September Meeting Agenda

The next Philly CocoaHeads meeting will be Thursday, September 8th 7-9pm at Indy Hall. Post-meeting drinks commence afterwords; National Mechanics is our usual hangout.

You’ll need to use the intercom to get in (#022). If you are having any trouble feel free to call MikeZ’s cell (267-563-0616) and we’ll be sure to get you in.

We usually all chip in and order some pizza and refreshments, so if you can bring a few bucks for that please do.

Meeting Agenda

Introductions & Group Business

  • Next Office Hours, Sept 22nd

Show and Tell

In addition to being an open mic to demo new apps or code, Show and Tell also invites people to bring problems or design issues they are encountering in current projects for feedback.

Subclassing UIScrollView

Corey recently took a second take on creating a cloning of Apple’s Springboard Control and is now properly subclassing UIViews to take advantage of Cocoa Touch. He’ll walk through why this is better and how the code works.

Mockups

In the last four weeks Mike Zornek has been mocking up a number of new apps targeting all his major development platforms: iPhone, Mac and Rails. In this talk he’ll demo some of his mockups and talk about the tools he is using to build them.

About CocoaHeads

PhillyCocoa is a Philadelphia area Mac and iPhone programming group, a chapter of the worldwide CocoaHeads. All skill levels are welcome. The only requirement is an interest in Apple-related technologies and moderate tolerance for geeking out.

We hold our CocoaHeads group meetings on the second Thursday of every month at Indy Hall. A calendar feed can be found on the PhillyCocoa website.

We are always looking for feedback and suggestions on what topics to discuss at our meetings. We have a public writeroom (password is “password”) where we try to keep tabs on what people are interested in hearing about. Feel free to append your own ideas, especially if you are interested in speaking.

Group website: http://phillycocoa.org

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August Meeting Agenda

The next Philly CocoaHeads meeting will be Thursday, August 11th 7-9pm at Indy Hall. Post-meeting drinks commence afterwords; National Mechanics is our usual hangout.

You’ll need to use the intercom to get in (#022). If you are having any trouble feel free to call MikeZ’s cell (267-563-0616) and we’ll be sure to get you in.

We usually all chip in and order some pizza and refreshments, so if you can bring a few bucks for that please do.

Meeting Agenda

Introductions & Group Business

  • Next Office Hours, Aug 25th
  • Future Meeting Topics Brainstorm

Show and Tell

In addition to being an open mic to demo new apps or code, Show and Tell also invites people to bring problems or design issues they are encountering in current projects for feedback.

AMMO Rack

Kostas Nasis will present AMMO’s latest product called AMMO Rack. It’s a document management app with some pretty advanced UI and should be in the store soon.

iOS Monetization

Pay for download or free download? Ads or in-app purchase, or both? Consumable or non-consumable? In this presentation Mike Zornek will review the various pros and cons of each pricing style while sharing some data from one of his own (free/ad/in-app upgrade) apps, Dex.

About CocoaHeads

PhillyCocoa is a Philadelphia area Mac and iPhone programming group, a chapter of the worldwide CocoaHeads. All skill levels are welcome. The only requirement is an interest in Apple-related technologies and moderate tolerance for geeking out.

We hold our CocoaHeads group meetings on the second Thursday of every month at Indy Hall. A calendar feed can be found on the PhillyCocoa website.

We are always looking for feedback and suggestions on what topics to discuss at our meetings. We have a public writeroom (password is “password”) where we try to keep tabs on what people are interested in hearing about. Feel free to append your own ideas, especially if you are interested in speaking.

Group website: http://phillycocoa.org

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June Meeting Agenda

The next Philly CocoaHeads meeting will be Thursday, June 16th 7-9pm at Indy Hall. Post-meeting drinks commence afterwords; National Mechanics is our usual hangout.

You’ll need to use the intercom to get in (#022). If you are having any trouble feel free to call MikeZ’s cell (267-563-0616) and we’ll be sure to get you in.

