This is a repost of my original article which I posted on my own website. But since it is related to iOS development, I thought it might be interesting for the Cocoaheads Belgium folks as well.

Colors Everywhere

Well, after my previous post I continued doing some more work on my UI and trying to create my own Style for UITableViews and UITableViewCells. I ended up using the same colors over and over again in all different places in my application. In the end I had code in my UITTableViewController which set the Color for the Background and the navigation bar :

- (void)viewDidLoad
{
    [super viewDidLoad];

    // Uncomment the following line to display an Edit button in the navigation bar
    // for this view controller.
    // self.navigationItem.rightBarButtonItem = self.editButtonItem;
    [[self navigationController] navigationBar].tintColor = [UIColor brownColor];
    UIImage *img = [UIImage imageNamed:@"BG_Pink"];
    [[self tableView] setBackgroundColor:[UIColor colorWithPatternImage:img]];
}

This was all working out quite nicely …

Using the same color scheme in other Views

Data Entry View with ColorScheme

Of course, my application consits of a few different UITableViews and I even added a data entry View and a detail view. As you can see, the data entry view is using the same background color for the UITableView and the UITableViewCells are using the same color as my other UITableView as well.

At some point, I wanted to change the color scheme I was using (it was more pinkish at the start), and use something more Orange or brown like. Sadly this required me to change the color in every spot where I was using it. When I tested it on my phone, it looked horrible, since I forgot to change a few colors.

Since I’m still developing some basic ideas for the app, and the color scheme might change a few times during the Development cycle, I started thinking. There surely must be an easier way to handle this, which wouldn’t require me to change the colors in 10 different places.

Of course, I could subclass UIColor and add my own colors to it, but I wanted to try a different approach

The Categories Approach

During the iOS bootcamp I took at Big Nerd Ranch Europe a while back, we touched on the subject of Categories. Categories allow you to extend a class without the need to Subclass it. Using Categories I could quickly add a few methods to UIColor whithout the need to create a new Subclass.

Creating a Category in UIColor

Creating a new category is actually quite easy. In my case, I wanted a category on UIColor so I could extend it. I created a new Header and Implementation file and called it UIColor+MyApp.h and UIColor+MyApp.c

The Header File

In the Header file UIColor+MyApp.h I added the following code :

//
//  UIColor+MyApp.h
//
//  Created by Stefaan Lesage on 11/11/10.
//  Copyright 2010 Devia. All rights reserved.
//

#import 

@interface UIColor (MyApp) 

+ (UIColor *)myTableViewBackgroundColor;
+ (UIColor *)myTableCellBackgroundColor;

@end

This simply declares a category MyApp on UIColor, and defines 2 new methods on it. myTableViewBackgroundColor which will return the Default color which should be used as the background for my UITableViews, and myTableCellBackgroundColor which defines the default color which should be used as the background for my UITableViewCells (and in some other places in my app).

The Implementation

In the Implementation file UIColor+MyApp.m I added the following code :

//
//  UIColor+MyApp.m
//  Phocation
//
//  Created by Stefaan Lesage on 11/11/10.
//  Copyright 2010 Devia. All rights reserved.
//

#import "UIColor+MyApp.h"

@implementation UIColor (MyApp)

+ (UIColor *)myTableViewBackgroundColor
{
    UIImage *img = [UIImage imageNamed:@"BG_Pink"];
    return [UIColor colorWithPatternImage:img];
}

+ (UIColor *)myTableCellBackgroundColor
{
    return [UIColor colorWithRed:255/255.0 green:240/255.0 blue:255/255.0 alpha:100];
}

@end

Well the implementation is pretty straightforward. For the myTableViewBackgroundColor, I simply return a UIColor based on the pattern in my previous post. The myTableCellBackgroundColor then returns the light pink / purple color which gets used as the background for my UITableViewCells.

Using the Category

Using the Category is now pretty Straight Forward. In my Detail View for example, I have a reference to a UITextField called nameTextField and to the tableView beneath it. So in my viewDidLoad I have the following code :

- (void)viewDidLoad
{
    [super viewDidLoad];

    /* Load our HeaderView if Necessary */
    [[self view] setBackgroundColor:[UIColor myTableViewBackgroundColor]];
    [[self tableView] setBackgroundColor:[UIColor myTableViewBackgroundColor]];
    [nameTextField setBackgroundColor:[UIColor myTableCellBackgroundColor]];
}

Quite simple, isn’t it ?

