Jeff Hodnett Indie Developer

Who are you and what do you do?

I’m Jeff Hodnett, an Irish developer currently living and working in London. I’ve always had an interest in creating Apple tech because I’ve always appreciated the thought put into user experience and the final look of the UI. I created a Cocoa application for my MSc thesis in Computer Science so when iOS development came along, I was ready to jump into app development.

Recently I’ve been responsible for apps for Stella Artois, Nestle, Ray Ban, Harrods, UEFA, Oracle along with lots of other bits and pieces.

I’m currently co-running a small mobile development company called Seamonster Ltd. in London. We have just recently launched our flagship product - Opuss which TechCrunch have called an “Instagram for words”. Opuss is a fun new and exciting way to share words with a community of readers and writers.

What is your computer and workspace setup while developing?

I’m using a 15” MacBook Pro that I’ve had for about 2 years now. When working in offices before I’ve always used big iMacs, you really need the screen-space. I normally have some “coding music” on like The Chemical Brothers or movie soundtracks (Batman, Tron, Drive, Gladiator) to get me going.

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

ASIHTTPRequest for networking, Flurry for analytics, CorePlot for charts & graphs, Tapku for Coverflow and DDSocialClient for all social network integration.

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

Well, I also do Android development so of course I begrudgingly use Eclipse. On a note, Android development is incredibly painful at the moment. Google need to really re-think their approach. I’ve also been doing a lot of web stuff recently, so Dashcode and TextWrangler are my go to editors, I don’t have the patience for Dreamweaver.

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

Twitter is an excellent means to stay up to date. I follow some amazing iOS devs on Twitter, so they always have the news fresh off presses. I also read some great blogs like iDevBlogADay, AltDevBlogADay, indiedevstories, TechCrunch and for cocos2d, RayWenderlich’s and learn-cocos2d blogs. Also cocoacontrols is an excellent site for seeing new controls that people come up with.

What are your hopes for the next major iOS update?

Maybe open up some Siri API so we can all have some fun with that!

Finally, what is your favourite app?

I hate to plug my own stuff, but Opuss is one of my favourite apps right now. Its great for reading offline, which I do a lot when traveling on the London tube. I love playing games too, so Cut The Rope and Jetpack Joyride are fun too!