Mellow Machines

The “iPhone and Android” session was presented by Julios Barros, who quickly became more of a moderator as the session changed into a lively and informative audience discussion. This post focuses on the session conversations rather than the slides. I’m going to refer to one particularly knowledgable/world-weary attendee as “Mr. Dude” because I forgot to ask his name when I thanked him afterwards for his comments. This was the only technical session where I didn’t have enough background (on Android) to follow in detail, and it was an iPhone-centric conference anyways, so take the notes with a grain of salt and let me know if anything needs correcting.

Kenji Hollis' neat trick.

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Here’s my first session recap from the 360iDev conference, starting with the keynote. The organizers said they would post the slides that came with our conference USB keys, so if a session already has slides, I’ll wait to post their links and focus instead on my notes about speaker’s comments and highlights from audience Q&As.

This post recaps Mike Lee’s keynote on the mac developer community as a resource. The opening keynote featured two other speakers not covered here: senior Ebay researcher on games with a purpose to enhance Ebay, and students from Worcester Polytechnic Institute on their sponsored game for Ebay. I’ll have a separate post about the WPI students’ awesome job filling in for the Unity3D presenter who didn’t show up, and Unity3D tips I learned from chatting with those students.

Edit: Thanks to Ben Clinkinbeard for the links to versionsapp.com and changesapp.com!
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Note: you can follow my tweets during the conference here.

Attended 360|iDev on a gut feeling…

I found out about 360|iDev only four days ago, and booked the flight+hotel without really knowing what to expect. This is the first conference I’ve paid money out of my own pocket to attend, since I used to speak regularly at Flash conferences. The organizers, speakers, attendees, and facilities (EBay) are making this event an invaluable opportunity for exchanging information. 360|iDev is worth much more than the $350 registration fee, but the organizers said they wanted to make the conference accessible given the current economic climate.

The vibe…

The conference has a pragmatic, down-to-earth, we’re-in-this-together kind of vibe. The last thirty minutes of each 80-minute presentation tends to slide into barcamp-like free-wheeling exchanges among attendees, with the speaker as a mediator. Audience members haven’t felt timid about raising questions and volunteering their own hard-won lessons. A lot of times, we’d end up listening to a vigorous (but civil) debate/brainstorm among a few audience members experiences in some specific aspect of this new mobile software era. I even met a very cool Cocoa veteran from Montreal who shared lots of great tips and resource links from the pre-iPhone era (I just haven’t had time to blog about any of this stuff yet!).

Technical and business insights…

Since we’re in the early days of iPhone development, the technical presentations unsurprisingly lean towards introductory levels. However, I’ve enjoyed much deeper technical discussions with speakers like Kenji Hollis, who showed me some Objective-fu beyond his official slides, and the small crowd of people who attended Collin Donnel’s Address Book session, which evolved into interesting discussions on table view optimization and Core Foundation practices.

More challenging and rewarding were the business sessions, which I gravitated towards after the first day. Apple’s enigmatic silence about App Store policies means that these participatory sessions are rare real-time opportunities for comparing notes and sharing ideas. Before the business sessions, I hadn’t realized how much Apple has changed the game for mobile software business. Criticisms about Apple’s dictatorial management of the App Store process were frequently countered by mobile ISV veterans with telecom/handset bureaucracy horror stories that span multiple continents. Their perspective makes the App Store business model seem like an ISV heaven in comparison, though far from perfect.

Converting raw notes into blog posts…

I want to do something productive with the copious raw notes I’ve been taking. Organizing the notes into a legible form will take many days and many blog posts though. The first set of notes I’ll post will come from the two opening keynotes by Ebay and Mike Lee. Hopefully, I’ll have those notes cleaned up in time for another blog post when I return to Seattle tomorrow.

Man, there’s still one more day of 360|iDev and already so much to blog about. Analytics, Unity3D, Quartz vs OpenGL, user feedback mechanics, business models, marketing insights, demographics, design patterns, architectures, debugging tools, etc. Crap, not enough time in the day to recap everything. Stay tuned…