But what are the advantages ?

For me, it makes my code a little more readable (that is of course a more personal opinion), but what’s even better is that my code is a lot easier to maintain. If for some reason I want to change my color scheme to use another pattern or another color for the UITableViewCells, I only need to update the code in one sport. Simply modify the Implementation found in UIColor+MyApp.c, build and it’s done !

Once I found the advantages of this approach, I even added more methods to my UIColor+MyApp category. It now also contains methods which return the color I will be using for the UINavigationBar tine, colors I will be using for different texts in my application, …

Feedback

As with my previous post, there might be better ways to achieve the same thing. If you have a more appropriate approach or solution, feel free to let me know … I’m eager to learn

This is a repost of my original article which I posted on my own website. But since it is related to iOS development, I thought it might be interesting for the Cocoaheads Belgium folks as well.

The default grouped UITableView

The default Grouped UITableView looks nice but …

Well, you can use the UITableView in it’s Plain mode, but also in a Grouped mode. The Grouped mode uses some kind of pattern as the background for the UITableView. It looks quite nice and is made up of alternating light and darker blue-grayish lines.

I wanted someting a little more ‘Special’ …

Although the default look isn’t all that bad … I wanted to have something ‘special’ for my application. So I was wondering if there was some way to change the color used in that pattern. Since I didn’t know the answer myself, I sent out a tweet. I was hoping someone would pick it up and maybe let me know where I could find some more information on this topic.

The feedback I got

I did receive some feedback to my tweet: ‘Is there an easy way to create your own UIColor which looks like the ‘Group Table View Color’ but with another color scheme ? #iphonedev. One of the answers was from Amar Kulo who suggested to supply me with some Photoshop files I could modify.

A few moments later, Amar Kulo even provided me with a complete answer and wrote a blog post about it to help me out. It is actually pretty easy, so I thought i would share it with the world as well.

The Trick

It is actually quite easy to get your own custom background. You simply have to use a custom background image. Amar provides a few samples in his blogpost. The only thing you need to do is open up your favorite Image Editor (in my case Pixelmator), change the colors to you liking and create the necessary versions for your application.

The Code

Once you added the resources to your project, you can simply start using them as the background for your Grouped UITableView. In my case, it was simple a matter of setting the background color in the ViewDidLoad of my UITableViewController :

- (void)viewDidLoad
{
    [super viewDidLoad];

    // Uncomment the following line to display an Edit button in the navigation
    // bar for this view controller.
    // self.navigationItem.rightBarButtonItem = self.editButtonItem;
	UIImage *img = [UIImage imageNamed:@"BG_Pink"];
	[[self tableView] setBackgroundColor:[UIColor colorWithPatternImage:img]];
}

Feedback

I ended up with this Bakcground and Color Scheme

Well … This might not be the best way to do it, so if you have any suggestions, feel free to let me know.

Personally, I had to experiment a bit with quite a few different colors before I got something which did looked OK to me, so feel free to experiment as well, and let me know what you come up with

Next time I’ll be delving a little deeper into some more things I did with my UITableView and UITableViewCell … but for now … feel free to post a comment and have a look at the result :

Well, last month Eric Bariaux gave a presentation on Automated Testing in an iOS World during our Cocoaheads Belgium Meeting. I did video tape the session, but didn’t really find the time to process it yet … until then end of last week.

So I finally Imported the HDV Tapes, did some color correction, added a few titles, exported the whole thing … and ended up with a 90 GB file. I had to compress this into a smaller format for uploading and ended up with an 700 something Mb file which I uploaded to Vimeo.

Automated testing in an iOS World – Cocoaheads Belgium from Stefaan Lesage on Vimeo.

Audio Quality

I know the audio quality isn’t superb … We did have a lot of noise from the activity in the room next to ours, and I couldn’t really filter that out without messing up the rest of the audio. Next time I’ll try to bring an Audio Interface and a Microphone so we can record the audio separately.

High Quality Version

The file I uploaded had a resolution of about 640 x 360 pixels, which is perfect for displaying on an older iPhone / iPod Touch, but somehow low quality for viewing on the iPad. If people are interested in a higher quality version, I could generate an iPad specific version for you, but I won’t be able to upload that to Vimeo due to the file size.

