chanson

The next CocoaHeads Silicon Valley meeting will be on Thursday, May 15, 2008 — that's tonight! — at 7:30 in the Garage 1 meeting room at Infinite Loop 4 on Apple's main campus. That's inside and upstairs at Apple's Infinite Loop campus in Cupertino. See the web site for directions.

This month's main presentation is on the Best of Both Worlds — an introduction to Cocoa development by Scott Stevenson.

This talk is a combination of an introduction to Cocoa, as well as a series of advanced tips and tricks that even relatively experienced Mac programmers may not know about.

The idea here is that we want to give all of the people who are new to Mac and iPhone development a chance to get started, but we also want to do something special for our advanced programmers. So rather than choosing one, we're just going to go ahead and do both.

Joel Norvell will also be presenting on how to edit PDF forms using Cocoa — he's done a lot of work with PDFKit and Cocoa, and I'm looking forward to learning from him.

Thanks a ton to Scott Stevenson, Steve Zyszkiewicz, Michael Jurewitz and Joar Wingfors for organizing!

In general, at a CocoaHeads meeting we do some introductions, have a presentation including Q&A time with the presenter, and then have an open Q&A and demo-your-cool-app period. After the meeting there's more independent mingling and discussion until it's time to go at 9:30. Often a subset of the meeting moves to BJ's Brewhouse in Cupertino, which is right in front of the Apple Infinite Loop campus on De Anza Boulevard.

The next CocoaHeads Silicon Valley meeting will be on Thursday, April 17, 2008 — that's tonight! — at 7:30 in the De Anza 3 auditorium at Apple. That's just inside the south side of De Anza 3, right across Mariani Avenue from Apple's Infinite Loop campus in Cupertino. See the web site for directions.

This month's presentation is all about designing and implementing your human interface. User experience and human interface design are critical for Mac OS X software to get right. To that end, there's even going to be a UI makeover as Scott describes in his post on the meeting!

Thanks a ton to Scott Stevenson, Steve Zyszkiewicz, Michael Jurewitz and Joar Wingfors for organizing!

In general, at a CocoaHeads meeting we do some introductions, have a presentation including Q&A time with the presenter, and then have an open Q&A and demo-your-cool-app period. After the meeting there's more independent mingling and discussion until it's time to go at 9:30. Often a subset of the meeting moves to BJ's Brewhouse in Cupertino, which is right in front of the Apple Infinite Loop campus on De Anza Boulevard.

The next CocoaHeads Silicon Valley meeting will be on Thursday, February 7, 2008 — that's tonight! — at 7:30 in the De Anza 3 auditorium at Apple. That's just inside the south side of De Anza 3, right across Mariani Avenue from Apple's Infinite Loop campus in Cupertino. See the web site for directions.

This month's presentation is by Scott Stevenson about Core Animation, one of the great new technologies available to Cocoa developers in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

Thanks a ton to Scott Stevenson and Steve Zyszkiewicz for doing the organizing!

In general, at a CocoaHeads meeting we do some introductions, have a presentation including Q&A time with the presenter, and then have an open Q&A and demo-your-cool-app period. After the meeting there's more independent mingling and discussion until it's time to go at 9:30. Often a subset of the meeting moves to BJ's Brewhouse in Cupertino, which is right in front of the Apple Infinite Loop campus on De Anza Boulevard.

The next CocoaHeads Silicon Valley meeting will be on Thursday, January 10, 2008 — that's tonight! — at 7:30 in the Garage 1 conference room at Apple. That's just upstairs from the Town Hall auditorium in Infinite Loop 4, right around the loop at Apple's campus in Cupertino. See the web site for directions.

This month's presentation is by Ted Bonkenburg of Google, who is going to be talking about the MacFUSE project for creating user-space filesystems for Mac OS X!

Thanks a ton to Scott Stevenson and Steve Zyszkiewicz for doing the organizing!

In general, at a CocoaHeads meeting we do some introductions, have a presentation including Q&A time with the presenter, and then have an open Q&A and demo-your-cool-app period. After the meeting there's more independent mingling and discussion — especially at BJ's Brewhouse, which is right along De Anza Blvd. in front of Apple's Infinite Loop 1 headquarters building.

The next CocoaHeads Silicon Valley meeting will be on Thursday, November 8, 2007 — that's tonight! — at 7:30 in the Town Hall auditorium at Apple. That's just inside Infinite Loop 4, right around the loop at Apple's campus in Cupertino. See the web site for directions.

