The Venue

I arrived in Reading on sunday, together with Cyril Godefroy. It took us a while to get from London to Reading by train, and once we got there we still had a short cab trip before arriving at the Venue. NSConference 2010 UK was held in Wokefield Park. It appeared as if the venue was located in the middle of nowhere, but apparently it was a huge golf course which surrounded the buildings. The infrastructure at the venue was great, and thanks to Tim, Scotty and the organizing team we even had Wifi available (although connecting to it was quickly becoming a hassle).

The Attendees

The day before the actual workshop I met up with a few attendees in the dining room and the bar. We had dinner and Jonathan “Wolf” Rentzsch joined us together with Victoria Wang. In all honesty I have to say that I had no idea who they were though. But we would get to know each-other during the course of NSConference and I would find out that they are part of the Chicago CocoaHeads chapter. I knew that Cyril wasn’t the only person from the CocoaHeads Belgium community that would join us, but the others were arriving the next day.

The Workshop

I was really looking forward to the World According to Gemmell workshop but the one an only Matt “The Legend” Gemmell. Heard so many great things about him and even delved in the MGTwitterEngine code just to see if I would understand it :-)

A few days before NSConference Matt sent out an email to all attendees asking us if we had any questions or topics we wanted to see covered in his workshop. And this is actually what made the workshop so great. Quite a few attendees sent in many different topics like how to get a more Mac Like GUI in cross-platform applications, how your application should evolve in the future or even how to handle / present specific information to the user.

The great thing was that although Matt had a few slides with some key points on the subjects brought up by the attendees, he left the discussion open to everyone. We all had the opportunity to give feedback on the topics which were being discussed. An in my opinion that’s what made the workshop so fabulous. Not only did we have the opportunity to lean from the master himself and hear his opinion, but we also had the opportunity to learn from each-other.

A question or problem presented by one user was immediately getting the necessary feedback and opinions from all attendees in the room (approx. 30 I think). This brought a certain dynamic to the discussions and was a great source of information, even for those people who didn’t ask the specific question.

At some point we even covered opinions on the iPad. The funny thing was that one attendee even had built a true size model of the iPad. Everything was correct (except for the weight of the device), and we could all touch and hold it for a while. This might sound quite geeky to most people, but it was the first time we could actually interact with something which was pretty close to the actual device. Suddenly the black border around the display made a lot of sense to me. I thought it was just a waste of space, but it is actually quite necessary. How would you hold the device without interacting with the Touch display if there was no black border ?

Closing Words

This workshop was really well thought of. Just as Matt himself said, you paid for 1 but you got the feedback from 30 of us. During the workshop we were also divided into smaller groups of 4 – 6 people. That was a great opportunity to make the first social contact with other attendees, something which we would do a lot more in the coming days (yes also in the bar).

NSConference 2010 is the first Mac / iPhone development related conference I attended, and this first day already made it clear to me that it would be quite different than all other development conferences I attended in the past.