Next Meeting

Well, since we should have had this months meeting yesterday … we will be skipping it and try to organize the next one on the 20 th December (if that’s find with everyone). We are still looking for a location or a topic, but we could also make it a ‘coding’ session if we can’t find someone to give a presentation.

Final Note

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., or even better … start organizing

Regards,

Stefaan

This month the meeting will take place in Gent on the 23rd of August.  Steven Vandeweghe (Blue Crowbar Software) will be showing us how he uses Git as a Version Control System during his daily life as a developer.  We might also get some additional info on SVN by Eric Bariaux (TinSys) and Mercurial by Raphael Sebbe (Creaceed). As you can see, this promises to bring out some interesting discussions on Version Control Systems.

The location for this month’s meeting is in the offices of SHPArtners – Roving Bird, Kortrijksesteenweg 1099a, 9051 Gent.

The meeting will start at 20:00, and there will be plenty of time to meet up with other Cocoa Heads BE enthousiasts. So if you’re interested, feel free to go to the EventBrite website and sign up, since spaces are limited.

You can find more information on CocoaHeads Belgium a the CocoaHeads Belgium website, in the CocoaHeads Google Groups and I even created a Linked In group for CocoaHeads Belgium.

Registration for this Meeting can be done on the Eventbrite page. If you have suggestions for future sessions or are willing to give a session, that would be the perfect time to let us know.

Well, I would like to thank Tom Maes and the kind folks at Sun Microsystems Belgium once more for allowing us to use the room for our Cocoaheads Belgium meeting.

It took us a while again to get everyone subscribed for this event, and to find an appropriate location, and sadly this time we had to limit the number of seats available. I hope everyone got in though, and if you didn’t make sure you register for the next meeting ASAP (or at least when we have more info about it). This time we had a room filled with about 30 people, at least a dozen of iPads, and even two iPhone 4 devices !

This month Tom Maes prepared a session on all things WWDC. Tom gave us his opinion about WWDC and why he finds it so interesting. As with many conferences, the sessions are quite interesting, but at WWDC you also have the opportunity to have some Lab Time with Apple Technicians which proves to be very valuable. He also mentioned that the conference isn’t always held in the session rooms, but quite a few times you meet up with interesting people in the lobby or hallways and you probably learn a few things there too.

Status Update

Personally I am very pleased with the way the Cocoaheads Belgium community is growing and evolving. I remember the first meeting where we all seemed strangers … but meanwhile we’ve grown acquainted to each-other and the sharing of knowledge and information is starting to be a fact !

I’ve had quite a few suggestions and ideas from the community last month and we have discussed a few of those during the meeting as well. For those of you who didn’t make it to the meeting, I’ll give you a little summary on the 2 most important suggestions.

NSCoder Nights

The goal here is to get together with a small group of developers and actually Code together. The idea exists in other countries and there is even a website dedicated to NSCoder Nights.

The actual goal is to have a weekly / bi-weekly event where a small group of Cocoa developers get together and … well code of course ! The big difference between the NSCoder Night and regular meetings is that the idea is to work in smaller groups, and be less formal. There would be no need to subscribe at all, if you feel you’re ready for an NSCoder Night you just turn up with your Mac and a project you want to work on.

It would be a great opportunity to share our knowledge ! One person could have an issue with some Core Location stuff and another developer could help him with the task at hand. I have already seen that we have quite a few smart people in our community, some know everything about Core Location, others about Core Animation and even some OpenGL experts. We are probably all experts in a specific area, but imagine what we could do if we could bring all that knowledge together … wel that’s exactly the idea of the NSCoder Night!

We have no concrete plans yet, but I noticed that the people present at the meeting would be interested in it, so here is a little list of things we would probably need :

• Spot with enough electricity / chairs to host a small group of developers
• Preferably a calm, not too noisy location
• If possible some Wifi access to the interent
• Some drinks / food in the neighboorhood would be great as well

In many cases it is done in a Pub with Wifi, which makes it absolutely perfect if it isn’t all too noisy (we still need to hear the each-other think & talk).