This month's presentation is by Deric Horn, Application Frameworks Evangelist at Apple. He's going to take us on a tour through what's new in Cocoa in Leopard!

Thanks a ton to Scott Stevenson and Steve Zyszkiewicz for doing the organizing!

In general, at a CocoaHeads meeting we do some introductions, have a presentation including Q&A time with the presenter, and then have an open Q&A and demo-your-cool-app period. After the meeting there's more independent mingling and discussion.

When we haven't had a presentation or two lined up, we've also had some great "unmeetings" (in the spirit of "unconferences") where we came up with an agenda for the core of the meeting on the fly by writing down topics and questions on our room's whiteboard and talking about each one of them for a few minutes. It worked really well.

Update: Every CocoaHeads gets bigger. Tonight's meeting has 59 people so far, which is nearly a 20% increase over last month's meeting!

The next CocoaHeads Silicon Valley meeting will be on Thursday, October 11, 2007 — that's this Thursday! — at 7:30 in the Town Hall auditorium at Apple. That's just inside Infinite Loop 4, right around the loop at Apple's campus in Cupertino. See the web site for directions.

This month's presentation is a special treat! Greg Robbins and David Phillip Oster of Google will be speaking about the Google Data APIs and the Objective-C Google Data framework that they've created for easy access to it on Mac OS X. It's a great API and they're going to be great speakers, so come on down to Apple and take a look at what they've created. Scott Stevenson has more Google Data API pointers at his Theocacao weblog.

Thanks a ton to Scott Stevenson and Steve Zyszkiewicz for doing the organizing!

In general, at a CocoaHeads meeting we do some introductions, have a presentation including Q&A time with the presenter, and then have an open Q&A and demo-your-cool-app period. After the meeting there's more independent mingling and discussion.

When we haven't had a presentation or two lined up, we've also had some great "unmeetings" (in the spirit of "unconferences") where we came up with an agenda for the core of the meeting on the fly by writing down topics and questions on our room's whiteboard and talking about each one of them for a few minutes. It worked really well.

The next CocoaHeads Silicon Valley meeting will be on Thursday, September 13, 2007 — that's today! — at 7:30 in the Town Hall auditorium at Apple. That's just inside Infinite Loop 4, right around the loop at Apple's campus in Cupertino. See the web site for directions.

Thanks a ton to Scott Stevenson and Steve Zyszkiewicz for doing the organizing!

In general, at a CocoaHeads meeting we do some introductions, have a presentation including Q&A time with the presenter, and then have an open Q&A and demo-your-cool-app period. After the meeting there's more independent mingling and discussion.

When we haven't had a presentation or two lined up, we've also had some great "unmeetings" (in the spirit of "unconferences") where we came up with an agenda for the core of the meeting on the fly by writing down topics and questions on our room's whiteboard and talking about each one of them for a few minutes. It worked really well.

The next CocoaHeads Silicon Valley meeting will be on Thursday, August 9, 2007 — that's today! — at 7:30 in the Town Hall auditorium at Apple. That's just inside Infinite Loop 4, right around the loop at Apple's campus in Cupertino. See the web site for directions.

Bill Bumgarner will be talking about bridging dynamic languages like Python and Ruby to Cocoa, and scripting in Cocoa. See Scott Stevenson's post on tonight's meeting for more details.

Thanks a ton to Scott Stevenson and Steve Zyszkiewicz for doing the organizing!

In general, at a CocoaHeads meeting we do some introductions, have a presentation including Q&A time with the presenter, and then have an open Q&A and demo-your-cool-app period. After the meeting there's more independent mingling and discussion.

When we haven't had a presentation or two lined up, we've also had some great "unmeetings" (in the spirit of "unconferences") where we came up with an agenda for the core of the meeting on the fly by writing down topics and questions on our room's whiteboard and talking about each one of them for a few minutes. It worked really well.

Here's a tidbit I heard on a podcast earlier this year: The Canberra, Australia .NET users group has 60 people attend a typical meeting. Given the large number of Mac developers — not to mention people interested in Mac development — in the San Francisco Bay Area, we should be able to beat that easily! Spread the word and post a link to the CocoaHeads Silicon Valley page on your own blog, and let everybody know your plans for attending! And if you have something you'd like to talk about, contact either myself or our organizer Steve Zyszkiewicz.

