360iDev

I wrote a lot of this entry right in San Jose as the conference was on-going. And finished most of it up on the flight home. That being the case, It doesn’t really make sense that it’s taken be a week and a half to post it, but … there’s the story of my life. Anyway, I went to the new iPhone conference, 360iDev a couple of weeks ago, out in San Jose. This is put on by John and Tom who do the 360Flex conferences. All in all, it was a good time. I learned a lot, made some cool contacts, and largely felt like I got a feel for this developing community. There is room for improvement. As you will see reading below, I was hoping for more code and technical data. But this was the first one, and it was kind of a test. I’m sure it has the potential to evolve into something great.

So, without further ado, here is the post (pretty much) as I wrote it.

Left Boston just as it was starting to snow. Didn’t realize until later that I was flying away from a major storm. Stopover in Denver. Next plane was delayed and downsized, but I made it on there. Checked into the hotel which is probably a mile away from the airport, and headed over to eBay, which is a mile away from the hotel. Other than a Denny’s and a couple of gas stations, there isn’t much else interesting in the area.

Sunday night there was the speaker dinner right at eBay. Indian food. Yum yum. Then went downstairs for the evening reception. All kinds of neat beers. But nothing that could quite live up to the great beer I had in Amsterdam last week. Met lots of new people, a few people I know or at least met before, and a couple I knew from on line only. Back to the hotel relatively early – 10 or 11pm.

Monday got up and go over to eBay again in plenty of time to catch the keynote. An eBay speaker went over some game concepts, and Mike Lee, an old time Cocoa guru welcomed us to the world of Cocoa/Cocoa Touch programming, giving tons of good references and resources.

After that I went to Julio Barros’s iPhone / Android comparison session. Good conversation, but I was hoping to see a little more technical stuff, i.e. code on how to write Android apps. I know it’s just Java, but would be nice to see at least a hello world be created and what the whole process is.

From there, went to Owen Goss’s session about the creation of an iPhone game. Also a good talk, but it was all about the development process, concept, art, user testing, etc. No code. 🙁 Owen, by the way, is the one who posted the “brutally honest” post about how much he invested in his iPhone game, and how much he made back: http://www.streamingcolour.com/blog/2009/03/09/the-numbers-post-aka-brutal-honesty/

From there, to Chris Stewart, “You’ve Shipped, now what?” Chris is the guy behind the great iPhone dev forum, iPhoneDevSDK.com. This was all about how to promote your app and get sales after you’ve released it. Again, cool, but not very technical. Not that I expected that one to be.

Wound up the day with Neal Goldstein, iPhone Application Architecture. Neil had the questionable honor of writing the iPhone programming for dummies book in 4 weeks. 🙂 This was the most technical of the talks of the day. Much of it I already knew, but there was some good validation of things I wasn’t totally sure of, and I did learn a few things. Still, although it was technical, there was really a minimal amount of code in there. More about design patterns and the program flow.

Dinner, more beer. In bed by 10:30, woke up at 5 am. I figure if there are no late night raging parties, I might as well stay on Boston time. 🙂

Tuesday went out to Denny’s for breakfast. Got fairly damp walking in the rain. Then got to eBay way early. Hung out and did some coding and catching up on mail, etc.

First session was the Location Based Search session with Chris Hughes from AT&T Interactive, who I had wound up talking a lot with and hanging out with over the last couple days. Wicked smart guy. He and his partner showed some code, but didn’t really dive into too much code itself. Learned some good concepts though.

After that, I went to Tim Burks, “Deep Geek Diving into the iPhone OS and Frameworks”. At this point I was starving for some code. Unfortunately, this session was not what I expected at all. It was about jailbreaking and reverse engineering assembly code. I got code, but not quite the code I was hoping for.

After lunch was Kenji Hollis talking about NSNotificationCenter and AppDelegate. Yay! Tech data! Yay! Code! He did a great job but finished up really early. It was his first time presenting. I know it often goes quicker than you expect. He could have fit a lot more in there, which would have been great, as what he did cover was great. Learned a lot from this one.

Then was Brian Fling talking about Inspiration and Iterative Apps. I knew that wasn’t going to be very technical and it wasn’t. He talked about finding the next big thing, innovating, coming up with ideas and inspiration, etc. Cool stuff, but I kind of zoned out and did some coding myself.

Nothing in the last time slot interested me heavily, so I chilled out in the lobby and had some good conversations. Then dinner, beer, back to the hotel and hung out some more there and had some more good conversation. It was still pretty early so I worked on my presentation a bit in my room.

Wednesday. Denny’s. My body is not speaking to me anymore. Keynote with Medialets and Admob. Interesting info. I really need to implement analytics with Medialet.

Then was my session. I gave a lot of code. It was mostly code. I think the audience appreciated that. I had several people come up to me saying they really liked it, so that’s a good sign. But who knows, maybe the rest hated it. 🙂

I was in the center room. To my left was Sean Christmann talking about Core Graphics, and on the other side was Tony Hillerson talking about persistence. Both of those guys were very code heavy too. So I think that one slot saw more code on the screens than the whole rest of the conference. I wish I could have seen their presentations!

Over lunch we did an impromptu open source round table discussion – myself, Chris Hughes and Jay Freeman. Jay is the creator of Cydia, the app store for jailbreakers. Very smart dude. That talk sparked some very cool feedback, ideas, and discussion.

Finally, I was able to squeeze in one final session – the memory management one with Danton Chin. That was really good. Got a much better idea of how to use Instruments, and learned about Clang. Will be checking that out for sure.

At that point, it was time to hit the airport. I had a lovely three-plane trek back to Boston via LAX and San Francisco. But seating wasn’t too bad. Two window seats on the smaller planes, and an aisle seat with nobody beside me from SF to Boston. I slept the whole way. Well, many consecutive 20-minute plane naps anyway.

Anyway, Tom and John are talking about a second 360iDev in 6 months, somewhere east of the Mississippi. If you didn’t make this one, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend trying to get to the next one.