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Metal Toad is proud to be a gold sponsor for DrupalCon SF 2010. If you see us there, say hello!

There's a lot of good to be said about the Brightcove iPhone SDK, it's easy, it seems to work really well, but there's also a ton of gotchas and the docs are a little conflicting and/or out of date. The OnePlanet app is also out of date. This post is my attempt to rectify some of these things.

There are three things needed to get your app going:

Do you remember that Art Director who burst into your office with a crazy deadline for a print piece and then let you figure out who to actually make it happen? Or the salesperson who sold a client something that couldn't possibly be delivered? Chances are if you been in the design field long enough you've got at least a dozen of these stories.

When discussing the benefits of open-source frameworks (especially Drupal), I've often heard, "But if everyone has access to the source code, how secure can it possibly be?" My standard response would be to discuss the platforms maturity and how it's been hardened by years of real world use.

Imagination time: Imagine for a moment that you have an app, it has one button and one little window. When you click the button it changes the text within the window to something else. Now, when you get into flash development it seems like the easiest and clearest way to do this is to wipe out the contents in the window, but you would be wrong for thinking so. While it is the most obvious I intend to prove to you that to do so is both slower and prevents you from turning on the juice later with caching.

On to story time: We're building an app for the OpenPeak tabletop device, it's totally rad and you'll love it I promise but that's really not the point of the post. When we started the app we had what I considered a pretty awesome solution, we'd clear the state, build it onto a global, then write the global out to a window on the app. It actually worked great for a long time until we decided to start doing some caching where it became wildly apparent that I had actually written all three parts of that app dead wrong. It's pretty exciting to do something wrong enough that you can write about it later. :)

Convincing people that 10% time is valuable can sometimes be a chore but I'm probably one of the luckiest guys in the country because my bosses actually want to do 10% time, but aren't quite sure how to get to the point where we can afford it. But more than just being able to afford you it's important to convince yourself, your coworkers, and your bosses that you can't afford not to do something like 10% time.

Here's a tiny shopping cart block for Ubercart that fits right in with the menu. Of course the standard block could be themed this way, but this is handy when the design calls for the full-sized block elsewhere in the layout.

You know that button on the website you want to change? The one that looks like it was designed in 1999? Guess what? It was designed in 1999, and so was the underlying technology. As a design element it's ripe for change, so in your new designs you change it. The only problem is that little change adds a week to development time.

If you haven't already heard of it, the Theme Developer is a great tool. It works like firebug, but for Drupal. You can click any element on the page to inspect it, and the Theme Developer window will show you what template files and functions were used to render it, and give you suggestions on which files you can edit to affect it.

When you first start creating a Drupal theme, you might be frustrated by the large number of stylesheets that are included by default in your theme -- especially if you're creating a Zen sub-theme. Most of the documentation suggests that you override these styles in your own themename.css file.