Michael Agustin started a Facebook group for CocoaHeads! If you're a CocoaHead — or would like to be one — and you're on Facebook, feel free to join!

The next CocoaHeads Silicon Valley meeting will be on Thursday, April 12, 2007 from 7:30-9PM in the Hong Kong conference room at Apple. That's just inside the entrance to Infinite Loop 1, the main headquarters building at Apple's campus in Cupertino.

See the web site for details, directions, and the organizer's contact information.

R. Tyler Ballance will be talking about C#, Microsoft .NET 3.0 and Visual Studio.NET 2005 as someone who has used both platforms extensively. But don't worry, he's not pitching us on becoming a Microsoft developer! He'll be comparing and contrasting it with Objective-C, Cocoa, Xcode and Interface Builder — even covering some of what's coming in Leopard — and he may even cover what the Open Source community has to offer with Mono.

As always, we'll also be hanging out and talking about Cocoa in general, discussing new and cool things that have come up in the past month, and helping each other out. Join us!

The next CocoaHeads Silicon Valley meeting will be on Thursday, December 14, 2006 at 7:30 P.M. tonight in the Hong Kong conference room at Apple. That's just inside the entrance to Infinite Loop 1, the main headquarters building at Apple's campus in Cupertino. See the web site for directions.

Dan Wood of Karelia Software will be showing off their excellent Sandvox web site creation tool and talking about its development. Sandvox is a really cool application, and was one of the first major third-party applications to adopt Core Data. Thanks a ton to Scott Stevenson for setting it up, and for letting me know about it!

Last month, Scott Stevenson gave a great presentation on using TextMate for Cocoa development, and Simon Fell demonstrated his very cool SF³ and SoqlXplorer applications for synchronizing with and working with Salesforce.com data on Mac OS X. Simon also gave us the scoop on his plans for releasing his Cocoa Salesforce.com client API, zkSforce, as Open Source!

Here's a tidbit I heard on a podcast: The Canberra, Australia .NET users group has 60 people attend a typical meeting. Given the large number of Mac developers — not to mention people interested in Mac development — in the San Francisco Bay Area, we should be able to beat that easily! Spread the word and post a link to the CocoaHeads Silicon Valley page on your own blog, and let everybody know your plans for attending! And if you have something you'd like to talk about, contact either myself, our organizer Steve Zyszkiewicz, or Scott Stevenson.

The next CocoaHeads Silicon Valley meeting will be on Thursday, December 14, 2006 at 7:30 in the Hong Kong conference room at Apple. That's just inside the entrance to Infinite Loop 1, the main headquarters building at Apple's campus in Cupertino. See the web site for directions.

Update: Dan Wood of Karelia Software will be showing off their excellent Sandvox web site creation tool and talking about its development. Sandvox is a really cool application, and was one of the first major third-party applications to adopt Core Data. Thanks a ton to Scott Stevenson for setting it up, and for letting me know about it!

In general, at a CocoaHeads meeting we do some introductions, have a presentation including Q&A time with the presenter, and then have an open Q&A and demo-your-cool-app period. After the meeting there's more independent mingling and discussion.

When we haven't had a presentation or two lined up, we've also had some great "unmeetings" (in the spirit of "unconferences") where we came up with an agenda for the core of the meeting on the fly by writing down topics and questions on our room's whiteboard and talking about each one of them for a few minutes. It worked really well.

Last month, Scott Stevenson gave a great presentation on using TextMate for Cocoa development, and Simon Fell demonstrated his very cool SF³ and SoqlXplorer applications for synchronizing with and working with Salesforce.com data on Mac OS X. Simon also gave us the scoop on his plans for releasing his Cocoa Salesforce.com client API, zkSforce, as Open Source!

Here's a tidbit I heard on a podcast today: The Canberra, Australia .NET users group has 60 people attend a typical meeting. Given the large number of Mac developers — not to mention people interested in Mac development — in the San Francisco Bay Area, we should be able to beat that easily! Spread the word and post a link to the CocoaHeads Silicon Valley page on your own blog, and let everybody know your plans for attending! And if you have something you'd like to talk about, contact either myself or our organizer Steve Zyszkiewicz.

The next CocoaHeads Silicon Valley meeting will be on Thursday, November 9, 2006 — That's tonight! — from 7:30-9PM in the Hong Kong conference room at Apple. That's just inside the entrance to Infinite Loop 1, the main headquarters building at Apple's campus in Cupertino.