We usually all chip in and order some pizza and refreshments, so if you can bring a few bucks for that please do.

Meeting Agenda

Introductions & Group Business

  • New Office Hours Schedule
  • Big Nerd Ranch “Mobile for Global Good” contest
  • Upcoming Events: iOSDevCampDC, SecondConf, i360

Show and Tell

In addition to being an open mic to demo new apps or code, Show and Tell also invites people to bring problems or design issues they are encountering in current projects for feedback.

WWDC Recap

We had a handful of local friends make the trip out to San Francisco for WWDC and at this meeting we’ll have a roundtable discussion of what’s new both Lion as well as iOS 5 (including iCloud).

To prepare for the meeting be sure to check out the Apple docs, including:

About CocoaHeads

PhillyCocoa is a Philadelphia area Mac and iPhone programming group, a chapter of the worldwide CocoaHeads. All skill levels are welcome. The only requirement is an interest in Apple-related technologies and moderate tolerance for geeking out.

We hold our CocoaHeads group meetings on the second Thursday of every month at Indy Hall. A calendar feed can be found on the PhillyCocoa website.

We are always looking for feedback and suggestions on what topics to discuss at our meetings. We have a public writeroom (password is “password”) where we try to keep tabs on what people are interested in hearing about. Feel free to append your own ideas, especially if you are interested in speaking.

Group website: http://phillycocoa.org

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May Meeting Agenda

The next Philly CocoaHeads meeting will be Thursday, May 12th 7-9pm at Indy Hall. Post-meeting drinks commence afterwords; National Mechanics is our usual hangout.

You’ll need to use the intercom to get in (#022). If you are having any trouble feel free to call MikeZ’s cell (267-563-0616) and we’ll be sure to get you in.

We usually all chip in and order some pizza and refreshments, so if you can bring a few bucks for that please do.

Meeting Agenda

Introductions & Group Business

  • Philly Tech Week recap
  • Office Hours Sat, May 14th.
  • WWDC Plans
  • June meeting moved to June, 16th.

Show and Tell

In addition to being an open mic to demo new apps or code, Show and Tell also invites people to bring problems or design issues they are encountering in current projects for feedback.

Xcode 4

This month’s meeting is all about Xcode 4, the latest (and greatest?) release of the Apple development tools. Fellow CocoaHeads are going to cover this in three parts:

  • Corey: Workspaces, Schemes and Static Libraries
  • Matt: Project Navigation, Shortcuts and Documentation
  • MikeZ: Interface Design, Project Building and Debugging

With any luck everyone will walk away with some new tips and tricks to help them work with this very evolved (devolved?) form of Xcode. If you have any Xcode questions, please bring them!

About CocoaHeads

PhillyCocoa is a Philadelphia area Mac and iPhone programming group, a chapter of the worldwide CocoaHeads. All skill levels are welcome. The only requirement is an interest in Apple-related technologies and moderate tolerance for geeking out.

We hold our CocoaHeads group meetings on the second Thursday of every month at Indy Hall. Meeting details and iCal feed can be found on the Philadelphia CocoaHeads chapter page.

We are always looking for feedback and suggestions on what topics to discuss at our meetings. We have a public writeroom (password is “password”) where we try to keep tabs on what people are interested in hearing about. Feel free to append your own ideas, especially if you are interested in speaking.

Group website: http://phillycocoa.org

Read More

April Meeting Agenda

The next Philly CocoaHeads meeting will be Thursday, April 14th 7-9pm at Indy Hall. Post-meeting drinks commence afterwords; National Mechanics is our usual hangout.

You’ll need to use the intercom to get in (#022). If you are having any trouble feel free to call MikeZ’s cell (267-563-0616) and we’ll be sure to get you in.

We usually all chip in and order some pizza and refreshments, so if you can bring a few bucks for that please do.

Please RSVP if you plan to attend to help us plan out our space needs.

