By now the second day of the Urban Arts Academy course “Beginning iPhone Development” will be well underway. The course started yesterday and has 18 folk, one of whom flew over from England to attend it, sitting down and learning from Philip Orr, programmer for Infurious and Blue Pilot Software. The machines they are using … Continue reading “iPhone Course at the Urban Arts Academy”
By now the second day of the Urban Arts Academy course “Beginning iPhone Development” will be well underway. The course started yesterday and has 18 folk, one of whom flew over from England to attend it, sitting down and learning from Philip Orr, programmer for Infurious and Blue Pilot Software.
The machines they are using are borrowed from Giant Associates, Mac-Sys Ltd and a local school. A lot of this wouldn’t have been possible without some quick thinking from Marty Neill (head bucko at NoMoreArt and Digital Circle Steering Group member), the rest of the folk at Trans and a heap of other folk.
Is this going to create iPhone experts?
Of course not. The attendees range from some who have never used a Mac, to one used to OpenGL|ES programming (the API used to program 3D graphics on iPhone as well as other embedded platforms. mobile devices and some consoles).
What it will do is remove some of the fear for some. And spark an interest for others. For some experienced programmers, they should be able to get a taste for Interface Builder and XCode and see whether jumping to that platform is something they want to do. For others, it’ll be the start of something. Or maybe not.
Jeff LaMarche writes a long article on how to survive and indeed thrive at WWDC. My earlier WWDC First Timer’s Guide posting was so positively received that I’ve decided to re-post it now that we’re only a few weeks out from the conference. I’ve also made some corrections and additions based on comments and feedback … Continue reading “Pre-WWDC Meetup, Wednesday 27th May, 4 pm”
My earlier WWDC First Timer’s Guide posting was so positively received that I’ve decided to re-post it now that we’re only a few weeks out from the conference. I’ve also made some corrections and additions based on comments and feedback I got. This posting really has been a community effort, so please feel free to ping me if you think there are additions or changes that should be made.
In June this year, we’re bringing 30 Northern Irish developers to WWDC and having a Pre-WWDC meet-up of attendees in The President’s Club, Talbot Street, Belfast at 4 pm on Wednesday 27th May. If you’re attending WWDC and want to meet up to talk to experienced developers (some of whom are experienced at WWDC as well), then come along, attend a brief presentation and network with other folk who are travelling to San Francisco.
This came out of two ideas I had. The first was Code4Pizza – the idea that people, in order to learn, would be willing to spend their time coding for open source projects. I still think this idea is a winner for getting younger folk involved but as an evening class, it fills in many … Continue reading “The Cocoa Cooking Class”
This came out of two ideas I had.
The first was Code4Pizza – the idea that people, in order to learn, would be willing to spend their time coding for open source projects. I still think this idea is a winner for getting younger folk involved but as an evening class, it fills in many gaps present in the current market for young and really smart folk who want to use computers for more than FaceBook and MySpace.
The second was Tuesday Night Cocoa – something the lads up at Mac-Sys were doing – on a Tuesday evening when the Enterprise Park was open late, they would gang together and learn Cocoa from the books, helping each other through tough problems.
So, the Cocoa Cooking Class was born.
First off, I’m not even sure if Tuesday night is the best sort of time for something like this but it’s catchy, sosumi.
The Background:
Due to my organising of DevDays and generally being loud about the iPhone, I’m inundated with people wanting to learn how to do stuff on the iPhone. How to write applications and generally take part in the gold rush that is the iPhone. I’m working my way through the books but as my time is ‘expensive’ (in so far as as it’s really bloody hard to find ‘free’ time), I’m thinking I need to formalise something in this respect. My idea is that an experienced developer guides a workgroup on a weekly or biweekly basis through an application specification, design and build. The workgroup then owns that app and can do whatever they want with it. I’ve spoken to an experienced developer about it and he’s on board, details yet to be discussed. It’s unreasonable to expect him to dedicate this time for free so we have to take that into account and allow for him to help people ‘online’ in a forum or via email. Holding it on a Tuesday night might make sense but the idea is to get someone who knows what they’re talking about to come in and spend time instructing people and get paid to do it. If it’s not worth the money then we stop paying them and we hack it together on our own time. We even have the option of varying our instructors.
The Pitch:
Take one room with enough seating for 11 people.
Fill with 10 or so eager would-be application developers. Do not over-fill.
Add in one seasoned instructor. Mix for twenty minutes.