See the web site for details, directions, and the organizer's contact information.

Scott Stevenson will be talking about TextMate!

The next CocoaHeads Silicon Valley meeting will be on Thursday, September 14, 2006 — That's tonight! — from 7-9PM in the Hong Kong conference room at Apple. That's just inside the entrance to Infinite Loop 1, the main headquarters building at Apple's campus in Cupertino.

See the web site for details, directions, and the organizer's contact information.

The next CocoaHeads Silicon Valley meeting will be on Thursday, March 9, 2006 from 7-9PM in the Hong Kong conference room at Apple. That's just inside the entrance to Infinite Loop 1, the main headquarters building at Apple's campus in Cupertino.

See the web site for details, directions, and the organizer's contact information.

The first Iron Coder contest has begun!

In the contest, an API is selected and, a day later — so participants can learn the API — an application theme is chosen. The participants have 24 hours to create an application that uses the API and submit it to be judged by Chairman Rentzsch. The winner is likely to be the judge of the next contest. This contest's API and theme? Accessibility and Mardi Gras!

It's very much in the spirit of MacHack and its Hack Show (RIP).

Also, the first CocoaDevHouse is taking place in Dallas right now. It's an event modeled after SuperHappyDevHouse and organized by Blake Burris, the guy behind the great CocoaRadio podcast. It looks like a good time; check out the #cocoadevhouse IRC channel. I wonder how many of the people there are Iron Coders...

I really wish there were another conference like MacHack. It was a convention of Mac developers that was organized along the same lines as a science fiction convention. This is something that a lot of people have been trying to replicate lately with things like "camps" and "unconferences" and "dexes" and "DevHouses" — but all without taking a look at what the science fiction community has been doing for over half a century. MacHack did learn from it, largely because the people involved in its creation were also long-time science fiction fans.

I could see a San Francisco (or Bay Area) CocoaDevHouse turning into something like that, if there was sufficient organization applied and if it was held over a weekend in a small convention hotel. Doing so would probably require a small membership fee — probably on the order of $30 to $50 per member — but that's in line with membership rates for science fiction and anime conventions.

(Please don't look to me to organize something like that. I'd love it but I'm simply not a conrunner type. Hey, I said to stop looking at me...)

CocoaHeads Silicon Valley is meeting tonight on the Apple Campus in Cupertino, in the Town Hall auditorium of Infinite Loop 4.

I'll be speaking about Cocoa unit testing with Xcode.

CocoaHeads Silicon Valley is meeting tonight at Apple in the Star Trek conference room of Infinite Loop 2 from 7-9PM.

It should be interesting to see just who shows up. I'll be there!

CocoaHeads is meeting tonight at 7PM in Newell-Simon 3001 on the CMU campus. Since I'm in Pittsburgh, I'll be there!

Jeff Szuhay will be talking about the Pollen screensaver.

Panther shipped!

That means I can go into more detail about what I'm talking about at the CAWUG meeting on Tuesday.

Here's the deal: In Panther, Cocoa includes a ton of new features. Most importantly, Panther Cocoa includes a new AppKit class named NSController.

In Model-View-Controller terms, Cocoa has historically been great for building model objects with FoundationKit and for building view objects with AppKit. But you've generally had to build all of your controller objects from scratch with FoundationKit. This isn't a problem per se but it does mean you have to do work. For instance, you had to write a data source object have an NSTableView display some data.

Now, with Panther Cocoa and NSController you can very easily bind view objects to your data model directly, with no code, right in Interface Builder.

It does this using some technology built on top of Key-Value Coding. Key-Value Observing lets one object watch for changes in an attribute of another and Key-Value Binding lets the values of attributes in two objects be dependent on each other (change one and the other changes).

On Tuedsay at CAWUG, I'm going to demonstrate how all this fits together.

But wait, there's more!

Apple also did quite a bit of optimization work in Panther, including optimizations to how NSView drawing works.

They've even included a new class in FoundationKit called NSSortDescriptor that represents — surprise — a way of sorting a collection! It's pretty much an equivalent of my BDSortOrdering class, which was just a reimplementation of the Enterprise Objects Framework's EOSortOrdering class.

I'll also be talking about some of the other major additions to Cocoa in Panther. There's a lot of cool stuff to cover! Join us! It'll be fun!