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.

Jeff LaMarche opened the second day, since Matt Gemmell was sick and had to return home. Jeff talked about some main differences in Objective-C and the possibilities of the Runtime. At some point he even mentioned to step away from Copy & Paste, something I’ve been telling Delphi developers for a few years by now

Additionally Jeff gave us some examples of things you can actually do with the runtime like determining the properties, instance methods, class methods and much more while your application is running. If I have to compare it to the good old Delphi, I would think of it of the Delphi RTTI on steroids. He did warn us though that using the Runtime you could get access to stuff Apple doesn’t want you to see or touch. In case of iPhone programming this could lead to your application being rejected on the AppStore.

Brushing Up on OpenCL – Andy Finnell

I have to admit that the session by Andy Finnell was way too technical and complex for me. The talk was about modeling the process in watercolor spreading using OpenCL. The whole concept of Context, Devices and Queues was a bit too much for me though. I left the session with a strange feeling … I suddenly knew I still have a lot to learn … and I had the impression that all painters must be smarter than myself.

Version Control Shoot Out – Dave Dribbin

For some reason people in the room were expecting some kind of Mud fight when Dave Dribin started his sesison on Version Control Systems. There were basically two big camps … on one side the Subversion users and on the other side the Git users …

Dave gave us a brief history of VCS and gave us some Pro and Cons on SVN, DVCS and Git. I have always been using Subversion and never really tried Git, but I guess I should give it a shot some day.

Code Signing – Graham Lee

Next up was Graham Lee with a brief session on Code Signing. The goal is to actually sign your application so it is tied to a unique identification. The great example he gave was if Malicious Monster would create a Malicious Library to attack Safari, they can sign as Malicious Monster or not, but can’t pretend to be anyone else. Apparently that unique ID is also used by other things like Parental Controls. Although this was a short session, I actually found it quite interesting.

The Many Faces of Data Persistence – Aaron Hillegass

Many Cocoa developers have heard about The Big Nerd Ranch, and if you didn’t you have probably read the book Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X by Aaron Hillegass (see our review of the book), and if you didn’t I suggest you go read the book ASAP

Aaron gave a talk about Data Persistence, and repeated that everything is moving to the cloud pretty fast. The concept of Files is dead, Long Live the Cache ! In order for our data to live on the cloud, we will need some way to synchronize that data to our local machines. The session wen through many aspects of storing your data and finally ended with Core Data.

Core Data seems to be a ver good solution, but in some cases it can be a little ‘slow’. At first I had no idea what he was talking about. I didn’t use Core Data yet and never heard it was SLOW ! But then he talked about the BNRPersistence which is available under the MIT license and can be downloaded from the Git Repository. BNR Seems to be similar to Core Data, but apparently is a lot faster. He showed us some numbers :

• Fetch 1M Songs BNR 3.6s CoreData 3.1s
• Insert 1M songs BNR 12s CoreData 56s 5x
• Fetch 1K playlists BNR 0.4s CoreData 5.6s 10x
• Insert 1K playlists BNR 1.2s CoreData 12.0s 10x

Depending on the case BNRPersistence appeared to be between 5 and 10 times faster than Core Data. What’s good is that BNRPersistence works on iPhone as well ! Great news, but I guess I’ll have to learn Core Data first !

Cocoa Rumble = Conference Speakers and Guests

I had no idea what to expect here, but the speakers were being teamed up with some people in the audience and got divided into 3 groups. Each group was assigned it’s Framework (Core Audio, Core Text and Core Image). The goal was to hold a Framework of the Year contets in which each time had a few minutes to create a presentation on why their framework should get chosen as Framework of the Year.

The presentations by all teams were great and fun to watch, but the best presentation was for Core Image and they won the Framework of the Year contest.

More Socializing, More Food and More Cocoa Talks in the Bar

Well, the day ended like the previous one. Plenty of us ended up in the bar getting a few drinks and talking about our project. This time I decided to get to bed a bit earlier and get some sleep. At least, that’s what I intended to do !

The day started with the opening keynote by Mike Lee which was called “Engineering Life”. To me this Keynote was a bit strange. It wasn’t really a technical speech and that felt a bit awkward to me. Mike did gain my respect though when he contacted me through twitter and started a discussion after he noticed my feedback on his session. His keynote did encourage me to make something of my life though, and to enjoy it.

Spelunking OS X – Jonathan “Wolf” Rentzsch

Well, I complained about the previous session not being to technical enough, but this time technical was an understatement

I met Jonathan the day before in the dining room but I had no idea back then who I was talking to. I was quite impressed with the plethora of debugging tools, het editors and ways to inject your own code at runtime he presented during his session.

In all honesty I didn’t understand all of it, but since I complained about the previous session not being technical I thought it was a good idea to go hide in a little dark corner right now

Clean Code – Dave Dribin

I’ve been a Delphi developer for about 10 years now and I’ve always been an advocate of writing clean, readable and maintainable code, so I was pretty anxious to hear how I should do it in XCode / Objective-C. I listened very carefully to what Dave Dribin, a.k.a. the best Cocoa Devleoper ever (according to his mum), had to say.

Quite a few things he mentioned were things I’ve been using in my Delphi development too. Choosing good names for Variables, Methods and Classes is one of my own personal rules, and so is writing clean, readable and especially short routines. My goal as a software developer has always been to write great apps, but my second goal has always been to write clean code, code which could be read and understand by other people.

