Because of WWDC, we held the June meeting a week later than we normally would have.
This month we had three presentations.
1. Demitri and Brad
In the "broadening our horizons vis-a-vis mobile computing" department, Demitri Muna and his guest Brad Midgley demoed a Raspberry Pi that Brad was able to talk to wirelessly using an iPad. Brad used this setup to demo Amber, a client-side Smalltalk environment that runs on top of JavaScript.
[UPDATE: In one discussion tangent, I mentioned that Smalltalk (at least the Smalltalk I used ages ago) formats your code when you save, applying a consistent indenting style. I seem to recall THINK Pascal used to do the same, but I'm not positive. This in turn reminded me of an article in Joel Spolsky's book, "The Best Software Writing I", which proposes that coding style be enforced by the language syntax. This would save us all a lot of wasted effort disagreeing about whether braces should go on the same line, and so on. Below, I've added a link to the article, titled "Style is Substance".]
Demitri also passed around his Playbook tablet so we could get a feel for a tablet with a different size and OS than we're used to.
Links:
2. Andy
I talked about my favorite sessions at WWDC — the ones about the Accelerate framework and Scene Kit. As I recall, I also told about being mistaken for an Apple employee at a noodle house, and almost getting a 10% discount on the check.
Links:
- WWDC videos; see "The Accelerate Framework" (Session 708) and "Introducing Scene Kit" (Session 504)
- Taking Advantage of the Accelerate Framework
- Accelerate Framework Reference
- Scene Kit Programming Guide
- Scene Kit Framework Reference
- [UPDATE: Sample code for Scene Kit is now publicly available.]
3. Ben
Ben Ragheb reprised a fun talk he'd given at the iOS meetup, about going to San Francisco without a WWDC ticket. Good tips. Given how quickly the WWDC videos came out, I'm tempted to do the same next year unless I have a specific need to meet with Apple engineers.
Unfortunately Ben's #badgeless tweets no longer show up in a Twitter search. If you hurry you can go here and grep for #badgeless and #wwdc. Note that, due to limitations in the Twitter API, AllMyTweets only shows the person's last 3200 tweets.