No meeting.
Cheers,
John
No meeting. Rescheduled due to storm.
Cheers,
John
"We had a good turnout & very energetic meeting this morning, inspite of the fact that several candidate presenters couldn't make it.
I did "J. Random App" - which is an app intended not for distribution but as a platform for testing out code, Rich Morby did \"MoodRing\" -- an experimental piece with a subtle yet nuanced combination of textural & visual elements, and Tim Cochrane & Gene Whitaker presented theirCoaster Counters App. Coasters are roller coasters & their app lets you see all the coasters on the planet, track your own rides, see what coasters are near you (using the Geo features on the iPhone), rate coasters, & upload photos of favorite coasters. Well built app! Very focused on their target user group (Tim & Gene are both, as you might imagine, coaster lovers). I'm not a coaster lover (it's not me, it's mytympanic canal, vestibular canal, and middle canal which are objecting) but I just bought to check out the design, which is very clean.
Chris Heimark's son showed briefly an electrical engineer's app he is working on: a quick tool to help EEs look up stuff they need; maybe he will get a chance to present at future meeting. Terry has in interesting database web site which I going to present on her behalf until we ran out of time (sorry Terry!). We have enough that we might do round 2 of "my very first iPhone App" in May.
Chris & Louis were extremely helpful in comments; Louis's 5 years at Apple & 10 years programming on OSX have given him a wealth of insights. When I did my presentation on J. Random App, Louis had some very helpful comments to make about how to read files in realtime, the exact sequence of steps used to load a view, how touches are read, & the like. Thanks!
Eventually the meeting broke up tho Deivy & Louis were still sorting out some problems with the education curriculum in this country (especially for math) when I had to go.
I brought a few books that I have found helpful:
Maher -- iPhone SDK3
Mark & Lalande - Beginning iPhone
Stark -- Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, & Javascript
Hillegass -- Cocoa Programming
Sadun -- iPhone Developer's Cookbook
Louis warned against this last: a lot of the examples use unsupported features or are otherwise gnarly: there are some interesting algorithms but trust nothing. In fact, I spent much of yesterday trying to get one of Sadun's examples to work, without success. Hmmmhh.
Cheers,
John
We will hear our own Michael Pigg on: "Building a Mesh Networked Wireless Thermometer"
I would like to be able to monitor the temperature of key locations throughout my house to help balance the HVAC system. I will present a design for a monitoring system using sensors that communicate over a wireless mesh network. This presentation will delve into the hardware and software used in this system and will conclude with a demo of the working system.
-- Michael Pigg
This is your chance to learn a bit of Java in a very practical context and, for the power mad, a chance to learn how to control your house. It is about time your house learned who is master!
NOTE: We are using a new venue, the Bear Rock Cafe in King of Prussia:
Bear Rock Cafe
192 West Dekalb Pike
King of Prussia, PA 19406-2327
(610) 265-6505
Cheers,
John
Great meeting this last time, on May Day! We had three presenters & lots & lots of free form discussion!
Presenters:
Terry Wilson & her 'Build Your Own Database', a Web based App that lets users add their own databases & fields. This is very much a work in progress, with a lot of interesting ideas. It kicked off a lot of good discussion.
Kevin Lee & a Beer Finder iPhone App that he and his fellowCOCOAHEADSare building, in time for the Beer Fest. This is an app meant to help people going to thePhiladelphia Craft Beer Festivalfind beer. Clearly the basic user interface requirement is really easy to use controls! And it has a very hard deadline. We had a lot of fun with the design of Kevin et al's App. He'd gotten some good feedback from an Expo earlier (what was the name of the Expo you presented at, Kevin?). We talked about ways to simplify the interface & so on. Note COCOAHEADS is meeting this comingThursday at 7pm at Indy Hall.They'll be discussing the iPhone 4. I hope to be there myself.
Tim Cochrane & Gene Whitaker of Coaster Counter fame batting cleanup withTeleprompt+, a teleprompter application for the iPad. This is now up on the App Store & has everything I can imagine you might want in a teleprompter application, speed controls, download of google docs to supply the script (or you can use email), remote control via iPhone!, mirror writing for use as input to a camera, ... Just wow!
Interesting we had a Web App, an iPhone App, and an iPad app. Quite a variety!
Thanks to our participants, who all did a great job!
