One day of workshops + a two days conference for Mac developers in Hatfield, near London, UK. The conference is organized by the excellent Mac Developer Network, publisher of Late Night Cocoa, Mac Developer Round Table and other popular shows. More information at the conference web site.
Here is the conference program:
Sessions
Designing and Developing Custom Cocoa Controls – Matt Gemmell
Take a look at any of the most popular Mac applications and it quickly becomes clear that standard UI controls no longer suffice. Custom user interface is the order of the day, but consistency and intuitive interaction have never been more important – and that principle applies both to what the user sees, and to the code which makes it work. In this session, Matt Gemmell discusses how to create your own controls while maintaining consistency and usability, for both the user and other developers who may use your code.
Pimp My App – Mike Lee
In a global software economy, it’s foolish for Europeans to compete on price. Someone who lives in a smaller economy than yours can always undercut you. Instead, you must compete on merit. You need to make your application better than any free knockoff. You have to sweat the details and add value to your application. You need to pimp your app.
We’ll start at Pimp 101, and learn about the second 80%, the work that begins when you think you’re done. We’ll talk about the idea of a hook, the thing that makes people want to talk about your app with their friends — and other facets of polishing an application, such as performance, stability, and beauty. We’ll talk about the importance of professional artists.
Then we’ll delve into human interaction, and the subtle art of empathy. We’ll talk about your feature list, and how discipline in application design can save you time and make you money. We’ll talk about rule #1: don’t annoy the user, and some common mistakes. Finally, we’ll apply all we’ve learned by pimping an existing app.
Foundations of Objective-C – Andre Pang
One reason for Mac OS X’s success is Objective-C, combining the dynamism of a scripting language with the performance of a compiled language. However, how does Objective-C work its magic and what principles is it based upon? In this session, we explore the inner workings of the Objective-C runtime, and see how a little knowledge about programming language foundations–such as lambda calculus and type theory–can go a long way to tackling difficult topics in Cocoa such as error handling and concurrency. We’ll cover a broad range of areas such as garbage collection, blocks, and data structure design, with a focus on practical tips and techniques that can immediately improve your own code’s quality and maintainability.
New Cocoa Programming Superpowers – Philippe Mougin
In some ways, we are still in infancy when it comes to harvest the enormous amount of power brought by dynamic object systems and frameworks such as Objective-C/Cocoa. Fortunately, new tools and technologies can help us. In this session, Philippe will get you up to speed with F-Script 2.0, a set of open source tools that complement Xcode and Interface Builder. You will learn how to use them, discover how they can bring Cocoa development productivity and fun to new highs, and acquire new programming superpowers not seen before on any other platform!
Integrating with Apple’s Photography Applications and APIs – Fraser Speirs
Learn how to integrate your service or application with Apple’s photography applications iPhoto and Aperture. If your application consumes images, you’ll want to know how to get the most out of the Apple photography ecosystem. In this session, Fraser Speirs will cover the SDKs for iPhoto and Aperture and touch on some of the major System APIs you’ll want to be aware of when dealing with photographs on Mac OS X.
Building a secure Cocoa application – Graham Lee
Mac OS X has a reputation for being a secure operating platform, and many of its security features are available for third-party developers to use in their own application. But there’s also a more fundamental aspect to security – understanding how your software will be used and anticipating how it may be misused. In this session Graham Lee will describe techniques for designing secure applications, then take a tour through the OS X security capabilities developers can use to turn the security dial all the way to 11.
Spotlight and QuickLook vs. Core Data – Marcus Zarra
Marcus will walk through how to integrate a Core Data based application with both Spotlight and QuickLook. Add these important, and usually overlooked features, into your application to add that additional polish that we all expect from OS X applications. In this session we will discuss how these features work and how to get them to work with Core Data in a performance aware way.
Building Applications with Core Animation – Bill Dudney
Core Animation is one of those technologies that is too easy to over hype. It does so many cool things that it is hard to not be overly enthusiastic about what you can do with it. Well Core Animation is not magic but it does make doing several things with your user interface much easier. In this session we are going to see what Core Animation is and how you can use it in your UI. In addition to learning about doing animations with Core Animation we will also learn how to use Core Animation to simplify your drawing and maximize the performance of your application. Come to this session and learn how to build applications that take advantage of this really exciting technology
What a Performance – Drew McCormack
Take a journey through the Mac performance cosmos, with stopovers in exotic destinations like Xgrid Foundation, NSOperation, and Grand Central Dispatch. Never observed an XGActionMonitor in full flight, or got your NSOperation priorities right? Join us for this once in a lifetime opportunity. We’ll look at the emerging trends, and common threads that bind all levels of the performance equation. How are the techniques used in High-Performance Computing similar to those used in modern Cocoa apps running on the latest multi-core laptops? Don’t know, but come along and we’ll see if we can figure it out. This talk will cover everything, from the death of multi-threading, to Snow Leopard niceties like blocks in C and OpenCL. Not to be missed.
Conference Workshops
iPhone Development – Bill Dudney
If your an experienced Mac Developer looking to write your first iPhone application Bill will spend a day helping you get up to speed.
The iPhone is on a tear. With the millions and millions of iPhones sold the market is almost too big to ignore especially for experienced Mac developers. In this workshop you will be brought up to speed on what is different with iPhone development. While Cocoa Touch is very much like App Kit there are differences. This workshop will pull you up the learning curve fast. Here is a list of the topics we will cover;
- View Controllers (what they are how they work etc)
- Table Views (how to use them, esp how to add custom cells)
- Drawing (how its diff on the iphone, no lockFocus backing store is always a layer etc)
- Multi Touch Event Handling (how to do pinch/zoom)
- Accelerometer/Location (cool tech that is only on the phone)
- Photos and Address Book (integration with personal data)
User Interfaces – Mike Lee
This workshop will spend the day looking at how decisions should be made when designing user interfaces.
Core Data – Marcus Zarra
This workshop will spend the day looking at practical issues of using Core Data in your applications.
Core Data for Cocoa Developers
A very brief introduction into Core Data followed up by best practices for configuring both the Core Data stack and Xcode to make the project as maintainable as possible. Also known as “Pimpin Apple’s Code”. Followed by Q&A.
Model Design
How to get the most performance out of your data model, how to choose the best persistent store for your data storage and access needs. Tips include how to pre-populate data into your Core Data persistent store and add data in later versions of the application simply and easily. Followed by Q&A.
Data Model Versioning and Migration
How to make your persistent store upgrades smooth for you as the developer and for your users. Tips and tricks to help reduce the headaches of data migration and how to avoid a Arithmetic progression of NSMappingModels. Followed by Q&A.
Evening Agenda
If you are staying for the evening activities you will get to attend
The Conference Dinner
A great conference dinner where developers can spend the evening talking geek stuff with nobody complaining.
The Mac Developer Roundtable “LIVE”
There will be a late after hours recording of The Mac Developer Roundtable “LIVE”.
