[I posted this recap to the list on December 6, and just realized I never put it here on the blog. I'm back-dating it by a couple of hours so Ed's update about the January meeting stays on top.]

Tom Frauenhofer gave an intro on developing for iCloud — what iCloud is and isn't, and how to enable your app to store and retrieve documents in iCloud.

Gabe Ghearing talked about how to use automatic reference counting with older iOS devices and with older libraries. He talked about MongoDB / Core Data integration and posed a question for the group about how to efficiently pull down object graphs when using a NoSQL database. Good discussion.

Demitri did a show-and-tell of a problem he'd been having with an astronomy app he's just starting. He's loading a bunch of FITS data into an array of floats, and wants to create a CGImage based on that array so that users can visualize the data. There was good discussion but we did not manage to solve the problem. Demitri gave me his code and I was able to get it working this morning — I'll explain in a separate email.

Odds and ends:

• It was suggested that the CocoaHeadsNYC home page have a list of direct links to the meeting videos. Good idea — I'll do that when I get a chance.

• A couple of people expressed interest in getting an NYC NSCoder night going. This has been a recurring request. A couple of us have tried to get NSCoder night off the ground in the past. It sounds like now the idea will have more traction. I'll follow up on this soon.

• Here's the "F*ck You, Pay Me" video I mentioned at dinner: http://vimeo.com/22053820. I also recommend the podcast Mike Monteiro co-hosts with Katie Gillum — it's one of my favorite podcasts on 5by5: http://5by5.tv/mistakes.