NOTE: We are using a new venue, the Bear Rock Cafe in King of Prussia:
Bear Rock Cafe
192 West Dekalb Pike
King of Prussia, PA 19406-2327
(610) 265-6505
Cheers,
John
We will hear our own Chris Heimark on: "Objective C"
Chris has a lot of experience developing iPhone apps in Objective C & is skilled speaker: this will be an excellent chance to get started with Objective C and/or pick up some pointers! He's been working hard getting some good slides up for this: it's going to be good!
NOTE: We are using a new venue, the Bear Rock Cafe in King of Prussia:
Bear Rock Cafe
192 West Dekalb Pike
King of Prussia, PA 19406-2327
(610) 265-6505
Cheers,
John
No meeting. Enjoy your holiday!
Cheers,
John
Code Reuse: We did a round-table on code reuse:
Everyone brought their your war-stories of reusing their own & others code, when is this good? whatare the risks? and what do we mean by code reuse, exactly?
This was fun & very useful: we've all had a lot of experience with code reuse; with the web & the proliferation of coding sites it is getting easier & easier to finduseful snippets of code.
NOTE: We are using a new venue, the Bear Rock Cafe in King of Prussia:
Bear Rock Cafe
192 West Dekalb Pike
King of Prussia, PA 19406-2327
(610) 265-6505
Cheers,
John
Our own Dick Ladson discussed: How to \"Mind Your Own Business: how to start one\".
Dick has a lot of experience in academia, the military, & in business, & has started several of his own. His slides are a lot of fun. And he has some useful pointers for dealing with the government.
Dick sees his slides as starting points for discussion, so the talk will be open ended. Many of us are independents or thinking of going independent, so have had to grapple with these issues. And if you have some insights to share about starting a business or keeping one going, come by!
NOTE: We are using a new venue, the Bear Rock Cafe in King of Prussia:
Bear Rock Cafe
192 West Dekalb Pike
King of Prussia, PA 19406-2327
(610) 265-6505
Cheers,
John
"I'd like to thank Louis Gerbarg for an extremely interesting talk at our last meeting, October 2nd!
We had an unusually large crowd, especially given it was a highly technical discussion. Louis is the middle of finishing off a Object Model for Distributed Data on the iPhone (& perhaps other architectures as well if I understood him correctly).
Louis's approach is to take advantage of the fact that many projects do not need to build dynamic queries, at least not in production, so that the levels of architecture needed to support dynamic queries can be bypassed, with very significant performance savings. He's build a general tool for doing this, and in a way that lets you handle cases where the mobile device is out of communication for significant periods of time, letting you update data locally & then sync when you can.
Many interesting technical issues came up in the discussion! And we discussed a lot of the strategic decisions you need to make in putting together a software project. Once you've taken the easy optimizations, everything is tradeoffs. It is just a question of making the right tradeoffs for your specific project.
He posted a working paper to the meeting but for contractual reasons he can't
release full details to the web till early November. We'll post to our web site then.
Thanks for a great job, Louis!
NOTE: We are using a new venue, the Bear Rock Cafe in King of Prussia:
Bear Rock Cafe
192 West Dekalb Pike
King of Prussia, PA 19406-2327
(610) 265-6505
Cheers,
John
Our own Fujita Kotaro will discuss: "Rapid Enterprise App Development and Deployment"
A look into iOS app development for the medical enterprise. Lessons learned on the frontline of a brand new mobile movement. Enjoy the gory details like "When ITMet iPad", "Kotaro Fujita VS the World", "Copy & Paste Coding", "Machete My License", "Code, Pray, Hate", "The Extendables", and "Love iPad Actually". More funthan seeing Piranha in 3D.
And now, with Real Projector!
NOTE: We are using a new venue, the Bear Rock Cafe in King of Prussia:
Bear Rock Cafe
192 West Dekalb Pike
King of Prussia, PA 19406-2327
(610) 265-6505
Cheers,
John
Our own Mike Zornek on "Supporting your mobile app with advertising"
Mike knows a lot about this, as he has been spending some time at "Learn By Doing" University. He told me he is going to make this an open-endedpresentation: some talking points, some talk, many questions, much valuable information, and -- knowing Mike -- a lot of entertainment! And now, with slides!
NOTE: We are using a new venue, the Bear Rock Cafe in King of Prussia:
Bear Rock Cafe
192 West Dekalb Pike
King of Prussia, PA 19406-2327
(610) 265-6505
Cheers,
John