use? What kind of well -
what different types of forms can you use? You know, things like that.
And when you're designing your own thing, a lot of times you have like -
you like a really good idea, but this kind of gives inspiration of different
things, So, let me show you a little bit here, look at the Table of Contents here.
You can see we've got the deep like a chapter here on navigation, with
different examples of different advertising of navigation, chapter on forms on lists and
things like that. If I go here to the springboard, this is one that I use
almost in all of the client applications. We sit down and discuss an application. I
usually start with the springboard design which is like the launch pad so
like you go into the application and you'll see the different
options. It depends usually what we do is that will list out the things that
they need their users to do. So you know, the users will set this up. They'll do
this whatever and we'll start, you know, mapping out these things here. But
this is - so what it has here is some different types of springboard
design and some different designs that are used in some of the popular
applications out there both in Android and an iPhone. Right now, this
edition of the book is from actually, this is from 2012 so, you know, this is
all before material design and everything like that.I probably need
to get an updated edition of it, but you know, it's really useful. And when it
comes to my recommendations for those of you, especially if you do like lots of
different applications and you quote for a lot of different
projects, this is really really useful. Like I said, what I'll do is
when we sit down for that first meeting, I'll sketch out a few of different ideas
of some wireframes and then I'll put them into for zone maker
some sort of wireframe tool and I'll send them off to my designer. She'll come
up with a few mock-ups, we'll put that into the quote and more often than not
we get the job. So, it really does help. Just to show that you fully understand
how it works but also just - you don't know what you sit in that meeting
where they're gonna throw at you and you might see, "Oh, this is going to
be - this would be perfect for that designer, this would be perfect for that design."
So, my question to you is over the last year which was some of the - what are some
of the good books that you've read so that when we go through and fill up our
shopping carts on Cyber Monday? What would you recommend? I don't have an
affiliate with anybody by the way. This is just my recommendation and this is -
this book is quite a few years old. Bu,t you know, it's really easy to thumb
through and just get inspiration from. So, what do you, guys, think? What are
some of your recommendations? And that's it for today. I'm gonna talk to you, guys,
tomorrow!