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.