| 360|iDev conference was a blast! |
| Tue, 10 Mar 2009 03:30 PM |
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Last week Mike and I went to the 360|iDev conference in San Jose, which was great: got to meet many fellow iPhone developers and listen to some very interesting presentations. Sessions that stood out, in my mind:Julio Barros (@juliobarros) talked about differences between iPhone and Android platforms. He is a freelance developer who started the New York iPhone developer meetup, which happens roughly every month and is a great chance to meet other iPhone developers from around the tri-state area. His presentation generated many questions from the audience and quickly turned into a very lively discussion. Android platform is definitely worth keeping an eye on. Owen Goss (@owengoss) did a great presentation that covered things that he learned while creating an iPhone game called Dapple. Owen came to develop for iPhone after years of working in the game industry and much of his talk was focused on best practices and advice that any game developer, beginner or not, would do well to heed. Things that stood out for me: prototype your game early and often - it can save you much time, money and frustration. Another point that I wasn't aware of because we never had to deal with things like this before: licensing a font for your game can cost you thousands (or even millions) of dollars. Crazy. Azeem Ansar (@zeemer) shared some stats that his company (Pinch Media) was able to extract from all the data that they collected as part of their iPhone app analytics-gathering framework. An online version of that presentation is available on their web site (http://www.pinchmedia.com/appstore-secrets/). Insights that I found interesting: 1) Only a small percentage of free apps make money on advertising, and 2) Ranking is all about the number of downloads in a rolling window of roughly 24 hours - nowadays, you need more than 20,000+ downloads a day to get into the Top 25 free apps listing. Christopher Hughes (@chews), expressing views of his own and not of his employer AT&T, did a fine job convincing almost everybody in the room that it was a good idea to jailbreak (but not unlock) their iPhones and at least glance at all those features that Apple isn't exposing via the official SDK. We had the pleasure of hanging out with Chris before the session - he is a fascinating guy that seems to be living the dream, giving away all of the software that he creates, yet making a good living by working for the likes of Google and AT&T. Highlights of the session: 1) Chris was the first person to jailbreak the phone and upload a custom ringtone to it - it took roughly a month to do so. 2) Chris introduced Jay Freeman, who was present in the room - apparently Jay doesn't own a Mac and compiles all of his iPhone apps on the iPhone itself. Sean Christmann (@seanalltogether) from EffectiveUI talked about using Quartz 2D, with tons of code samples, which are available on his blog. The session was very informative, with Sean doing a great job demo-ing all of his code. The highlight of the presentation for me was an example of creating the "magnifying glass effect that Apple uses inside textfields on the iPhone, but in a more generic way so anything on the screen could be magnified" (also described on his blog). Jay Freeman (@saurik) is the guy behind Cydia, a graphical front-end for Debian's "apt" that allows for easy distribution of legitimate but not-Apple-approved apps on jailbroken iPhones and iPod Touches. Jay has also written other cool apps such as Cycoder (which allows you to use iPhone as a camcoder) and Veency (a VNC server for iPhone). In his session, he talked about launching an alternative app store built on top of Cydia and allowing developers to easily sell such apps there. It was an interesting glimpse into a world of un-official iPhone development and the people behind it. Highlight: more than 2 million iPhones and iPod Touches use Cydia (which means that there are at least that many jailbroken devices out there). My own talk about multiplayer iPhone games went well (or so they tell me). At the very least, people asked questions, which is encouraging. Regrets:
What about East Coast?One not so great thing about the conference: it's a long haul for those who live on the East Coast (On the other hand, who am I to complain, given that Chuck Smith (@ChuckSmith) flew in all the way from Berlin!). John Wilker (@jwilker) and Tom Ortega (@LordBron) (two great guys that organized the whole thing) mentioned alternating sides of the Mississippi every once in a while, so hopefully it'll be a bit closer next time. Can't recommend this event enough, very glad that we got to go there. If you get a chance to attend one of these in the future - DO IT! -- Peter Bakhyryev |
