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360 MacDev day two: a recap of the Denver nerd-fest
Saturday was the second and last day of 360 MacDev in Denver, and it was full of excellent topics from the world of Mac development. Although I was unable to stay for the last three speakers (my apologies, guys!), the morning and lunch sessions were very useful and educational. To start off the festivities were Dave Wiskus of Double Encore (the sharp-dressed man standing next to the conference poster with legs at right) and Kyle Richter of Dragon Forged Software with a talk titled "iOS: the Gateway Drug." Wiskus and Richter were thinking of possible Mac-related papers for the conference a while back when they got the idea of taking one of the Double Encore "Massively Overrated" iOS apps -- KeyGrinder (free) -- and porting it to Mac OS X and the Mac App Store. TUAW reviewed KeyGrinder earlier this year. KeyGrinder is a small app -- you get into the app, get a password hash, and then pop back out. The challenge was to turn this into something usable in OS X, so they decided to set the app up with a menu bar icon as a primary user interface element. Users would be able to drag a URL to that icon, then have the app open up with the URL pre-populated and password hash visible. Their usual modus operandi is to draw out ideas for the UI on paper, create a wireframe, then make a mockup and finally look at style guides for additional tweaks.
360iDev: Mike Lee on changing the world with engineering
Former Delicious Monster and Tapulous developer Mike Lee (who now works for the mothership at Apple) took the stage to start off the last day of 360iDev in San Jose. He gave a wildly rambling speech about what it means to be an engineer and why programmers should not only make the best programs they can, but actually commit to changing the world for the better. Lee's speech was probably the most broad, and least technical, of the whole conference. While other speakers had covered using Core Data in apps or how to make the most money on the App Store, Lee spoke about his work with the Terrorist Watch List, the beauty and insanity of Van Gogh's Starry Night, and why he has to convince himself that he is really as cool as everyone says. As you can probably tell already, it was a heck of a thing to see. About halfway through the speech, summarized as best it can be below, Lee stopped flipping slides and just talked candidly and from the heart about his apps, his work, and his life. Read on for more.
Yojimbo: Made possible by Tiger
The Apple Developer Connection spoke with the folks at Bare Bones about Yojimbo, their application for organizing just about everything, and how Apple technologies made it possible. Core Data, Sync Services, and Cocoa created the perfect storm, in the form of Tiger, that combined to form Yojimbo, after some work in Xcode and Interface Builder that is.An interesting article about a very clever app.
Core Data video tutorial
You want to develop an OS X app with the latest and great technology in Tiger, but you don't know where to start. Story of my life, that is. However, we are both in luck because Jonathan 'Wolf' Rentzsch has created a video tutorial all about using XCode and Core Data. You can find the proper tutorial here on the Apple Developer Connection website, and a little behind the scenes info at Wolf's blog. If you don't know what Core Data is, and you don't care, I would skip this one.