So, if anyone has a suggestion of a place where we could host the NSCoder Nights, please let us know. Remember this is supposed to be a smaller group, and there is no problem at all with having it take place in 2 or more places in Belgium at the same time. For example, I could imagine one in Antwerp, one in Gent, one in Brussels, …

NSBBQ

The other idea is a suggestion for a more social happening. From time to time we get together for our meetings, and we even take some time to grab a beer together and that’s how the idea started to grow. And if there is one thing we Belgians love on hot sunny days, … its a BBQ with good food and a few drinks! (if you answered : creating iPhone apps in 1 day, you should check the NSCoder Night topic again)

The idea is to plan a day where the whole community could meet up and socialize. Since there is no technical content attached to this event, you could even bring your girl/boyfriend, husband/wife and maybe even the kids.

We have absolutely no idea yet on how we should organize this. For now it’s a wild idea, but a quite interesting one. With the help of the community we could get it organized (find a location, catering, …) or we might even be able to do it ourselves (bring our own food, do the BBQ ourselves).

If you are interested in this idea, and have some suggestions / can offer a helping hand, please get in touch with us.

Feedback & Suggestions

If you have any feedback on the topics mentioned or have any other suggestions at all, feel free to get in touch with us. You can reach us through our Google Group for CocoaHeadsBE and CocoaHeadsBE group on LinkedIn, and of course our CocoaHeads Belgium webiste / Blog. Furthermore you can also follow the CocoaheadsBE twitter account to learn more about us.

Next Meeting

As of yet, the date is undecided. If we keep our schedule, the next meeting would be on the 26th of July, but that will probably be during most people’s summer holidays. Personally I’m out of the country during the last 2 weeks of July, but that doesn’t mean you guys can’t have a meeting without me.

Some people suggested we should skip July and jump straight forward to August. Who knows, we might be able to organize our NSBBQ during the summer holidays for those of you eager to see me before the end of august

Final Note

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

I’m a big fan of Apress books as I find they offer very good value for money. I visit the Apress site on regular basis to check out upcoming titles on iPhone and Mac development. There was one book that was announced quite some months ago, but the release date kept slipping and slipping.

That book is the one I’d like to review today and it’s called “Learn Cocoa on the Mac”.

First of all, I’d like to point out that this book does *not* cover iPhone development. This is about Cocoa and Mac applications. Of course, with Cocoa Touch being a subset of Cocoa, you will recognize design patterns that you use on the iPhone and of course topics like Core Data can be used in both Cocoa and Cocoa Touch.

The chapters in this book are:

1. Must love Cocoa
2. Hello, World
3. Lights, Camera… Actions!
4. GUI Components
5. Using Table Views
6. Cocoa Bindings
7. Core Data Basics
8. Core Data Relationships
9. Search and Retrieve Core Data with Criteria
10. Windows and Menus and Sheets
11. Document-Based applications
12. Exceptions, signals, errors and debugging
13. Drawing in Cocoa
14. Advanced Drawing Topics
15. Working with files
16. Concurrency
17. Future paths

I’m not going to go through all the chapters in detail as the titles are clear enough.

You can see that the base of subjects is *very* wide and that is what makes this book a really great one. I find the explanations of the subjects and the samples really great. I felt really comfortable and got more confident going through this book, occasionally going through chapters very fast because of my knowledge of Cocoa Touch.

The nature of this book is really great. We all know that there are dedicated books on subjects such as Core Data and graphics. However, “Learn Cocoa on the Mac” does a great job of giving great introductions and clear explanations of what is going on. It goes deep enough into its subjects to make you understand what’s going on.

I love this book. I had great expectations of it and it didn’t disappoint. This goes easily in my personal top 3 of Cocoa books.

]]> http://cocoaheads.be/wordpress/2010/04/book-review-learn-cocoa-on-the-mac/feed/ 3 http://cocoaheads.be/wordpress/2010/02/book-review-more-iphone-3-development/ http://cocoaheads.be/wordpress/2010/02/book-review-more-iphone-3-development/#comments Sun, 07 Feb 2010 20:02:19 +0000 Spencer Pieters http://cocoaheads.be/wordpress/?p=247 Cocoa Programming, this is another book review. This time I'd like to review the followup to one of the best iPhone development books out there.]]> After Stefaan’s excellent book review Cocoa Programming, this is another book review. This time I’d like to review the followup to one of the best iPhone development books out there.

