I will be speaking on “Using Concurrency to Improve the Responsiveness of iPhone Applications” at the 360iDev Denver iPhone Developer’s Conference September 27th to 30th. I’m excited about speaking at and attending 360iDev. Whether you’re new to iPhone programming or have been doing iPhone development for a while there’s something for you at 360iDev. With sessions covering game development, going indie, design, marketing, legal issues, location aware applications, MapKit, performance, debugging, push notification, Core Data, Core Animation, internationalization of your application, code reuse, NewsGator, Rails, OpenGL ES, WebKit, user experience, or porting your iPhone application to other mobile platforms there is a session for you. With a keynote by Matt Drance and the opportunity to talk to Mike Lee about your code it promises to be a conference not to be missed! Register before they sell out and hope to meet you there!
Speaking at iPhone Developer Conference: 360iDev Denver September 27 – 30th, 2009
•August 21, 2009 • Leave a CommentWWDC 2009 Tuesday Evening: Stump The Experts
•July 6, 2009 • 1 Comment
One of the great pleasures I’m sure for many WWDC attendees is the evening event Stump the Experts. As you can see from this official Apple photo everyone in the audience has a great time including me! Stump the Experts is the no-holds barred annual game show pitting Apple engineers against the audience. Stump the Experts has been co-hosted by Fred Huxham and Mark Harlan since 1992. 
Fred wore a Dr. Seuss “The Cat in the Hat” hat and Mark wore a gray and white camouflage suit topped by a green and white umbrella hat. The score is kept by “The Crazy Swiss Guy” Sandro — a WWDC attendee from Switzerland. The audience wins points by naming the songs played before the game starts and stumping the Apple engineers with their pre-show submitted questions. The experts can also ask the audience questions and can even cheat when they answer questions! Fred Huxham and Mark Harlan deserve a lot of credit for their willingness to appear silly in their costumes and being such great hosts. And the Apple engineers deserve a lot of credit for their participation and helping to make it a great evening of entertainment. Thanks to all the Apple Experts! The experts won this year. I have never laughed so hard at a conference event so I’ll be sure to attend again next year!
Post-WWDC 2009 Early Monday Morning: Reflections About Lining Up For The Keynote
•July 5, 2009 • Leave a CommentMy goals at WWDC were simple — learn as much as possible, network and meet fellow developers, and to enjoy the whole WWDC experience. For some of us part of that experience is to line up early for the 10 AM keynote. Lining up at 7 for a 9 AM conference keynote I’ve done before. But lining up at 5 AM or earlier? No way — that’s only reserved for rock stars or World Series tickets or so I thought! Well, as the saying goes — in for a penny, in for a pound. So for the full WWDC experience I thought I would go for it. Lining up at midnight was too extreme for me even though I’ve read that some developers do just that. A more “reasonable” approach I thought would be to get up at 4 AM and join the line around 5 to see how many of us were nutty enough to do this.
At 5 in the morning there were enough of us lined up one to two abreast to cover one side of the Moscone West building.
At about 5:30 AM there were still no Apple employees inside the hall that I could see. 
When an Apple employee came by later to compress the line and asked us to count off I was number 173 (or 193 I forget which).
As it got lighter around 7 I saw Jeff LaMarche stop by to say hello to Bill Dudney who was closer to the beginning of the line than I was. So I guess I wasn’t that crazy!
Around 8 AM we were admitted to Moscone West and this is the view to the beginning of the line on the second floor.
And this is the rest of the line behind me.
And finally around 9:40 we were allowed to move up to the keynote on the third floor.
Would I do it again? Yes I would! You get to meet other developers, talk to a few vendors as they ply the line, and watch the sun come up. After all it is part of the WWDC experience!
WWDC 2009 Videos and Slides Are Available!
