Natalie and David gave a great talk about the metrics/analytics library they're working on for iOS. Here's a PDF of their slides, with a few annotations they've added. You can click the image or this link.
See you next month!
Just a note that we're back to our regular meeting–the second Thursday of the month–for this first meeting of the New Year. Keep an eye on the meeting page for more details.
[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.
Here's a belated recap of the November meeting.
Ed showed some photos from MacTech Conference, which was a lot of fun, by the way. I encourage all you developers to attend next year.
I gave a short intro to ARC, partly to invite the audience to fill in gaps in my understanding. For any of you who would like to give a presentation about something but hesitate because you don't feel like a world-class expert — I invite you to present what you do know and we can use group discussion to enhance everybody's understanding including your own. CocoaHeadsNYC is about as friendly and low-pressure a venue as you'll find to present at. And I think you will find that just preparing to give the talk will help clarify your thoughts.
Patsy's, our usual pizza/pasta place, was again very accommodating. I called ahead to say we had, as I recall, about 16 people. When we showed up with more like 20 people, they cleared an entire separate area for us to move to so the group wouldn't have to split between two tables. All that and they have good food.
Usually I try to jot down things that are mentioned at CocoaHeads, often in passing, that I think would be worth posting links to. For some reason I only have one thing in my notes this month: someone asked if anybody's tried AppCode, by JetBrains.
AppCode is a new Objective-C IDE for developers building apps for Apple devices such as Macs, iPhones & iPads.
I keep meaning to check it out myself.
December's meeting is coming up fast. It's going to be this coming Monday, December 5, instead of the traditional second Thursday, due to scheduling requirements at Google. We will have two speakers this month; stay tuned for details.
Jon Nathan was our presenter. He explained the nuts and bolts of how to have your app support plug-ins, and he pointed out some interesting reasons you might want to take this approach. For example, you (or a third party) can use plug-ins to extend your app's scripting dictionary, or support additional languages.
To me the most interesting reason for the plug-in approach was simply to force you to think about your code in a certain way. Jon has found that you can often — perhaps more often than you think — factor your application design into a central core plus a bunch of plug-ins that inherit from a common base class. Since the plug-ins live in their own Xcode projects, at any given time you're working on a smaller code base than if you had all your code in one monolithic project. And this can allow you to send your users a quick bug fix by having them install an updated plug-in, without making them wait until you ship a full official release of your app.
Jon preferred that we not video his presentation, but there's a link in the "show notes" where you can get his code. (Ever since I started listening to podcasts semi-regularly I think in terms of putting URLs in "show notes".) There are also links to other things that came up during the meeting or over dinner.
Links
Here's some of the stuff we talked about at the last meeting in addition to the main presentation.
Demitri had questions about Xcode 4. Seems like there's a lot of that these days. Ed suggested that it would be great if we could get a presentation from someone who knows Xcode 4 very well and can talk us through it and get it to make sense to us.
==> If you can (and would like to) demo and evangelize Xcode 4 with clarity and persuasiveness that would make Guy Kawasaki proud, please let me know.
LESEC's next e-waste recycling event will be at Tekserve next Saturday, the 17th. See here for more info.
I mentioned a seminar I'd attended at Tekserve called "iOS Devices for Students with Special Needs". The speaker was Vicky Windman, who has a site called IpadAppsClarkstown.
Tekserve does quite a bit of work with people with special needs. Check out their Adaptive Technology page if you're looking for solutions or if you'd like to work with Tekserve in this area.
I posed a brainteaser based on a debugging question Andy Finnell posted on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/#!/macgeek02/status/111654936940511232
macgeek02: I need a sanity check. I should be able to do this:
NSManagedObject *object = …; NSLog(@“object = %@“, object);
without an exception?
http://twitter.com/#!/macgeek02/status/111656936260378624
macgeek02: My google-fu is failing me. It’s throwing a -[__NSCFNumber objectID]: unrecognized selector… I only got one thread (that I created).
http://twitter.com/#!/macgeek02/status/111660524340641792
macgeek02: Thanks for all the suggestions. Twitter isn’t best way to debug. (FYI: not a fault, not a zombie. Throwing in NSManagedObject description)
Ben was the first to get on the right track. Here's where Andy posted the answer once he figured it out, and some of the replies he got:
Thanks to Greg Casamento, lead developer on the GNUstep project, for driving up from Laurel, MD to talk with us. That is quite an arduous day trip, and indicates how committed he is to spreading the word. Greg told us about the history and status of the project and answered our many questions about under-the-hood stuff. He showed us ProjectCenter and GORM, which are GNUstep's counterparts for Xcode and Interface Builder. They looked like the old NeXTstep dev tools, which struck a nostalgic chord with me.