Meeting Agenda

Introductions & Group Business

  • Philly Tech Week
  • WWDC
  • Office Hours Update
  • Build Server Project Update
  • May Meeting will be all about Xcode 4. Topics and Speakers Wanted.

Show and Tell

In addition to being an open mic to demo new apps or code, Show and Tell also invites people to bring problems or design issues they are encountering in current projects for feedback.

Git Innards Part 2

Corey Floyd will continue his talk from last month, discussing how git works internally which inevitably let’s you better understand how to use it more effectively.

Roundtable Discussion on Quality Assurance

Didn’t have time for this last month, so take two. To wrap up the meeting we’ll have a roundtable discussion on the various tools and practices we all use to test our software and make sure it doesn’t crash and works properly.

About CocoaHeads

PhillyCocoa is a Philadelphia area Mac and iPhone programming group, a chapter of the worldwide CocoaHeads. All skill levels are welcome. The only requirement is an interest in Apple-related technologies and moderate tolerance for geeking out.

We hold our CocoaHeads group meetings on the second Thursday of every month at Indy Hall. Meeting details and iCal feed can be found on the Philadelphia CocoaHeads chapter page.

We are always looking for feedback and suggestions on what topics to discuss at our meetings. We have a public writeroom (password is “password”) where we try to keep tabs on what people are interested in hearing about. Feel free to append your own ideas, especially if you are interested in speaking.

Group website: http://phillycocoa.org

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March 2011 Meeting Recap

Another fantastic crowd for the March Philly CocoaHeads meeting. Among our regulars, we are continuing to see lots of new faces who bring new input to the meetings, so thanks to everyone for coming. We encourage you to keep coming!

As always, we want to thank Indy Hall, our constant “sponsor” and provider of our great meeting space.

Meeting slides are online in keynote as well as pdf.

We had two excellent talks this meeting. The first, from Corey, was about git’s inner workings. Included in his talk was the recommendation of the “experimental” fork of the gitx client, as well as his current git cheat sheet, which Adam has posted as a gist. There was a lot of content to cover, so part 2 of this talk will be coming during one of our upcoming meetings.

Our second talk, by SiNae and Kostas of Amphetamobile, was an impressive demonstration of their latest iOS and web project, called Ink. You can see a video demonstration on youtube of their project.

We weren’t able to get to our planned QA Roundtable, so count on that showing up in in one of our next few meetings.

The next meeting will be Thursday, April 14th. As always, if you have something you’d like to present or demo let us know so we can get it on the agenda.

Also, don’t forget our upcoming “Office Hours” event, which will be held Wednesday evening, March 16th. More details will be coming shortly!

Thanks everyone!

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March CocoaHeads Meeting!

The next Philly CocoaHeads meeting will be Thursday, March 10th 7-9pm at Indy Hall. Post-meeting drinks commence afterwords; National Mechanics is our usual hangout.

You’ll need to use the intercom to get in (#022). If you are having any trouble feel free to call MikeZ’s cell (267-563-0616) and we’ll be sure to get you in.

We usually all chip in and order some pizza and refreshments, so if you can bring a few bucks for that please do.

Please RSVP if you plan to attend to help us plan out our space needs.

Meeting Agenda

Introductions & Group Business

  • Lion Developer Preview
  • iPad 2
  • NSCodingNight Details (Wednesday night, March 16th).
  • Build Server Project

Show and Tell

In addition to being an open mic to demo new apps or code, Show and Tell also invites people to bring problems or design issues they are encountering in current projects for feedback.

Git Innards

Corey Floyd will be doing a talk about how git works internally covering topics including: The Git Model, Basic Toolset, Recipes, and Configuration.

iOS Ink Demo

SiNae Pitts and Kostas Nasis of Amphetamobile will do a demo on some new ink technology they’ve been working on for iOS. A new concept they call “inkcasting”, which is the recording of ink and audio for later presentations. They will cover expected use cases for the technology as well as implementation issues they’ve ran up against.

