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

This month the meeting will take place in Brussels on the 28th of June. Tom Maes and the folks at Sun Microsystems Belgium have been kind enough to provide us with a location in which we can hold this month’s meeting.

The address for this month’s meeting is Sun Microsystems Belgium, Lozenberg 15, 1932 Zaventem.

Tom will be presenting a session on “WWDC 2010 – The non-NDA parts”.

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 Raphael Sebbe and Sandrine Louiseau from Creaceed once more for allowing us to use the room for our Cocoaheads Belgium meeting.

The room was filled once again, and I think we had approximately 20 people joining us this time (and about 8 iPads I believe). Of course all the familiar faces were there again, and we also had some newcomers there too.

This month Raphael Sebbe prepared a session about XCode for us. Raphael is a developer from Creaceed who are the creators of some Mac and iPhone products like Prizmo, Hydra and Vocalia. And Raphael showed us how he is using XCode for a few things, learned us some new keyboard shortcuts and showed us a few Tips and Tricks. All in all, it was a great session both for beginners like me and more advanced XCode users.

Cocoaheads Belgium – Raphael Sebbe – XCode : Basics & Beyond – April 2010 from Stefaan Lesage on Vimeo.

You can find a PDF version of the actual presentation on the Creaceed 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. Furthermore you can also follow the CocoaheadsBE twitter account to learn more about us.

I would like to encourage everyone to help us fill it with content you guys are looking for. A great example here is the Book Reviews like the ones posted by Spencer Pieters. The more content we have, the more visitors the website will generate, and the easier it will be for Cocoaheads Belgium to achieve some things.

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

We decided that the next meeting will be on monday, the 31st of May. Currently we are still looking for a room we could use to hold the meeting, and also for someone to hold an actual session on something.

So, if you do know of a location we could use, or are willing to present something related to Mac / iPhone or iPad development, please get in touch with us.

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

This month the meeting will take place in Mons on the 26th of April. Raphael and Sandrine from Creaceed have been kind enough to provide us with a location in which we can hold this month’s meeting. The location for this month’s meeting is La Maison de l’Entreprise (LME), Parc Scientifique Initialis, 2 Rue Descartes, 7000 Mons. Raphael will be presenting a session on “XCode, Basics and Beyond”, which should be quite interesting for even the novice and more advanced developers in the community.

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.

This month the meeting will take place in Leuven on the 22nd March, and will be focused on all things OpenGL. The location for this month’s meeting is Diestsevest 39, 3000 Leuven. The venue is within walking distance of the Railway Station, and close to the Parking lot under the Martelarenplein.

Thanks to Stephane Winnepenninckx we will have a special guest speaker again this month : Jay Martin Anderson. Jay is the OpenGL instructor at The Big Nerd Ranch and has done computer graphics for over 45 years, and has developed graphics applications for Hewlett-Packard and the former Tymlabs Corporation.

Jay has lectured widely in the United States and Europe, especially on visualization with QuickTime movies. He is an Apple Distinguished Educator (class of 2001), and professor (emeritus) of computer science at Franklin & Marshall College, Lancaster PA, USA.

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.

Today started with an opening keynote by Mike Lee. This time his keynote was awesome. There was plenty of advice in this Keynote. One thing he showed us is that you should target your app at the average user. In fact he said : “If you are targeting the expert user of your app, you are targeting the wrong user”. You should actually design your app to do the most common tasks really well, and not a few complicated things which will only be used by 3 or 4 users anyway. He really gave me one piece of advice which I’ll carry with me and that is “Know your target user”. If you know who will be using your application, you will have a pretty good idea on the features they are looking for.

Hard and Fast OpenGL ES – Jeff LaMarche

This session concentrated around OpenGL and OpenGL ES. OpenGL ES is apparently a great tool for 2d and 3d drawing, but probably not as easy as Core Animation and Core Graphics. Both OpenGL and OpenGL ES define their own datatypes which are actually the same ones as the default ones but prefixed with GL. For functions there is apparently some specific convention as well. Functions are suffixed with a letter depending on the types of arguments passed to the function.

This was again one of those sessions which made me realize I still have a lot to learn. Still OpenGL and OpenGL ES seems to be quite interesting for Game Development.

Core Data Synchronization – Marcus Zarra

Yesterday we had a presentation from The Big Nerd Ranch in which he mentioned that Data Synchronization would become a very important issue. Wouldn’t it in face be nice if your twitter client on your desktop would automatically mark tweets as read if you viewed them with the same twitter client on your iPhone ?

Well, that’s where ZSync comes to play. ZSync can be used to sync data between your desktop and your mobile phone. Apparently right now syncing from the iPhone to the desktop seems to be working and is 90% finished. For now it has only WiFi syncing though. The goal is to have cloud syncing over 3G or WiFi in the future as well as Mac to Mac syncing and a few other things.

The Physics of Sumo: Developing Games with Core Animation – Drew McCormack

Drew McCormack was back with a session on Core Animation which he used for his Sumo Master game. He did mention though that if you plan to do a game, you should probably take a look at OpenGL instead of Core Animation. But he did show us that you could actually do quite a lot of things with Core Animation too.

To me, this was one of my favorite session. It showed you the power of some of the iPhone API’s. You can actually achieve some very good looking results with it, and still have code which isn’t looking all too complex. Drew showed us several stages of the development phase and showed us some pieces of code which he used to solve some animation problems.

Supporting Online Play and GameKit in your app – Jeff LaMarche

This last session of NSConference was all about GameKit, which is a framework provided to you that can facilitate easy network play over Bluetoot. It’s main focus is probably that it’s designed for networkable games on the iPhone (it can’t communicate with bluetooth on a desktop machine). Quite interesting for those of us developing games with network play, but apparently you can actually transfer any kind of data with it.

Closing Words

Well, that concluded the NSConference, and if you ask me if it was worth it’s money, my answer would be “Absolutely”. Not only were the sessions quite interesting, but there was a lot of opportunity to meet up and chat with presenters and fellow developers. I think I probably learned as much from the discussions outside the session room than from those in the sessions. So I would like to take the opportunity to thank Scotty, Tim and all others who made this conference possible.

The conference actually motivated me to start with my own iPhone application, and although I still have a lot to learn it’s going quite well. I really hope we will have an European version of NSConference next year to, and if that is the case, I’ll surely be signing up for it.

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