Project Intro: John Bickerstaff

Hi!

Thanks for dropping by…

WordPress is so cool!  The WordPress iPhone application is even cooler!  This is not news to a lot of folks, but having just discovered both things recently, I had to say it!

This site is dedicated to in-depth System Analysis and Developer Training on the way cool iPhone WordPress application.  I’ve taken on the task of soup-to-nuts system and code-level documentation for this project (with the gracious approval of a few of the founders) for the purpose of providing an “open source” System Analysis and iPhone development training course for my local Mobile Development User’s group.  (www.utahmobiledev.org).

First, take a look at a great introduction presented by Michael Pick of Automattic.com

So, why do this?  Because I love iPhone and mobile development and I’m passionate about the power that WordPress gives people to share ideas, pictures, and the stuff that matters to them.  I believe a tool like WordPress approaches the world-changing power of Guttenberg’s press… but now each of us has that press via the ‘net.

Of course, I’m also doing it because I think it will help drive a lot of excellent development into very worthy open source project.  Good docs make it easy to contribute code - and there are a lot of up and coming iPhone developers out there who want a good project to contribute to as a way of establishing their “chops” in the mobile field.

There is also my belief in the power of truly excellent System Analysis and documentation at many levels to drive excellence in a project - and because I’m crazy enough to do stuff like this for fun!  There are going to be Visio maps, Functionality lists, User Interface mapping and a whole slew of other things drawn from my years of experience in IT.

Finally there will be a set of training videos that developers can use to reproduce each functionality “module” so they can easily reproduce any of this functionality for themselves in their own “cool” iPhone application.

I also plan to document the iPhone app I’m building for a client - with some training videos to go along with it as well.  More on that later…

Of course, since the System Analysis and Training will be “open source” anyone besides the Utah Mobile Development group wishing to make use of the training may do so as well…

Since my 20 years in IT includes stints as a Sr. Developer, Sr. Architect, Sr. Product Manager and Sr. Project Manager, to say nothing of cutting my teeth 20 years ago as a Tech Writer and Training Developer, I plan to provide several views of the project - with an eye to creating “views” that are understandable by a number of disciplines, and thus enhance everyone’s ability to contribute to the success of the application.  In part this is for fun, simply because I can, but also I’m a big believer in the power of good documentation and UI to add intelligence and creativity to any project…  So, it will be interesting to see if that theory is borne out in the results of this effort…

I’ll be using WordPress itself for this effort (How cool is that?!  Use the tool to document the tool!)

In the end, while creating the system and functionality documentation, I plan to incrementally record a set of  videos which walk a new iPhone developer through the process of building the major functionality found in the project — module by module.  This will (I believe) make it very attractive for other iPhone developers to contribute to the project and will drive even more “coolness” into the app.

To download the iPhone application or to contribute code, please see iphone.wordpress.org.  And of course, my thanks to Ganesh Ramachandran, Michael Pick, and