Craig Scott Independent Developer

Who are you and what do you do?

I’m the developer of a mindmapping app for iPhone (iThoughts) and iPad (iThoughtsHD) I’m an ‘indie’ developer now - working from my spare bedroom - but in a former life I was CTO of a UK company which builds those speech driven telephone systems that we all love :-)

What does your computer and workspace setup look like while developing?

I have a 2010 27” iMac with 8GB of RAM. I haven’t touched a mouse in over a year now - the Magic Trackpad is my pointing thingy of choice - a much underrated piece of kit.

What are your favourite Apple iOS API's to use within apps that you develop?

Coming from a Windows/C++/MFC background I think all the Cocoa APIs/Frameworks are just amazing. The ease with which CoreAnimation enables me to animate the UI is great. The core classes like NSString, NSData, NSArray etc. are a god send. Perhaps my favourite is CoreGraphics - makes drawing stuff a walk in the park.

What is some essential software that you use outside of Xcode for development?

I use Versions as a front end onto Subversion for source control. TextWrangler is my text editor of choice - with an xmllint bash script to prettify and validate XML. 0xED is a great binary editor/viewer which helps me reverse engineer the various desktop mindmap app formats. Pixelmator has ‘changed my life’ - I keep trying to learn Photoshop and Illustrator, but they’re just too damn complicated for dipping in and out of. VMWare is another vital tool for me - enables me to test my import/export with the various Windows based mindmap apps.

Perhaps the most important tool I use though is iWeb. Ok, you can stop laughing now - but I’ve yet to find another tool that is genuinely drag/drop level website building. I’m not interested in what a DIV tag is - I just want to put text and pictures up on the web and have them appear as I intended. Rapidweaver are you listening? I’d pay lots of money for an iWeb replacement.

What do you do to stay up to date on new iOS features, frameworks and SDK's?

I try to watch the WWDC videos and read the release notes. I don’t tend to install the betas anymore - they’re too distracting and disruptive to my dev environment. At the end of the day, I’m unlikely to take advantage of the bleeding edge features on day one so why waste the time. I also spend a lot of time browsing the web looking for iOS articles - many of which highlight new (to me) features.

What is a quick development tip you've learned over time you'd share with other developers?

There is no such thing as a ‘one off glitch’. If you saw it once then it’ll happen again - don’t ignore it. Along the same vein - the glitch is almost certainly your fault, not a bug in iOS - accept it and ‘search within’.

Finally, what is your favorite app?

Reeder is a great app on both iPad, iPhone and iMac - I waste far too much time checking it.