Ben Ragheb was our speaker this month. Ben talked about two techniques he combined to implement a photo upload feature in his iOS app: (1) WebView/UIWebView JavaScript tricks, and (2) using Amazon Web Services. His approach allowed him to provide web-based functionality without investing prematurely in writing a full-blown web service.

Dulio Denis shot, edited, and uploaded a video of the talk, complete with intro and outro music, rolling credits, and screen-within-screen. Terrific job! The video and Ben's slides are embedded below.

Here are "show notes" on things that came up during the meeting or afterward:

• Amazon Web Services
• Dropbox API
• Parse (recently bought by Facebook) — "A powerful web presence without all the hassle."
• Isaac Schmidt's presentation last April about Parse.com.
• StackMob — "Accelerate your app development and eliminate the headache of maintaining your infrastructure."
• Firebase — "Build apps fast without managing servers."
• NSHipster, Mattt Thompson's great Cocoa developer blog. It's highly technical in the same way as Mike Ash's NSBlog. Ben mentioned an NSHipster article about remote views in iOS, but I wonder if he meant this article which references an article by Ole Begemann.
• In response to a question from Mike Akers, Marc Van Olmen emailed a bunch of links to crash reporting libraries that might be worth looking into.
• Demitri gave a talk about crash reporting back in March 2011. Here's a zip file with his Keynote slides and demo code.

Kevin Wolkober demoed his free app NYC Wi-Fi, which shows nearby Wi-Fi hotspots in NYC. The app draws on a set of data called NYC Open Data.

This was Kevin's first iOS project and his first experience with Objective-C. He drew on a number of open-source libraries which are mentioned on his slides.

• Kevin's slides.
• Tutorials by Ray Wenderlich. Either Kevin mentioned these as a resource he used, or someone recommended them; I forget which.
• CocoaPods. I think it was Anup who recommended CocoaPods as a way to manage the open-source libraries in Kevin's project. Anup definitely did vouch for CocoaPods during dinner afterwards.
• During open discussion, Brian Papa mentioned the Academy for Software Engineering, which teaches computer science to high school kids. They partner with the iMentor NYC program, which matches high school kids with adult mentors. You can apply to be a mentor on their web site.
• Someone mentioned this blog post by Daniel Pasco. Pasco lists a bunch of interview questions that he asks his coworkers at Black Pixel to use to gauge a candidate's iOS or Cocoa expertise. I think it's a good list, and a sobering reminder of my own shortcomings.
• I asked a question about Sparkle, assuming everybody knew what I meant. I had forgotten how many developers are iOS only.

Here are quick recaps of our first three meetings of 2013.

January: Anton Marini talked about OpenGL in the context of Quartz Composer plug-ins. It was a fast-paced meeting, with one of the longer presentations and Q&A sessions that we've had. If I ever find my notes from the meeting I'll add them here.

• Anton also works on Syphon, which was his alternate option for his presentation topic.

February: Demitri gave an introduction to Core Image. I'm really glad Demitri presented, because this was his last CocoaHeadsNYC before moving to Columbus, OH.

• Demo code.
• Quartz Composer composition.
• An NSDateFormatter pitfall that Natalie mentioned during open discussion.

March: I talked about how I resolved four problems I ran into while working on UI details in AppKiDo. Kevin Doughty did a show-and-tell of what he's doing with additive animation.

• My slides. Note: I've sinced changed my approach to the key-view-loop problem, so it's no longer as described in the slides. I added a class called AKTabChain (.h, .m), which takes a delegate, and I overrode sendEvent: in my application class. At some point I'll write a class comment that explains it all. I'd also like to try Avi Drissman's suggestion to use an event tap.
• Kevin's sample code on GitHub.