One neat thing was when Greg took the source code for Bean (an open-source Cocoa text editor) and compiled and ran it on Linux, Windows XP, and Windows 7. He did all this within a virtual machine on his 2007 white MacBook, which we were viewing via Screen Sharing on my MacBook Pro, over WiFi, because we didn't have the video adapter he needed. Gotta love the technology we take for granted these days.
Greg's drive to New York took rather longer than he expected, so his talk got off to a late start, but we found stuff to talk about while we were waiting — more about that in my next post. We had our pizza delivered instead of going to Patsy's so Greg could talk while we ate.
After the meeting I took Greg to the Good Stuff Diner where we yakked for a couple more hours. Just one thing I learned: you may remember how it used to look in IB when you Control-dragged to make an outlet connection. You'd get an L-shaped line connecting the start point to the destination point. The thing about this connection was that it wasn't confined to a window; it typically connected points between windows. It turns out that way of drawing a connection was patented, which is why it isn't used in GORM (or at least wasn't — I forget exactly). Who'd have thought?
I hope to see you all next month, when Jon Nathan will be talking about how to make your app plug-innable.
I finally posted Avi's slides on Chromium's Out-of-Memory Killer, which he sent me shortly after his talk. Deep stuff.
Thanks very much to Mike Swan for the surprise donation of a raffle item, Core Data for iOS by Tim Isted and Tom Harrington. Mike was a technical reviewer for the book and decided to share one of his complimentary copies. It looks pretty good — I might get a copy myself. Congratulations to the raffle winner, and sorry for not getting your name in my rush to stuff my face with pizza. [UPDATE: As you can see in the comments, the winner was Gabe Ghearing.]
Speaking of which, I highly recommend the "freak pizza" that Ed and I shared at Patsy's, so-called because (horror of horrors) we requested that they leave off the cheese. With their good sauce and crust, and the fresh veggie toppings, I didn't miss the cheese at all. In fact, that might have been the best pizza I've had there.
Someone mentioned an "Xcode WTF" Tumblr stream. It's here.
If I'm forgetting something that came up, feel free to chime in here.
I hope to see you all next month, when our guest will be Greg Casamento, lead developer on the GNUstep project. Details to follow.
P.S. Ed has permanently booked the big room ("Bakerfield") that we used for the last two meetings. See the Meeting page for directions.
Thanks to Ed for editing this. The logo at the beginning and end is a nice touch.
Use the direct link if you're on an iOS device: Daniel Jalkut on Run Loops.
I like how I introduce Daniel "without further ado", then proceed to explain who he is, which is in fact further ado.
Here's a PDF of Daniel's slides.
Hope to see you all next month!
I'm running late as usual, so I'll dash this off and possibly amend later or post a followup.
I don't know what our record attendance was but we probably doubled it last night at about 40 people. Fortunately Clay was able to procure us a larger conference room that could hold us.
Daniel's talk was great — it addressed areas I should definitely know better and in fact had recently struggled with. I got the talk on video which I will post this weekend. It turned out okay but I made the mistake of pointing the camera at Daniel with the bright projection screen behind him, so he looks like he's in the witness protection program.
We had quite a few newcomers who'd heard of CocoaHeads via Larry Legend's iOS meetup. Larry himself was there and told us a bit about his group. If you think 40 is a lot of people, you should have been there Monday, when he had the Apple Store packed to the rafters.
We raffled off two AppViz licenses using our traditional heads-and-tails methodology. (I wonder if arms-in-the-air/arms-folded would feel less goofy.) I've sent IdeaSwarm the info they need to generate the license keys.
When it looked like we had about 20 for dinner, someone suggested calling Patsy's to warn them and to let them know we wouldn't mind being broken up into multiple tables if necessary. This turned out to be a very good idea. When we got there they had set up a gigantic table for us and they greeted us very cheerfully.