iOS Enterprise Consulting and Development

Professional Services

We offer a variety of services that can be readily tailored to your organization's needs:

• Mentoring. In addition to our full complement of iOS training courses, we also offer mentoring services at the individual, team, and organization level. Our consultants have experience developing and implementing enterprise-wide mentoring programs that can dramatically accelerate the transition of knowledge and skills to your team.
• Consulting. We can offer expert assistance to your project teams onsite and remotely, as needed.
• Outsourced development and managed services. We can develop all or part of an app, library, or set of web services for you, or design and implement more broadly-based enterprise technology solutions.
• Assessments. Need advice on how to get started, insight into an existing codebase, or direction on process and best practices? We'll be happy to provide an assessment that can help you move forward with the insight you need to make smart decisions.

Our project managers and senior consultants have a wealth of experience in the following:

• Project planning and estimation.
• Software development process.
• Requirements analysis.
• Software architecture and design.
• User interface design, including user interaction and usability engineering.
• Project setup and tooling, including source code management (version control).
• iOS software engineering.
• Developing web services in Java EE and other server-side technologies.
• Test strategy and execution, including automated unit, system, and performance tests, and continuous integration.
• Enterprise deployment and security.
• Technology risk and controls.

Our engineering team has deep expertise in the following technologies:

• Source code management (SCM) tools, including Git, Subversion, and CVS.
• OS X, including bash and command-line tools.
• Automated testing and continuous integration.
• ANSI C, Objective-C, and Java.
• The iOS SDK, including:
• Xcode, Interface Builder, Instruments, and other developer tools.
• Cocoa touch frameworks such as UIKit and Core Data.
• Best practices for integration with web services, such as asynchronous loading, use of REST and JSON, UIWebView and WebKit, etc.
• Manual memory management and ARC.
• Persistence mechanisms (archiving, serialization, NSDocument, NSUserDefaults, SQLite, Core Data).
• Cocoa touch design patterns such as Model-View-Controller, Delegation, and Publish/Subscribe (NSNotificationCenter).

Why About Objects?

The About Objects team marries decades of experience in full-lifecycle software development for Fortune 500 financial, telecommunications, and healthcare companies with deep expertise in Apple platforms that includes years of iOS development experience. So on the one hand, we're comfortable providing guidance–and/or doing–the big picture stuff: high-level architecture, development process and tooling, enterprise and cloud integration, test strategies, and the like.

On the other hand, we're also intimately familiar with the wide array of low-level details that go into the design and engineering of truly polished iPhone or iPad app. So we can help you avoid the engineering, design, and usability pitfalls commonly encountered in iOS development, while showing you how to take best advantage of the capabilities of the platform.

And because training is in our DNA, our consultants are unusually strong at mentoring. That's important to many of our customers, who view the learning that takes place as a key benefit of our consulting services.

Values Matter

Unfortunately, consulting engagements often tend towards polar extremes. One is the throw-it-over-the-transom model often seen in outsourced projects. The other is the embrace-of-death model, where the contractor's central goal appears to be to stuff projects with hourly-billable consultants for as long as possible.

One of the big problems with the former model can be summed up this way: app life cycles rarely end at version 1.0. Unless an outsourced development shop is unusually proficient, their customer is likely to wind up taking delivery of a hard-to-maintain codebase accompanied by little to none of the knowledge transfer that might be essential to future updates to the app.

As a company that provides both training and consulting, we see teaching and mentoring as central to our service offerings. As such, one of our core goals is to reduce our customers' reliance on our services over time by transferring knowledge and skills to their development staff, while at the same time making sure that your project is a success.