Introduction

I remember buying my first Apple laptop about 2 month after I had gotten my iPhone 3G. I wasn’t really interested in iPhone development at first but then I started playing with the device and wondered what exactly was possible with it. Now, if you’ve been developing Windows software for more than 10 years and then switch to OSX, Xcode, Cocoa and Objective-C – all at once – things can be a little challenging.

More than often I found myself at the wrong side of the swimming pool wondering what I had gotten myself into. It was at that time when the first iPhone books from Apress started coming out. I figured out pretty soon that Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK by Jeff LaMarche and Dave Mark would help me out. I wasn’t wrong.

This book helped me understand the iPhone SDK and chapter by chapter I found myself able to understand and use all the iPhone’s internals: gps, accelerometer, tab bars, navigation controllers etc. This book has since then been updated with Beginning iPhone 3 Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK to deal with the changes in SDK3.

This book has been the basis of my iPhone knowledge.

Enter SDK 3

Apple introduced quite a few new topics when SDK 3 was introduced. Topics such as GameKit, StoreKit, MapKit and CoreData. After the success of “Beginning”, Apress wanted more and More iPhone 3 Development: Tackling iPhone SDK 3 was released some weeks ago. This book builds on “Beginning” and is considered a followup that focuses on SDK3.

Needless to say: if you’re completely new in iPhone programming then you’ll need both books to get up to speed.

Table of contents

There are 16 chapters in this book, divided in 3 parts: an introduction, Core Data and Further Explorations.

Core Data alone covers 6 chapters.

Other chapters include:

• Peer-to-peer over Bluetooth using GameKit
• Online play: Bonjour and network streams
• Working with data from the web
• MapKit
• Sending mail
• iPod library access
• Keeping your interface responsive
• Debugging

The chapters on Core Data are focused on building a project involving heroes with superpowers and the project becomes more and more complex throughout the chapters, introducing you to all the different aspects of Core Data.

Peer-to-peer over Bluetooth using GameKit isn’t that difficult because you’ll be using delegation a lot which is something you’ll be familiar with if you’ve ever used the built-in gps or accelerometer. Online play is the follow-up chapter and it explains how you can let 2 iPhone users play against each other over a network connection. It’s a bit more complex but it’s a very interesting subject.

A lot of iPhone apps are mobile versions of websites where data is hosted on a server somewhere. The chapter “Working with data from the web” explains how you can access that data, how to do error handling and so on.

MapKit is the framework that allows you to use Google maps within your app, using Annotations with pins or images.

Sending mail is a very interesting chapter because in-app mail in SDK3 allows us to do something that wasn’t possible before: let users send an e-mail from within your app.

iPod library access does exactly what it says. It allows your app to access your media library and play songs from it.

Keeping your interface responsive gives you a load of tips and tricks on using timers, explaining deadlocks, operations and queues. It is a must read if your app involves heavy calculations which can slow down your responsiveness.

The final chapter gives you more info on debugging, which is something we all need to do from time to time.

Conclusion

I like this book, I really do. There are some typo’s in this book but the authors have setup support forums at http://iphonedevbook.com/forums where you can find typo’s and the solutions for them. If you haven’t got this book and if you’re serious about iPhone development, get it now.

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

The first meeting of 2010 meeting will take place in Gent on monday the 25th of January. Thanks to Thomas Bouve and the people at IBBT we are able to use their offices again for this meeting. The offices of IBBT are located at Zuiderpoort Office Park, Gaston Crommenlaan 8 (bus 102), B-9050 Gent-Ledeberg. You can find the exact location on Google Maps.

This meeting is a great opportunity to meet up with other Cocoa Heads BE enthousiasts. The schedule for this meeting looks as follows :

• 08:00 PM : As requested during the previous meeting, we have moved the starting time to 8 PM in order for everyone to get here.
• 08:15 PM : Steven Vandeweghe of Blue Crowbar Software has prepared a session on Core Image.
• 09:00 PM : We will be using the remaining time to get to know eachoter as quite a few members of the community have suggested. Everyone will get a few minutes to present who they are, what they do, if they are Mac or iPhone developers, what apps they have created and what they expect from CocoaHeads Belgium.

You can find more information on CocoaHeads Belgium a the CocoaHeads Belgium website, in the CocoaHeads Google Groups and I even created a Linked In group for CocoaHeads Belgium.

