Voices That Matter: iPhone 2009 Day 2

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.

Moving on, Kevin Avila gave an indepth look at Core Audio, and OpenAL which was a bit over my head, but had some good information that I’m sure will come in handy when I get that far along in my development path.

I had the pleasure of meeting Erica Sadun at the conference. During lunch, she did a presentation on in-app purchases, which was very interesting. It truely does open up a new distribution path for your application, such as making it possible to do premium content and conversion from demo to full version software within your app. I was very pleased to spend a little time chatting with her. She showed me her Dell Mini 9 Netbook, converted to a Hackintosh, running Leopard! I now have a new mission!

Dan Glover showing us some shortcuts and tips for making the most of XCode, I learned that XCode has a testing module called OCTest, which is handy for automated testing! Erica also showed us how to get a split view of both our .m and .h files! Very handy!

The last session of the day was about Network Gaming by Peter Bakhirev, which was a good overview of strategies we can use for tackling an online or local network game. It was very interesting and he had a nice chart highlighting approaches to the various types of networked games, turn-based or real-time, either online, or local.

With the closing of the last session, the conference ended. It felt sort of anti-climatic, since pretty much everyone just disembarked, but I think that’s probably for the best, since people wanted to head home after a long weekend. Overall, I’m happy with how the conference went, and I hope to make this an annual event.