•June 29, 2009 • Leave a CommentWow! It must be a record — the WWDC 2009 videos and slides are available via ADC on iTunes for attendees and ADC Premier members! Apple deserves kudos for getting this out in what must be record time. Thank you Apple! :)
To Help Create or Recreate That Special WWDC 2009 Feeling
•June 15, 2009 • Leave a CommentOne of the things that I enjoyed about the JavaOne Conferences over the years was the music played at the conference. In the morning live musical performances were played before the kickoff mini-keynote hosted by John Gage (Sun Microsystems’ former Chief Researcher and Vice President of the Science Office) and other Sun executives. Music was also played between sessions. The music was always lively and upbeat and was a welcome addition to the silent sounds offered by developers drifting sleepily in. The music was vibrant and mood setting. While WWDC did not have live music each morning followed by a mini-keynote they did play music between sessions which I enjoyed. So if you were not able to make it to WWDC or want to recreate that WWDC feeling here is a very short playlist of some of the songs that were played:
The Bourgeois Blues, Ry Cooder
That’s Not My Name, The Ting Tings
So What, P!nk
Circus, Britney Spears
Stir It Up, Bob Marley / The Wailers
Don’t Stop Believing, Glee
Just A Friend, Biz Markie
Porcelain, Moby
A Mhuirnin O, Clannad
Colorado, Nortec Collective
Bar Infierno, Nortec Collective
Wonders Never Cease, Morcheeba
Low Sun, Chicane
Another Postcard, Barenaked Ladies
Tell Me Why, Los Lonely Boys
Rich Girl, Gwen Stefani Feat. Eve
Wonderful Night, Fatboy Slim
Black Horse…Cherry Tree, KT Tunstall
Lift Me Up, Moby
This Fire, Franz Ferdinand
I Don’t Want To Be, Gavin DeGraw
Times Like These, Foo Fighters
Heaven, Los Lonely Boys
Ghosts In My Machine, Annie Lennox
To Get Down, Timo Maas
Feel Good Time, William Orbit / P!nk
Whip It, Devo
Working On It, Chris Rea
All Along The Watchtower, Jimi Hendrix
Now you can queue these up to play on your favorite iPod and create or recreate that WWDC excitement while you work!
WWDC 2009 – fifteen hours and counting!
•June 7, 2009 • Leave a CommentOver the years I’ve attended NeXTStep, JavaOne, 360Flex, and 360iDev Developer Conferences but this will be my first WWDC! I am pretty lucky to be attending WWDC this year and I am really looking forward to all of the sessions, labs, and the chance to meet other developers. It’s been five years since my last trip to San Francisco and each trip was to attend either a NeXTStep or a JavaOne Conference. My last trip to San Francisco was for my ninth JavaOne Conference and over the years I had seen attendance mushroom from about three thousand to well over 20,000. Decidedly not intimate and definitely frustrating because of the difficulty of navigating through and around so many people. So this will be a welcome change. Other differences aside from the number of attendees are that I think the conference will be a lot less frenetic since there are no BOFs scheduled late into the evening to compete with other functions. And during the day there will be no exhibit hall to visit allowing the focus to be on the sessions and labs. And I’m not really expecting Steve Jobs to show but it sure would be great if he did put in an appearance. I’m sure he would receive a standing ovation from the audience. The last time I heard him speak was at the last NeXTStep Conference I attended. He’s a great speaker. Wouldn’t it be great if Phil Schiller stole Jobs’ keynote line “…oh and one more thing…..” and out steps Steve Jobs to announce the next new device?
iPhone OS 3.0 – Beta available today with huge changes coming!
•March 17, 2009 • Leave a CommentApple’s two-hour press conference on the changes coming in iPhone OS 3.0 (thanks to ArsTechnica’s live coverage) reveals many changes are coming in June that users, developers, and entrepreneurs will love. Some of my favorite upcoming features are: new subscription models in which users can purchase a base application and purchase new/additional game levels, street guides, etc., all within the base application; automatic discovery of other nearby iPhones via Bluetooth and Bonjour; push notification; copy and paste for all applications; a public API for Maps although we’ll have to find our own source of map tiles; support for MMS; support for iCalender format for calendaring; a new Apple application named VoiceMemo for recording using the built-in mic or an external microphone; and many other changes described as a “…thousand new APIs and a hundred new features”… The beta is supposed to be available today for developers (hopefully all). Can’t wait to see the new APIs!