Registration for this Meeting can be done on the Eventbrite page. If you have suggestions for future sessions or are willing to give a session, that would be the perfect time to let us know.

Regards,

Stefaan Lesage

First of all, I would like to thank all attendees for showing up. I think we had about 20 people fighting their way through the rainy streets and joining us in Nivelles. Apparently there were a lot of new faces, I guess that means the word is getting around.

This month we had a very interesting session about the CLang Static Analyzer by Cyril Godefroy (developer of the 321Run iPhone Application). We did our best to video tape the session again, and after a full day of editing and uploading it is finally available on Vimeo.

Status Update

Before the session started I gave a little Status Update on things we have already done since the last meeting.

The Google Group for CocoaHeadsBE is still available, but we need some action in it Feel free to use the Google Group and post things in it if you want !

We also created a CocoaHeadsBE group on LinkedIn. We’re not quite sure what we will do with it, but for those of you who have an account on LinkedIn, make sure you join the group as well. It could be used in the future to post job openings and get in touch with each other on a professional level.

Since the 4th monday of the month would be in the Christmas Hollidays, we are going to check if we can schedule the meeting on the 21st of december (third monday). We will update the website once we have a confirmation.

This month’s session : Cyril Godefroy : CLang Static Analyzer

I had seen a few minutes of a demo about the CLang Static Analyzer at the iPhone Tech Talks in Paris, and I was quite happy when Cyril told me he wanted to give a presentation on it at the CocoaHeads Belgium meeting. Cyril traveled from France (Lille) to join us in Nivelles.

Cyril gave us a very good overview on the CLang Static Analyzer and showed us how to use it to detect possible memory leaks and other things. He then went on by showing us some pitfalls and workarounds a few things. Since I had never used it myself, I was quite interested in seeing it in action when I got home. So, first thing I did when I got home was install the latest XCode and let the CLang Static Analyzer check my code.

Cyril also created a guest post on this website where he attached the actual slides from the presentation. Thanks for that !

For those of you who couldn’t make it to this month’s meeting, I’ve uploaded the video to Vimeo :

CocoaHeads Belgium – November 2009 – CLang Static Analyzer from Stefaan Lesage on Vimeo.

The Video

The video is pretty descent, though it might be a bit hard to see the actual screen and the code. I spent the better part of a day editing the video and trying to improve the sound in Post Processing.

People have asked if it was possible to put an iPod version online. Well, that’s actually possible and I could even create an AppleTV (HD 720p) version. The only thing is, bandwidth isn’t cheap. The current version of the video is about 120 Mb in size, and if 10 people start to download it, that would generate 1 Gb in traffic. If others discover the video the bandwidth might increase pretty fast.

So, YES, I could provide an iPod / iPhone version and even a High Definition version for the AppleTV, but that would come at a cost. If enough people are interested in that, I might have a look at what it would cost and could setup a system where you could buy the actual video. For now if you can live with the video on Vimeo, well, it’s feee …

If you want us to keep video taping the sessions, please let me know. And if you have any suggestions on how to make the video even better, feel free to talk to me as well.

Next month’s meeting

After the session, I asked the attendees if it wouldn’t be better to plan the next meeting on the 21st of december, instead of the usual 4 th monday of the month. Everyone seemed to agree, since the 4 th monday of the month would actually be in the Christmas Hollidays. I’ll try to see if we can find a location and someone who can give a presentation.

Ideas for Presentations :

It doesn’t matter where the next meeting will take place or on which day of the month it takes place, but one thing we will surely need is someone giving a presentation or a session on something related to Cocoa Development. If you have any ideas, or are willing to give a session at next month’s meeting, please get in touch with us so we can arrange everything.

Sessions could be anything, ranging from How to market / promote your application to how to design a good Mac / iPhone User Interface or even something technical like an in-depth look at Instruments. I had someone talk to me about presenting the ‘Bug of the Month’, in which he could give a short session about a typical problem he encountered while programming and how he solved it. All great topics for sessions !

So if you’re willing to give a presentation / session at the next CocoaHeads Belgium meeting, please let us know !

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.

I would also like to take the opportunity to thank Eric Bariaux from TInSys who kindly sponsored the venue in Nivelles.

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