On one of his slides I noticed the following quite, which I quickly scribbled down :

“programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute”

I forgot to write down where the quote came from, but I found it quite intresting. The other thing he mentioned was that the Quality of the code can be measured in the number of WFT’s per minute. That made me laugh, but I have to admit that it is actually true.

Dave did teach me a few things and mentioned some other things I didn’t think about yet. At some point he mentioned it’s sometimes better to comment why you are doing something instead of commenting what you are actually doing. This is something I’ll have to remember myself.

All in all, I found this a great session. Would have loved seeing more practical examples and I surely hope I’ll be able to get hold of the actual slides or video of the session so I can have another look at it.

Data Presentation in Mac Apps – Drew McCormack

Next up was Drew McCormack who did a session on data presentation on the Mac. He started off by showing us different ways of showing the same data. This lead to the types of views you typically find in Mac applications.

What was quite interesting is the fact that most views used in a Mac application are actually single column type views. He also mentioned a few ways to do multiple column views, and quickly compared Table Views with Collection Views and Tabular Views, giving us the Pro and Cons of each type of view.

He ended with some advantages of using WebKit do display information (eg in iTunes) and gave a quick sneak peak at Core Plot wich is actually a 2D visualization library for the Mac an iPhone. The objectives of Core Plot is to get a complete plotting framework using the Cocoa API which runs both on the Mac and on iPhone. There is currently no official release yet, but it is usable and already has quite a lot of features (Scatter and Line plots, Bar Plots, Histograms, Financial Plots, Pie Chards, …)

Core Animation – Marcus Zarra

The last session of today was a session by Marcus Zarra on Core Animation. Core Animation can actually be use to do pretty much anything including state changes and transitions but also particle effects.
Marcus showed us the basics of CABasicAnimation and CAKeyframeAnimation and showed us the core principles of both.

Socializing at the Bar and Dinner

The great thing about NSConference is that you have plenty of time in between sessions to meet the other attendees and have a chat with them. That way you had the ability to meet people, share ideas and even code or even solve a problem using some help from others. During those breaks I’ve seen quite a lot of people show their ideas, iPhone and Mac applications and even pieces of source code to each-other.

After our ‘session’ at the bar we went to the other room where a nice Dinner was prepared for us. Spencer and myself sat down at a table and were joined by Jonathan “Wolf” Rentzsch and Victoria Wang from the USA, Stephan Burlot from Switzerland, our new met fried Jakob Dam Jensen the “knae hoej kaerse” guy from Danmark and someone from Argentina (sadly forgot his name). Dinner was fabulous and we had some very interesting discussions. You would think all of those would be about geeky stuff, but we actually had some great discussions on politics and other things as well.

Closing Words

This was the first day of the actual conference and it was great. There was a good mixture of quite technical sessions and some less technical ones, from which I learned quite a few things. The great thing with NSConference though is that you don’t stop learning when the sessions are done, you just step outside of the room, have a drink at the bar, go get some food and keep learning from fellow attendees.

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.

Due to the success of last years NSConference2009, NSConference 2010 will even be bigger and better. This year the conference will take place from the 31st of January till the 3rd of February 2010 in Wokefield Park, Redding, Berkshire, UK. The conference itself is intended to be a community event. To ensure that everyone gets a chance to meet everyone else, it has intentionally be kept relatively small (although 200 places isn’t that small IMHO).

The conference starts of with a one day optional workshop. Attendees have the choice between ‘The World According to Gemmell’ by Matt Gemmell himself. The other option is ‘Concurrent Programming on Snow Leopard’ by Drew McCormack. Matt will give us his views and opinions on the life cycle of Mac application development, while Drew will concentrate on technologies such as NSOperation, Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL. It was a hard choice for me, but I choose to go with The Wold According to Gemmel.

The second an third day of the conference will include about 10 sessions and presentations from some of the worlds top Mac developers. Those sessions will primarily be aimed at intermediate to advanced Mac developers. Personally I’m still a novice when Mac development is concerned, but I’m absolutely positive I will pick up quite a few interesting things there.

The list of confirmed speakers is already impressive and apparently they still need to add some names to the list. Some of the names include :

• Aaron Hillegass : author of the “Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X” book, which I would recommend to everyone starting out with Cocoa / Objective-C
• Matt Legend Gemmel ; yes the guys who gave is the MGTwitterEngine and quite a few other goodies
• Andy Finnel : specialized in Mac and iPhone development and a Core Image enthousiast
• Drew McCormack : Board member and regular contributor on MacResearch.org
• Marcus Zarra : co-author of “Cocoa is my Girlfriend”
• Mike Lee : Cofounder of Tapulous, whose titles include Tap Tap Revenge and Twinkle
• …

And if 3 days isn’t enough, this year they have even added a fourth day, specially targeted at iPhone Developers. If iPhone development is your thing, then you’ll surely find something interesting in one of the 5 sessions from some of the worlds top iPhone developers.

Well, that was more than enough to get me convinced (and I noticed someone else from the CocoaHeads Belgium community already booked his tickets as well). If anyone from our community is interested in going as well, hurry up and book your tickets, and let us know here if you’re going. It would be great if we could have a small meet-up there as well

More information of course can be found on the NSConference 2010 website.