I wanted to send out a quick reminder that the next CocoaHeads meeting is tomorrow night (6/14). The agenda for tomorrow night is pretty loose, but the general topic of discussion will be XCode and debugging tips. Stop by the CocoaHeads site for more information and directions.
I hope to see you there!
-Bob
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I wanted to see if Cuil was indexing my site correctly so I did a search for my name. Clearly, this is my new favorite search engine.
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Today the Wordpress team released the first version of their native iPhone application! I’m using it right now and am pretty impressed. The setup was a piece of cake and the editing interface is clean and simple. It provides you with the basic functionality you need to write posts, including nicely-integrated image support.
Overall, I think this looks like a great tool for mobile blogging. Kudos to the Wordpress team!
- blogged from my iPhone
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The presentation and sample code from last week’s Objective-C talk have been posted. Stop by the CocoaHeads site if you’d like to download the materials.
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We had another good CocoaHeads meeting tonight. I gave a talk on Objective-C 2.0 and we had a lot of good conversation on the subject. It was nice to have the Cocoa veterans give us some insight into the various details of the language. I hope everyone found the discussion useful.
As we don’t have a specific topic defined for next month, the plan is to have a “How do I do X?” meeting where we can bring in specific questions (and hopefully solutions) and discuss them as a group. It appeared that everyone was onboard with this idea and should make for some interesting discussion. If you have some specific topics you’d like to address, post them on our new forums to give the group a heads up.
I’m sorry for the meeting time mixup and apologize to those who arrived early. Mea culpa. I’ll be sure to triple check the entries on the main CocoaHeads site to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Have a happy iPhone day!
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I wanted to send out a quick reminder that the next CocoaHeads meeting is this Thursday (7/10) at 6pm where I’ll be leading a discussion on Objective-C. I had a great time at the first meeting and look forward to seeing everyone again this month.
I’m also happy to report the community site is up and running! I’d like to say thanks to Vlad and Mike for all their efforts in getting this going. We now have a blog, calendar, and forums at our disposal so head on over to http://www.cocoaheadsmn.org/ for a big cup of Cocoa-y goodness.
I’ll see you this Thursday!
-Bob
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I would really like to thank all of you who attended the inaugural CocoaHeads meeting last Thursday. I couldn’t have been happier with the turnout and participation from everyone. It was also nice to finally meet many of you with whom I’ve traded emails over the past couple of months.
We had a great mix of people at the first meeting ranging from experienced Cocoa, NeXT, and Mac OS developers to those experienced with other languages/platforms, but just starting out with Cocoa and CocoaTouch, to those just starting their journey into software development. This should make for a very interesting group!
Andy Atkinson started polling at the end of the meeting for what technical topics people would like to see at upcoming meetings. I think the final ones we settled on were:
Some additional ones I would personally like to see covered (even if I’m the one covering them) are overviews of Core Data and Core Animation.
Let me know if there are any others that I missed and should be tracking.
John Shields wrote up a nice summary of his thoughts on the meeting that you should check out.
I’d like to thank Bill Heyman and Damon Allison for showing us some very cool demos of what they are doing over at CodeMorphic. Good luck guys and keep ‘em coming! If anyone else would be interested in demoing their products or projects, just let me know and I’ll find you a slot.
I’d also like to thank everyone at Synergy Information Services. Their facilities are great and they also have a larger room available should we need it. We all also greatly appreciated the pizza and soda!
Vlad will be posting the Getting Started with Cocoa presentation and sample code to the website. Keep an eye out at Synergy’s CocoaHeads Page over the next few days if you’d like to download that content.
BTW, if you are interested in understanding the history of Cocoa and Mac OS X, I’d recommend checking out David Shaw’s website. He has a wealth of information on NeXT, Rhapsody, and Apple that many of you would find very interesting. Great job David!
As I mentioned the other night I’ll be giving a presentation on Object-C 2.0 at the July meeting. This will be a much more detailed look at ObjC which will allow us to dig into its core syntax and features.
I hope to see you all again at the next CocoaHeads meeting on 7/10 @ 6pm.
-Thanks,
Bob
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I just wanted to send out a reminder that the first CocoaHeads of Minnesota meeting will be this Thursday (6/12) at 6pm. It’s at the offices of Synergy Information Services in Bloomington. For more information and directions check out the CocoaHeads page at their site.
At the first meeting I’ll be giving a presentation entitled “Getting Started with Cocoa” where I’ll give a high-level overview of the tools and basic techniques you’ll need to know when writing Cocoa applications. It looks like I may also be giving a presentation on Objective-C 2.0 at the July meeting. I’ve had a number of people express interest in giving future presentations, but have yet to pin down specific dates. Please let me know if you’d like to give a talk or product/project demo and I’ll get you added to the calendar.
I’m really looking forward to meeting all of you on Thursday!
-Bob
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Over the weekend, I finished reading the 3rd edition of Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X by Aaron Hillegass. The previous edition had long been considered the best introduction to the topic, but it had grown rather out of date given the major changes introduced in the Leopard release of OS X. Thankfully, the 3rd edition has been completely revised to reflect the current state of Mac OS X development.
Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X is an introductory guide to programming on the Mac platform. It provides broad coverage of the core Mac programming concepts you’ll need to write real world applications, but is not intended to be a definitive reference on the subject. Aaron’s presentation of the material is excellent and the code examples really help explain the concepts being covered.
The organization of the book has changed considerably since the last release. Several less-relevant and irrelevant chapters have been dropped and replaced with chapters covering Core Data, Core Animation, web services, and garbage collection. Additionally, the existing content and examples have been significantly revised giving this release the feel of a whole new book.
I would highly recommend this title to anyone interested in Mac development. Even if you own the previous edition, I think you’ll find the new and revised content well worth the price.
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I’d like to officially announce that CocoaHeads of Minnesota is on! My friends at Synergy Information Services have graciously offered to host the meetings at their offices in Bloomington, MN. Our regular meeting schedule will be the second Thursday of the month at 6:00pm. We’ll be kicking things off on June 12th at 6:00pm!
As it’s likely many attendees will be new to Cocoa development, I will be giving a presentation entitled “Getting Started with Cocoa” which will provide an overview of the frameworks, tools, and techniques you’ll need to get started writing Cocoa applications. Beyond the presentation I’m looking forward to meeting everyone and getting your feedback on where we’d like to go as a group.
The official notice will be available on the main CocoaHeads site shortly and we’ll have our local website up and running this week. CocoaHeadsMN.org will be your primary destination if you’re a CocoaHeads of Minnesota member.
Watch this site for more updates this week!
-Bob