Establish base level of capability and break the people into 3-5 groups.
Distribute skills liberally through the groups to attempt to maintain consistency.
Start to build projects, one for each group for 90 minutes.
Break for 15 minutes to check consistency and share experiences.
Return to the room and continue to build knowledge for a further hour.
Stop activity and get each workgroup to show and tell for 5 minutes each.
Rinse and repeat weekly or bi-weekly.
To cover costs, everyone hands the instructor a £20 note. This covers room hire, instructor time and during the week support. That’s a reasonable night out.
Reasoning:
It’s my belief that this will create multiple opportunities for Mac and iPhone developers in the province. It will provide a collaborative approach to building applications with some real potential for IP creation and future revenue generation. Mix this with XCake and other initatives and we’ve got something to talk about. Would be even better if we could get some sort of funding for it (or even just a free room somewhere for the evenings).
Six weeks before the conference started and about the same time since the tickets went on sale. There are more than 30 folk heading out to WWDC from Northern Ireland in June. Related posts: Plus ça change $10000 to call BillG out. Pre-WWDC Meetup, Wednesday 27th May, 4 pm WWDC anxiety and other thoughts on … Continue reading “WWDC Sold Out”
Six weeks before the conference started and about the same time since the tickets went on sale.
There are more than 30 folk heading out to WWDC from Northern Ireland in June.
As many of you will know, I was in California in March, talking to Apple, talking to some VC folk and eating some really nice breakfasts. Some of this was as a result of the XCake group that John Kennedy and I started last year and some of it was due to serendipity – meeting … Continue reading “WWDC 2009”
As many of you will know, I was in California in March, talking to Apple, talking to some VC folk and eating some really nice breakfasts. Some of this was as a result of the XCake group that John Kennedy and I started last year and some of it was due to serendipity – meeting some of the most excellent people along the way who were more than glad to open doors for others. To be honest, I’d never encountered such a can-do attitude before so a quick shout out to the “band of brothers” who blazed a trail in Cupertino. Here’s a pic of us outside Apple in Infinite Loop.
Band of Brothers
Following on from this, we have the two iPhone developer days and now, as part of my work with the Digital Circle, we’re planning to take some companies out to WWDC in June to learn about the iPhone. If you’re working for a Northern Ireland company and are interested in spending a week at a developer conference, then get in touch. At the moment we have 35 names of folk who are interested in attending the event which will bring over 1000 Apple engineers into a big hall to talk to many more thousands of developers about web standards, the Mac, IT and, most importantly, the iPhone.
In 2008, there were 5,200 developers there in addition to Apple staff – the conference sold out. I can only imagine that this year they will have vastly increased the amount of space or it’s going to sell out even quicker. To give a comparison, have a read on the Google Mac Blog about the report from 2008.
And when I accidentally opened my laptop with the WiFi still on, it found three computer-to-computer wireless networks on my flight to SFO. I didn’t think much of all this until I looked up the aisle of the plane. Three rows up on the other side of the aisle, some guy had his laptop open. At a glance, I could see he was using Interface Builder, one of the tools developers use to build software for both Mac and iPhone. Then he picked up a book on introductory Cocoa programming, and it hit me: the conference was going to be big this year.
I’d like to point out that this was before the AppStore was open. This was before the first of the “59p millionaires“. People just knew that the iPhone was going to be massive.
I’ve posted this image before. It was taken at 0930 on the day before we were due to go to Apple. The iconic nature of this simple window display really struck me.
I asked which was more important, Apps or iPhone. Apps. Which takes up more room in the picture – the app icons almost obscure the iPhone itself. This should help ram it home to anyone running a business today that is grey panels with embedded text boxes that needs to run on a desktop PC. Mobile is here. It’s getting bigger. And if you don’t do something now, you’ll be eaten.
So, get your act together. Get in touch. Talk to me and book your place on the WWDC rollercoaster. We’ve got 35 names already registered – folk willing to take a punt. At this rate, we’ll take over an entire hotel.
Gus Mueller twittered this great Flickr set from Mikey, the support guy at Panic. This one is my inspiration. Related posts: 6/100 How Flickr Did it Right Top 10 reasons for IT to support the iPhone Technical Co-Founders Developing for iPhone?
MacRumors writes: A few rumored changes could be positioning Apple for a transition to sell OS X for generic PCs: Changing .Mac to Me.com (platform neutral) OS X Leopard (not Mac OS X Leopard) 10.6 to be Intel only (dropping PowerPC would be necessary) “No new features” in 10.6 could be due to resources devoted … Continue reading “OSX for generic PCs?”
