This month's featured speakers were David Jacobs and Natalie Podrazik of 29th Street Publishing. David and Natalie gave us an inside look at the tools and infrastructure they're building for developing Newsstand apps. They're doing this because they found that Apple's process for publishing on Newsstand is less straightforward than one might expect. Among the components they're using is the Starwatch framework they presented in February. You can ask for more info at hello@29.io or on the CocoaHeadsNYC mailing list (which you can sign up for here if you're not on it already).

Natalie has also posted some open-source mini-projects (not related to the Newsstand stuff) on GitHub.

One thing David mentioned in passing was a collaboration and task management tool called Asana. I checked it out and I think it's pretty nicely done.

I had two show-and-tell items. One was the "method-aware" feature I recently added to AppKiDo. It's implemented by a single AKMethodNameExtractor class (.h file, .m file) that is just a simple hand-rolled parser. I mentioned that I use hand-rolled parsers in a couple of places, and I used to feel vaguely wrong about it until I read a blog post entitled "Why I don't use a Parser Generator".

My other show-and-tell was the Scene Kit example project from WWDC, which I'd modified slightly. Since the meeting I've learned that Apple actually has three publicly available Scene Kit examples.

Speaking of conferences, we're two months away from MacTech Conference, which Ed Marczak co-chairs. This year at least three of the speakers are CocoaHeadsNYC members: Natalie, Mark Mentovai, and me. I hope to see you there; it was really fun last year.

I hope to see you all next month, and I hope you'll bring your own show-and-tells.