At the Voices That Matter 2009 iPhone developer conference there was a heavy emphasis on good design and August Trometer suggested using paper templates or whatever we could do to plot out or applications before diving into development. We even got an iPhone Sketchbook as a goodie from the conference, which is a neat notepad of grid paper with a 1:1 blank iPhone in the middle of the page. I googled around the web and found a nice photoshop template for this at http://www.teehanlax.com/blog/?p=1628. I’ve not tried it yet, but it looks like a promising way to get a more real representation of your final design.

Sunday in Boston was a dreary and raining day. When the last session of the Voices That Matter conference ended, I decided to head to the airport. I still had about 3 hours before my flight, but the weather didn’t make it pleasant to drag my luggage around town. I decided to take public transportation to the airport. I  took the outbound Red Line train to the Silver line bus to the airport, which was pretty easy, and only cost me $2. Once at the terminal, I got my boarding pass, went through security, and settled in. I was pleased to find out that there was a Legal Seafood restaurant at the terminal, and I had a nice dinner there… A bit overpriced, but being at the airport, I didn’t have alot of options, and I didn’t want fast food.

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Today was the second and last day of the conference. We started off with a keynote from Jessica Kahn of Tapulous, who gave us great insights to the success and troubles that the company had gone through with their Tap Tap Revenge offerings on the App Store. Jessica walked us through areas such as pricing, launch preparation, the importance of marketing and to not think like a developer.

After the keynote, Mike Daley gave a talk on beginning iPhone development, which I enjoyed. He began his journey on the iPhone in many of the same ways as I, although he’s much further along. He does iPhone game development on the side, since his day job is at Oracle, and he sees the platform as a great place for the solitary independent developer, much like the old days of the C64. He showed the game he’s working on for his upcoming book, which I look forward to reading early next year. I hope to keep in touch with him.

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Today, was Day 1 of the conference, and I walked out of the hotel to go to the MCLE Conference center, while on the way, I meet up with 3 other attendee’s, the bunch of us got a little lost getting to the facility, which we almost missed due to construction obscuring the view. But once inside, registration was simple, we checked our coats in, and headed to the second floor for breakfast. It was a simple breakfast, buffet style, mainly with fruit, cereal, and pastries. The only downside was there were not enough chairs to support everyone at the conference. Many of us stood, or took breakfast downstairs to the Milstein Hall auditorium to get a seat for the opening keynote address by Big Nerd Ranch’s Aaron Hillegass. Aaron’s keynote was about building good applications for the iPhone. He confirmed something I had already come to realize, the gold rush is over, but that doesn’t mean that it’s pointless to continue developing apps for the iPhone. The difference will be putting in the extra effort to make a higher quality application, something that will improve the overall nature of our trade, considering the enormous amount of bad applications on the App Store.

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I finally met up with Jennifer and James a little after 6:30pm. James got a little lost locating the Cub Quarters. Sadly, he suffered from what I suffered earlier; the GPS just doesn’t work in downtown Boston. Trying to follow the GPS myself earlier in the day, I managed to watch myself teleport all over the map, which basically didn’t help me locate the hotel. Ultimately, I got to the hotel after I pulled out the paper instructions my wife printed up for me the night before my flight.

The three of us wandered down to Quincy Market, but didn’t settle on anything in the facility, since finding a place to sit was nearly impossible (being a Friday night). We wandered out not too far from the market into a nice bar/restaurant and had a nice catch up dinner conversation. I was speaking to James and Jennifer about how my real life job had kept me from doing much iPhone development, and how I’ve grown rusty. James had similar feelings, and mentioned that he had been wanting to write a simple 2 minute timer application. A challenge was then posed, what can we write this evening? So, after dinner we headed back to our hotel rooms, and we began coding. Admittedly, for something that sounded so simple, it was rather tricky, and it served as a nice refresher for me. I managed to make a weak 120 second count down timer, it worked. but looks rather awful. I’m just proud of being able to have gotten that much done, and feel more encouraged to continue

Made into Boston without any issues today, smooth flight, and I even had a nice chat with a woman who works for Verizon, although she didn’t have much to add about the whole Verizon + Google partnership. I got in today around 1pm, and took the train into downtown, a pretty easy task! I was expecting a long haul like in Hong Kong or New York, but it was 3 stops on the Blue line and I was 2 blocks from the Club Quarters Hotel.
I did a little exploring around the area and walked over to Quincy Market for some Clam Chowder in a bread bowl over at the Oyster Bar stand in the market. I then took a stroll over to the aquarium and spent some time wandering around and looking at the fish. I’m back in the hotel now, waiting for Jennifer and James to arrive.

Klipsch Image S4

Today, I had a real desire to pick up some new earbuds. Partially it was for my trip to Boston, but I didn’t want to settle for just any old earbuds. I have plenty at home, ranging from the ones that Apple gave me with my iPhone to others I’ve gathered over time that came with various media devices I bought, and even some I got from my trips to Hong Kong. I’ve always seemed to like the sound that came out of the Bose headphones, but I’ve never tried their earbuds, and they don’t offer demos of them (for obvious reasons — hygene). But I’ve been hesitant to plunk down $100 for a set of earbuds. I’ve read plenty of reviews for the Shure earbuds, and they all tout how incredible they are, but if I can’t get myself to shell out $100 for Bose, I sure as hell am not about to shell out $300 for Shure. One of the nicest sounding earbuds I did buy were some Philips ones, which ran $20 (yes I’m cheap), but sadly broke because they went cheap on the cable. So I Googled around for top rated earbuds, and CNet gave the Klipsch very high marks, and at $80! The price is still more than I ever paid for earbuds, but I wanted something that would make my music really pop. So, off I went searching the internet like a good frugal, money conscious, shopper and I noticed that no one sold these for any less than $80, so I just stopped into my local Best Buy and I happily picked them up tonight.

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It’s finally here! Tomorrow, I’m off to the Voices That Matter iPhone conference. I’m looking forward to re-igniting my iPhone development interests, especially after my recent non-iPhone work related experiences. It’ll be nice to get away from home and hang out with all the development brains, maybe some of that awesomeness will rub off on me.

I’m hoping to hook up with Jennifer and James, two of my fellow Big Nerds in Boston tomorrow. I’ll be sure to write up how things go.

I was able to obtain a Windows 7 OEM build from MSDN, but I got the wrong bit version. I’ve been wanting to play with it, since I sort of missed the ball on the beta, something called life and work sort of got in the way. But I can tell you that the install experience was MUCH faster than that of Vista, I was able to install it twice in the time that Vista would have maybe gotten through half of it’s own installation! The install went smooth, but I wanted to put the 64 bit version on, and my buddy who got me the disks didn’t know which was which, sadly, they both were 32 bit. I’m waiting now to get my hands on the 64 bit version. I figure there’s no sense in going backwards to 32 bit. I’ll post my musings when I finally get my system back up and running.

So, it’s been a couple of weeks now that I’ve upgraded to Apple’s latest os, and I must admit that it doesn’t seem to have changed much. Understandably many of this latest version is really under the hood, but doesn’t this commercial upgrade then fall into the category of a service pack that I shelled out money to buy?

A coworker of mine made that comment, and honestly I must agree. For all Apple’s hoopla about Snow Leopard, it really is the equivalent of Vista SP1 or XP SP2. The only difference here is Apple is the only company in the world that can get away with charging for what Microsoft gives away for free!

I’ll probably get flamed for even saying such a blasphemous thing, but that’s how I see it.