CocoaHeads Belgium January Meeting – Notes

I didn’t do a headcount this time, but I think approximately 30 people jouned us at the IBBT for the first CocoaHeads Belgium meeting of this year. Meanwhile some of the faces are starting to get quite familiar, although most of the time I remember the faces but forget their name.

This month Steven Vandeweghe prepared a session about Core Image for us. Steven has been using Core Image in a few of the applications / plugins he has been writing for his company Blue Crowbar Software. Steven has been writing plugins for iPhoto and Aperture and some of those use Core Image to do some nice things. Personally I didn’t know a lot about Core Image but after seeing this session it looked pretty easy to achieve some quite good looking effects with applying just a few filters. If Core Image is something you are interested in you’ll like the video.

CocoaHeads Belgium – January 2010 – Core Image from Stefaan Lesage on Vimeo.

You can find a PDF version of the actual presentation on the Blue Crowbar Software website.

Status Update

Before the session started I gave a little Status Update on things we have already done since the last meeting. As we all know by now, we have our Google Group for CocoaHeadsBE and CocoaHeadsBE group on LinkedIn, and of course our CocoaHeads Belgium webiste / Blog. I would like to encourage everyone to help us fill it with content you guys are looking for. If you have a Cocoa Problem, feel free to post it in our Google Group … if you have an interesting tutorial to share you can always post it on the CocoaHeads Belgium website. Even if you post it on your own website, we would appreciate a little post on the CocoaHeads Belgium website which links through to your website for the full content.

Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on the 22nd of february and we are checking if we can host it at the IBBT again. This time we will be doing something quite different tough. At each CocoaHeads Belgium meeting we have the opportunity to meet other Cocoa developers, but quite often we don’t really know what they are working on. Some people already expressed that it would be interesting to know what everyone is doing with Cocoa on the Mac or on the iPhone. A few sessions ago we let everyone tell the group what they were doing, but apparently a few people missed that. So …

For this months meeting it has been suggested to let everyone present themselves and what they are doing in the Cocoa world. We will be giving everyone the opportunity to do that in 5 minutes or less (max 10 slides). The goal is to let everyone else know who you are, what you have done and maybe where your expertise lies. Remember you get max 5 minutes to do so …

I think we can fit about 15-20 people in one session so if we get more we could spread it over 2 meetings. If you are interested in that, please let us know so we can schedule you for the next meeting.

Final Note

I still have some coupon codes from Stefanie Höfling from The Big Nerd Ranch Europe. She was kind enough to supply us with a Coupon Code which gives you an additional 50€ reduction on one of their courses. She even promised she would double that reduction for member of the CocoaHeads Belgium community. So, I’d like to thank here in the name of everyone involved in CocoaHeads Belgium. Sadly I forgot them, but I’ll make sure to bring them with me at the next meeting.

If anyone thinks he can help us out with one of the ideas mentioned in this topic, please do contact us. If you still have more ideas … well contact us as well. There is a real need for a CocoaHeads Belgium, and I’m sure that we can make it happen if we all work on it together.

Regards,

Stefaan