MacRumors writes:
A few rumored changes could be positioning Apple for a transition to sell OS X for generic PCs:
Changing .Mac to Me.com (platform neutral)
OS X Leopard (not Mac OS X Leopard)
10.6 to be Intel only (dropping PowerPC would be necessary)
“No new features” in 10.6 could be due to resources devoted to just making 10.6 “PC compatible”
and they add this photo:
Back in 2001, Jobs was very vocal about the name of the operating system being ‘Mac OS X (pronounced ‘ten’) and there were corrections made when individuals dropped the ‘Mac’ part of the name.
I think the main change in thought came with the release of the iPhone. Calling it iPhone OS 2.0 is technical, iPhone OSX sounds poo. I don’t think that Apple is ‘removing the Mac’, I think we’re just seeing some consistency in the branding especially as Apple have indicated that the operating system in the iPhone and iPod touch is going to power all of their handheld iPod devices.
So, we now have ‘OS X iPhone’ and ‘OS X Leopard’ on banners at a developer conference. These are not meant to indicate marketing messages. I think it’s unlikely that Apple will offer OEM deals with third party PC makers but they may open the licensing of Leopard so that individuals and companies may put Leopard on their own hardware.
However – with Apple’s focus on design (and the fact they have grabbed 66% of the high end $1000+ PC market) it seems very unlikely to me that they would endanger that by allowing individuals to reproduce a Mac on a cheap piece of hardware. Apple was bitten on this before with the Mac clones back in the 90s – it almost killed them.
I can’t honestly speculate on anything regarding 10.6 because, frankly, it’s a little early. I find it ridiculous that Apple would have gone to all this effort to make the OS universal and then one version later dropped PPC support. I think we will see PPC support continue to 10.6 but I’m doubtful it will go further. Apple has a history of supporting ‘the old way’ for 5 years. It’s what they did with Classic and it’ll be what they do with PowerPC. That said – we’re 2.5 years into those 5 years now – and Leopard is less than a year old. If we had Leopard for two full years, we’d not be far off the 5 year limit so 10.6 might end up being an Intel-only release after all.
As for the dropping of Mac.com and the replacement with Me.com – that’s pretty clever really and indicates to me more that Apple will be offering their online service to iPhone and PC users as well as just Mac users. That makes sense as PC users could very easily avail of some of the current .Mac services considering they already have iTunes, Quicktime, Safari and iPhone.
The changes we’re seeing are purely marketing. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
In the next week, we’re going to see what Apple has on offer from WWDC. Everyone is expecting some news about the new iPhone models because, with the exception of a minor memory storage upgrade, the iPhone will have been on sale for 1 year without any changes and Apple likes to upgrade their devices … Continue reading “Thinking about iPhone 2.0”
In the next week, we’re going to see what Apple has on offer from WWDC. Everyone is expecting some news about the new iPhone models because, with the exception of a minor memory storage upgrade, the iPhone will have been on sale for 1 year without any changes and Apple likes to upgrade their devices every 9 months – 1 year. So it’s not a bad speculation. What are we likely to see in terms of hardware? Faster wireless is for one thing. It’s a little early for solar-panel displays but we could reasonably see the camera gaining a hardware ‘button’ and a small camera mounted on the front of the device for video conferencing.
We’re also going to see the new iPhone operating system. The big news there is obviously the Application Store. Why do I want it? So I can play a couple of casual games while I’m not in a good network region. So I can read my RSS feeds while mobile without the clunkiness of the online readers. So I can twitter by only sending my data and receiving others twitter data rather than having to receive the text and graphics from pockettweets. It would be nice to be able to receive MMS messages and also to be able to forward the odd SMS but, to be honest, there are a lot more easy wins in this respect. Double-tap to zoom in a mail message for the idiots who keep sending me 800-pixel wide images as their email signature?
“Loading freeze-dried sites from bookmarklets using the current iPhone software takes almost as long as loading the site itself, which suggests an efficiency problem in the browser and rendering software, not the network hardware.”
Except that the bookmarklets on your home screen are just bookmarks – they’re not freeze dried copies of the web sites themselves. The renderer in MobileSafari over EDGE is quick enough to outpace the slower renderers on faster 3G networks so I think we can reasonably expect that if the EDGE limits are removed, we shall get much faster data and therefore faster rendering.
