360|iDev Conference. Day 1 Wrap-up: from Prototyping to Marketing iPhone applications

If you are an iPhone developer or an aspiring iPhone developer today’s content would have answered a lot of questions and created much food for thought. The conference kicked off with a warm welcome by John Wilkes and Tom Ortega followed by Mike Lee’s keynote “Welcome to the Neighborhood”. In part it was a personal story of his journey as a developer from Java to Cocoa. It was also an introduction to the Cocoa development community and some well-known contributors and bloggers, tools, and official and non-official resources.

Next up was a talk by Julio Barros on the pros and cons of the iPhone and Android platforms. Then Owen Goss gave a talk on the “Creation of an iPhone Game: Process and Lessons”. His talk detailed the hard learned lessons gained when he developed Dapple, a color matching puzzle game, now available in the App Store. Allan Musselman from Adobe talked about using Fireworks CS4 to prototype iPhone applications. Allan provided a link to a Google code project iphone-gui-fireworks-symbols which can be used to develop interactive protoypes using Fireworks. Allan also invited everyone and anyone to join him in weekly FireWorks Jam Sessions at 8 PM PST where participants can submit their questions. And Scott Michaels from Atimi talked about marketing your iPhone apps. His talk was invaluable with talk about bricks, squishes, navigating the Apple organization, and naming your app. Marketing is not something developers think about but this one was an eye opener. As always there were many more interesting talks then I could attend. The trip so far has certainly been worth it. And I’m looking forward to more great talks tomorrow.