HANA HYDER

iOS Developer and Design Intern at Angie's List

Summer 2013 | HANA HYDER

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Over the summer I had a paid internship at Angie's List. I interned as an iOS developer and design intern for Angie's List's B2B (business to business) iPhone app. I worked on several projects- some of which cannot yet be disclosed, but will shortly be as it is in beta testing. My work there had challenged me in a lot of new ways, I had to constantly ask myself, "how else can this be done". I worked primarily with CoreData objects, JSON Parsing (through YAJL), reading data, allocating data to CD objects and displaying this information on the parts of the application I worked on. Although I did a lot of work on the development side, I did an equal amount of work for graphics; I was given the opportunity to take my design and apply it, along with my own custom-made graphics. I worked for eight hours each day and intend to set my earnings aside for college fees. It was a wonderful experience that I am glad I had the opportunity to have! (Graphic and mockup of one page of my project are attached.)

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Nina the Adventurer

March 13, 2013 | HANA HYDER

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My latest and most exciting project! For the past couple months, my sister and I have been developing an iOS game called "Nina the Adventurer". Except, given our busy school lives, we didn't have much time and had a temporary hiatus on the mission. Even though school isn't exactly over, my term as Silicon Valley DECA Executive Vice President is over, so the mission is back up! I still have to attend certain functions, like for example, STAR Awards by the Cupertino Chamber of Commerce, which will be happening this coming Saturday. I also need to prepare for the International Career Development Conference, but I have freed up just enough time to dedicate to Nina the Adventurer. A sneak peak of what it's going to look like!

For security purposes, I've uploaded a jpeg, so the quality may not be as nice. (But safety first!)
My younger sister has been building many of the monsters. Of course, the image being displayed is not going to have trees without trunks, but this is only a mockup of what's being built. At the top, we have 3 characters (looks a lot like the ones from fruit jump!) that can be pressed to determine what Nina will do. The third one will perform an attack against anything in her way, the middle will jump, and the first will stop. Nina will be constantly running, so these three functions will work to help the user! It's a lot of fun to program this one because you have sprites moving at different speeds to make it look more real (as real as a 2D cartoon game can get in terms of physics). I am having a really fun time using the Cocos2D framework. Most of what I've learned has come from the Ray Wenderlich website. There's still plenty to learn and I'm eager to learn it all! Who knows, maybe the final product will look totally different because I've learned something new!

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Fruit Jump

2012 | HANA HYDER

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So I learned how to program in Objective-C last summer at iD Tech Camp 2012, which was held at the Stanford campus. The class was designed for basic development and understanding of how to use Xcode, but I was in it for more. I wanted to learn how to program a game as soon as I walked in. But I was met with discouragement that it was a bit too early for me to jump in. But I believe nothing is truly impossible if you work hard, so I insisted upon developing a game. My instructor, seeing that I really wanted to make it happen, agreed to help me out. He, however, refused to give me answers; instead, he encouraged me to find a way to get my answer by pointing into the right direction. Which I am really glad he did. I found great online sources, such as the Ray Wenderlich community! (Which I still avidly use and read.) But at the time, I didn't use a framework because it was discouraged. So the work I had to do was a lot harder than it needed to be. But it's good I learned. The first real game I'm proud of was a game I call ' Fruit Jump'. (The image above is of the chick I used in the game. I think most of my colleagues and my nearby instructors were impressed by the bird more so than by the game itself. Guess good design makes the game worthwhile!)

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EcoFactor iPhone Application Design

March 13, 2013 | HANA HYDER

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I decided that some active animations and cute graphics will do justice to make the technical application for EcoFactor seem user-friendly and just right for the everyday American family.
*EcoFactor is a software that finds the most efficient way to maintain a specific thermal signature. EcoFactor can be found in the Comcast Xfinity Home Automation and Services Bundles.

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HTML5 or Native Mobile Apps?

March 12, 2013 | HANA HYDER

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The past year for the world has been a sensational one with hit successes for mobile application entrepreneurs and hard-core objective-C techies. However, 2012 was also the birth to a new kind of movement, as I like to call, "The Minimalist Movement". We saw Google go minimalist, we saw Twitter's BootStrap take over the world, but most importantly, we saw the birth of HTML5. HTML5 shook our worlds and changed every programmer and designer's mindset. I can easily attribute this minimalism movement to the birth of HTML5, which comes to no surprise to many. We even saw HTML5 start it's invasion of the highly successful mobile application industry; however, HTML5 mobile pages were never taken seriously. At least, until now. It seems that many companies have resorted to HTML5 mobile web pages. Which comes as a scare to many of the application market engineers who have spent endless time developing native apps. But that same scare exists when something new and simpler is found. Question is, are HTML5 apps really the way to go? Fact is, HTML5 applications depend on having Internet access, which today, is not even a problem. However, it is true most native apps do not depend on access to the Internet, which opens the market back up to little kids on iPods without 4G that aren't near WiFi. But HTML5 is not stable- the number one problem that most HTML5 converts, like Facebook, face. Native applications, on the other hand, are relatively quite stable and less likely to spazz out if the engineer(s) who made it did a decent job. But native applications are expensive and need to be rebuilt for multiple platforms (but through the use of a good framework, it may just need to be built once, but again, quality counts). So overall, it's all too young to really say what's the best thing to use. Only time (and a bit more creativity and innovation) can tell!