Hi everyone, For those that attended the iPhone Tech Talk yesterday in San Jose, California, just wanted to see your thoughts/insight on the overall event and the individual sessions, as well as provide a quick summary for those unable to attend. Since there were three different discussion topics being covered at any given time, the following is based only on the sessions that I attended. Also, all this information is publicly available, on the web and in the Apple Developer Portal in particular. Overall, I thought it was a pretty well-organized event and covered some interesting/useful information, and was worth attending. The sessions varied in terms of how technical they got, but they tended towards the more technical/coding side, which is how Apple described the event. The kickoff presentation started off with a video that apparently was also shown at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference 2009, and covered how varied iPhone developers are and how iPhone apps are being used across different industries (like medicine, construction, consumer goods, etc.). Then, it covered the growth and development of the user base (50M as of September '09), developers and the iPhone OS SDK. Then, a few apps were singled out as examples of good apps - the takeaways were that successful apps 1) use the latest technologies, 2) go the extra mile and 3) keep things fresh. After that, I attended two sessions on Effective iPhone App Development, which covered considerations related to data persistence, design decisions, memory management and application lifecycle. The takeaways are to know the system, magage data carefully, conserve memory, maintain the user experience and use the available tools to test your app. Next, I attended the session on Integrating Web Content into iPhone Apps. This was an informative session, but appeared to cover more than what the title suggested. For example, in this session, the most useful thing was to be reminded about using the built-in capabilities of the code to save memory (e.g., instead of having a separate image for each button, you can use the built-in capabilities to generate a button and manipulate the image with shadowing, reflections, etc.). Then, I attended a session on using Location/Maps. The takeaway was to choose the right degree of accuracy (e.g., GPS > Wifi Network > cell towers), and weighing with time to fetch/power consumption considerations. The last session I attended was the Networking session. For me, the most useful portion had to do with knowing the limitations of the network and peer-to-peer communications, in particular, reachability, bandwidth, latency and security. Basically, anticipate delays and keep the user experience running as smoothly as possible. After that, there was a wine/cheese reception, where it was nice to meet some of the presenters and some fellow developers. One final thing that was useful is the Technical Q&A session Apple had during the entire day. If there are some sessions that don't appear as useful to you, it's a nice option to go into the Technical Q&A room, bring your code and ask some Apple representatives regarding issues/questions about your app/code. Also, they had a sign-up sheet for UI Design Review at the Technical Q&A session. I thought it would have been really great to have an Apple rep review our apps for UI design, but, as you can imagine, the sign-up sheet for that got filled up really quickly, so time ran out at the end of the day. Not sure if they'll have this in other locations as well, but make sure you keep an eye out and sign-up as soon as you can! Any other thoughts/insights/notes from those that attended the event (or, in the future, from those that attend at other locations)? -Scott
i attended the iPhone Tech Talk in Stockholm last year - its a pity they didn't do it again in Stockholm this year; some of the topics would have been interesting to see. does anyone know if they are mirroring the topic presentations anywhere?
The topic presentations are here (you can click by region): http://developer.apple.com/events/iphone/techtalks/ Also, I heard that they hosted some lectures online last year. Not sure if they are doing the same this year, since they didn't mention yesterday.
Whoops. =) Someone did ask if they would make the slides publicly available in one of the sessions yesterday, and the presenter said he'd check on that. I'll email the presenter to follow-up, since I didn't hear what they decided by the end of the day.
I went to the Seattle tech talk today. It was just OK. There was food, drinks, a free tshirt, etc, and that was all nice, but I really felt like the talks were lacking. To elaborate, I felt like they didn't go nearly advanced enough. Almost everything they mentioned at the rooms I went to were things I already knew. I was hoping to have some rabbits pulled out of hats, with cool expert techniques and tricks, but there really wasn't anything like that. I would say that if you spent an hour in the SDK documentation you could probably learn what you would in the hour presentation on most stuff. I would say each session gave me 7 minutes of information I may have not known out of 60 minutes total, and that was with me picking sessions that I was hoping to learn from! Pretty bad ratio. Also, the "kick off" meeting was a bunch of marketing fluff already shown at WWDC. Waste of my first hour. I was also really surprised by how many corporate-looking people were there considering the "garage" App Store start-ups you always here about. Lots with their MacBooks, working away, in their turtle necks and button ups, bluetooth in ears, jotting down EVERY word on EVERY slide without actually paying any attention. Some even on their Dell laptops with Windows 7 and Outlook open... ha! I kinda chuckled to myself simply because I used to be in that world (somewhat) and I feel free without it now. I won't be going to the next one. Just my two cents. Ethan
some of these events are to get people more interested in the platform - so; they cannot go deep into harder topics. i felt the same back in 2008 when they had the tech event in stockholm.. as one of the more senior developers there - i was able to provide a lot more info than gain from the event. i would love to attend another event - even if it is just for the marketing side of things.
