Voices That Matter: iPhone 2009 Day 1

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.

The first session I attended was Custom User Interfaces with Core Animation by Marcus Zarra. He showed some pretty interesting things you can do with CAShapeLayers to create a slick interface that didn’t need to change views to bring in other views. His presentation was good for me to see, since it was more pertinent to something I was trying to do after the Big Nerd Ranch. Hopefully the source code will be available on the conference site soon so I can dissect his app.

August Trometer’s session was titled Designing a Killer iPhone User Interfaces, where he highlighted the importance of taking the time to create a well designed application, and not just design in the graphical sense. It reinforced the things that Aaron had said in his keynote. August did a nice job showing some examples of similar applications and how a good design really set them apart.

After lunch, I attended Bill Dudney’s session on Peer to Peer Networking for Games, where he gave an overview of using GameKit to easily create local networked games using Bluetooth networking between 2 iphones. It was quite amazing to see how GameKit really made things simple. Sadly, I was suffering from food coma, but once again, I hope to get the session source code to play with.

Jonathan Rentzsch presented next about Core Data, but sadly, this session I didn’t get much from. At the Ranch, we didn’t go over this too much, so I didn’t have much of a background on Core Data. I was hoping Jonathan would have given a more interesting overview of what I can use it for, but he rambled on about the benefits in regard to other data modeling methods, but I didn’t have much context to understand what he was talking about. It wasn’t until the last 10 minutes of the session where he started using Xcode that I started to see something interesting, but sadly, all I got to see was 2 errors that I could encounter when trying to use Core Data.

The last session of the day was titled “Rapid Application Delivery: Going Hybrid” presented by Lee Barney, the creator of the QuickConnect iPhone framework. Prior to the session I’ve never heard of the framework, but I was interested in seeing how I could leverage html, css and javascript in an iPhone app. I was very impressed with what the QuickConnect framework offered; with it, I could actually build an application only using html, css and javascript. Very impressive indeed, probably one of the best things I’ve seen at the show.

Dinner was provided for us, and soon after dinner we were treated to a presentation by Andy Ihnatko titled “Know Your Oppressor”. It was a very insightful look at Apple, and had warnings about how Apple could crumble from the empire they are today, if they aren’t careful, in particular, their missing the boat on ebook readers, their handling of their loyal development community, and the looming threat that Android could evolve into.

The final event of the evening was the networking get together at the Elephant and Castle pub, where we got a chance to talk with the other conference attendee’s; a nice way to end a long, interesting and enlightening day.