Video demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Jr5FB1Wo2Y

Roundtable Discussion on Quality Assurance

Even the best software has problems. To wrap up the meeting we’ll have a roundtable discussion on the various tools and practices we all use to test our software and make sure it doesn’t crash and works properly.

About CocoaHeads

PhillyCocoa is a Philadelphia area Mac and iPhone programming group, a chapter of the worldwide CocoaHeads. All skill levels are welcome. The only requirement is an interest in Apple-related technologies and moderate tolerance for geeking out.

We hold our CocoaHeads group meetings on the second Thursday of every month at Indy Hall. Meeting details and iCal feed can be found on the Philadelphia CocoaHeads chapter page.

We are always looking for feedback and suggestions on what topics to discuss at our meetings. We have a public writeroom (password is “password”) where we try to keep tabs on what people are interested in hearing about. Feel free to append your own ideas, especially if you are interested in speaking.

Group website: http://phillycocoa.org

Read More

February CocoaHeads Meeting!

The next Philly CocoaHeads meeting will be Thursday, February 17th 7-9pm at Indy Hall. Post-meeting drinks commence afterwords; National Mechanics is our usual hangout.

You’ll need to be buzzed up, but if you are having any trouble feel free to call MikeZ’s cell (267-563-0616) and we’ll be sure to get you in.

Pizza and refreshments will be provided by our sponsor, The Neat Company. Be sure to thank them.

Please RSVP for the February 2011 meeting.

Sponsor: The Neat Company

A very special thank you to The Neat Company for sponsoring this month’s CocoaHeads meeting.

The Neat Company is hiring! We’re an innovative technology company headquartered in Philadelphia. Our scanners and software solutions are defining the digital filing cabinet category by reducing paper clutter and organizing your information. Learn more about our open positions for web, mobile, and desktop development here:

http://www.neatco.com/our-company/careers/jobs

If you have the experience and the passion, we want you on our team.

We have some of Neat’s hardware at IndyHall if you are ever curious. Additionally, Neat’s own Joe Walsh will be at the meeting to answer any questions in addition to doing a technical presentation on using Instruments.

Meeting Agenda

Introductions & Group Business

  • New site is live. What’s next?
  • Global Game Jam recap.
  • Do we want to do anything for Philly Tech Week?
  • Interest in a movie / coder / office hours night?

Xcode 4 Roundtable

Love is in the air (Happy Valentine’s Day!) and to celebrate we will have a group discussion of what’s new in Xcode 4: the things we love and things we love to hate.

Show and Tell

In addition to being an open mic to demo new apps or code, Show and Tell also invites people to bring problems or design issues they are encountering in current projects.

Using Instruments

Per member request, Joe Walsh will be doing a tech talk on the useful but sometimes daunting developer tool known as Instruments. In this talk, Joe will focus on the basics of tracking down memory leaks, performance hogs and help you find those key settings that turn the results into something human readable.

Implementing VoiceOver

After exchanging emails with a blind user of his iPhone app, Mike Zornek spent some time learning what VoiceOver is all about. Today, Mike will first demo VoiceOver use in general and then more specifically review the deficiencies of his iOS app and how he fixed them (some fixes more obvious than others).

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February Meeting Date Moved

The normal “second Thursday of the month” for February has a conflict with the popular Ignite Philly event and as there is overlap in our attendance we will be postponing the next CocoaHeads meeting till the Thursday after:

Thursday, February 17, 2011
IndyHall
7pm to 9pm

Official meeting notice with agenda will come soon. If you’d like to hold a slot to present let us know.

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January 2011 Meeting Recap

We had a great first meeting of 2011. In addition to the planned agenda we had Mike Reedell demo his Gist posting app (now in beta 2) and Corey’s demo his upgraded “new project template” including some schooling on git submodules.

Related Downloads:

Meeting Slides (keynote | pdf)

Introduction to Core Plot (keynote | pdf)

During introductions people were asked for books and blog recommendations. Feel free to share more in the comments.

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