Making the Most Of Your (iOS) Dev Conference Experience

Next weekend 360iDev starts, and last weekend was the first CocoaConf of the fall 2014 season. I’ve seen on twitter at least one request for advice from a first-time attendee. I had more to say than I could fit into a tweet, so I thought I’d respond here.

Core Theme: It’s All About the People

There’s a lot going on at conferences, but the most important thing to remember is that you have access to people at conferences that exists no other place. Making the most of your experience (and time and money) is all about making the most of your contact with the people around you.

My Top 5 factors for iOS Contracting Success

About a year ago now, I was contemplating leaving my day job and becoming an indie* iOS developer. My last day working in a cube farm was June 30th, 2011. Now, as I pack to leave for WWDC in the morning, it occurs to me how much my life has changed since I made that decision.

When examining my finances in preparation for this trip, I determined that in my first year as an indie I’ve made within $1000 of the amount of money I made in salary my last year as an employee, while spending more time with my family and enjoying my work so much more. Personally, I consider that to be a success.

Looking back, I can think of 5 things that I did that I think contributed most to that success, and I wanted to take this opportunity to share them with you all.

360iDev Conference Notes, or How I Spent my September Vacation

This Thursday, I got back home after four days at 360iDev 2011 in Denver. I went last year, which was easy for me because it was in Austin where I live. I was concerned about the extra time and extra money it was going to take to go this year, since it was in Denver. Now that I’m back, I’m so glad I went. I have no hesitation about recommending it to other people, so that’s what I’m about to do.

360iDev Impressions - Day 0

The first class I took was Kendall Gelner’s Advanced Debugging class. It was really, really good. I learned about using the Mac “User Interface” instrument to record and play back simulator events for debugging and how to create custom instruments with DTrace. It was a well organized, very useful talk. Sunday afternoon I took Saul Mora’s Unit Testing that Doesn’t Suck class. It didn’t go as well. The class was predicated on the attendees having GHUnit and MacRuby, and the hotel WiFi completely failed under the load (and not for the last time during the conference).

360iDev Impressions - Day 1

Monday morning, David Whatley did a great keynote that was based on this video. He talked about what happened at his company when he instituted a Results Only Work Environment. It was very interesting, and ended with this. Which is the coolest way to end a keynote, ever. I started with Tom Frauenhofer’s Cocos2D class, which is probably the class in which I learned the most the whole conference, but that’s largely because I had never touched cocos2d before, so I had a lot to learn.

360iDev Impressions - Day 2

Tuesday opened with a informative panel that covered a bunch of issues including the upcoming Mac App Store, and Android vs. iPhone development. Then on to Tim Burks’ Get Your Head in the Clouds talk. I learned about a lot of really cool tools I hadn’t dealt with, especially ASIHTTPRequest, which I think I will find a lot of uses for. Tim was very prepared, but it was at times a difficult talk, as he got questions ranging from subtle differences between Heroku and AppEngine to “What is this Amazon S3 you keep mentioning?

360iDev Impressions - Day 3

Day 3 started an hour later (to give us time to recover from the party or the Game Jam or (for some crazed souls) both). We went through a review of the people that wanted to present their apps. Lots of very impressive accomplishments for such a short time. Next, I went to Brandon Alexander’s talk on Interface Builder. It was a rough talk (like Time Burk’s the previous day) because there were obviously some Interface Builder experts int he audience, as well as some people who don’t seem to have ever used it before.

360iDev Impressions - Overview

I got back last night from the latest 360iDev conference (my first time to attend). I had a great time and learned a lot, but most importantly, it provided a lot of motivation I really needed to keep working on my apps. I went through my notes to reinforce my memory while it’s reasonably fresh, so I figured I might as well post my notes. Pre-conference class notes start here, and continue to Monday, Tuesday and Yesterday.

Color Mixing with Multitouch

OK, It’s more fun and more challenging now, although I’m not sure anyone would buy it, even if I polished it. It was way too easy, so I took a cue from @ OwenGoss’s Dapple and put in a color mixing element. So now there are 6 colors of spaceships and 6 colors of shields but still only 3 buttons: So if you want to block the green aliens, you have to hit the Blue and Yellow buttons at the same time while the green spacecraft enters the atmosphere.

It's a Game! (Not sure if it's any fun, yet, though)

Movie code starts ! Movie code ends ! So it actually kind of looks like a game now. I need scoring, I guess, and some consequences, but the idea is there. From The List: Get a cocos2d hello world screen showing the big blue ball royalty-free NASA supplied image Get a quick sprite to be the bad guy on the screen. Cover the world in an opaque block when screen is touched and restore it when touches end

My plan for world (and self) deprecation

While I’m waiting of my wife and 4 year old to meet me for dinner, thought I’d jot down a quick list (it doesn’t count as starting until I open XCode, right)? Get a cocos2d hello world screen showing the big blue ball royalty-free NASA supplied image Get a quick sprite to be the bad guy on the screen. Cover the world in an opaque block when screen is touched and restore it when touches end

Quick concept art

Threw this together in DrawIt (scaled down to save bandwidth):

Status Update: Primary-Colored World

Movie code starts ! Movie code ends ! Really remedial, but something is actually happening. Only took 4 and a half hours to get colors to show up. But, as for my list: Get a cocos2d hello world screen showing the big blue ball royalty-free NASA supplied image Get a quick sprite to be the bad guy on the screen. Cover the world in an opaque block when screen is touched and restore it when touches end

Talking to Myself

I’m going to keep writing updates to RapidWeaver locally - Although I have no idea when I’ll have enough bandwidth to actually publish them. Kinda takes the fun out of it. In any case, I have the ship moving (until it hits the bottom of the screen). It’s at least looking more like a game now. Next up: Conveyor Belt

The Sky is falling!

Movie code starts ! Movie code ends ! Or at least the aliens are. Get a cocos2d hello world screen showing the big blue ball royalty-free NASA supplied image Get a quick sprite to be the bad guy on the screen. Cover the world in an opaque block when screen is touched and restore it when touches end Make the alien move. Make the alien able to collide with the block.

Confessions of an Inept Game Designer: 360iDev Game Jam Post 1

I’ve written one game my entire life, and I think I was 11 at the time, and it involved PRINT@ statements on the TRS-80 Model 1, so I don’t exactly consider myself a game designer. That said, I’m attending the 360iDev conference, and they have an all-night game-design session they call the Game Jam, and it sounds like too educational an opportunity to pass up. And if I’m going to remember much after staying up all night, I’m going to have to write it down, and I figure there are worse places than my blog, so here goes: