August Meeting Agenda

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

IndyHall’s main entrance is now located street level at 22 N 3rd Street. You’ll need to use the intercom to get in (#001). If you are having any trouble feel free to call MikeZ’s cell (267-563-0616). Our meeting happens on the second floor.

We’ll have pizza and refreshments available. If you can, please bring a few bucks to chip in.

Please RSVP via Meetup so we have enough Pizza.

http://www.meetup.com/PhillyCocoaHeads/

Meeting Agenda

Group Business

  • Mountain Lion Release
  • Xcode 4.4 GM (works on Lion too)
  • iOS 6 beta 4

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.

Planned Show and Tell talks include:

  • Kotaro Fujita will demo an app he did for Docphin. It takes advantage of several technologies like Sudzc, Storyboards, ARC and few other minor niceties.

Talks

  • Mike Zornek will do a walk through of his current project code architecture reviewing how he’s broken things down to be DRY (don’t repeat yourself) and less brittle.

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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July Meeting Agenda

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

IndyHall has expanded to included the first floor and its entrance has moved. It’s to the right of the old doors, street level. Shouldn’t be too hard to find. You’ll need to use the intercom to get in (#001). If you are having any trouble feel free to call MikeZ’s cell (267-563-0616).

We’ll have pizza and refreshments available. If you can, please bring a few bucks to chip in.

Please RSVP via Meetup so we have enough Pizza.

http://www.meetup.com/PhillyCocoaHeads/

Meeting Agenda

Group Business

  • IndyHall membership drive.
  • WWDC videos and code

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.

Planned Show and Tell talks include:

  • Hugh O’Neill will demo a new game he is working on.

Talks

  • Kotaro Fujita will talk about the Unity3D game engine and his use of it at the recent Philly Game Jam 2012.
  • CocoaPods by Jose Ibanez. CocoaPods is a tool to help manage library dependencies in Objective-C projects.

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 14th 7-9pm at IndyHall. Post-meeting drinks commence afterwords; National Mechanics is our usual hangout.

IndyHall has expanded to included the first floor and its entrance has moved. It’s to the right of the old doors, street level. Shouldn’t be too hard to find. You’ll need to use the intercom to get in (#001). If you are having any trouble feel free to call MikeZ’s cell (267-563-0616).

We’ll have pizza and refreshments available. If you can, please bring a few bucks to chip in.

Please RSVP via Meetup so we have enough Pizza.

http://www.meetup.com/PhillyCocoaHeads/

Meeting Agenda

Group Business

  • IndyHall membership drive.

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.

Planned Show and Tell talks include:

  • Mike Zornek will share some of his early success and pitfalls using the iOS theming APIs to customize the look of a new app.
  • Peter Sody will talk about Python on Mac OS X, covering automation (AppKit, ScriptingBridge) and also about aspects of creating a Python OS X App.

Talks

The rest of the meeting we’ll have a round table discussion of iOS 6 news. If anyone gets an opportunity to test any of the new APIs our I’d love to see demos. I’m particularly interested in UICollectionView.

What’s New in iOS 6
https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/#releasenotes/General/WhatsNewIniPhoneOS/Articles/iOS6.html

iOS 6 beta Release Notes
https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/#releasenotes/General/RN-iOSSDK-6_0/_index.html

iOS 6 beta API Diffs
https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/#releasenotes/General/iOS60APIDiffs/index.html

** These links only worked in Safari for me. Chrome reported bad headers.

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 10th 7-9pm at IndyHall. 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’ll have pizza and refreshments available. If you can, please bring a few bucks to help chip in.

Please RSVP via Meetup so we have enough Pizza.

http://www.meetup.com/PhillyCocoaHeads/

Meeting Agenda

Group Business

  • WWDC is June 11th (sold out)
  • Our June meeting will be the 14th so I’m sure we’ll have stuff to talk about.
  • SnipSnap released and featured

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.

Planned Show and Tell talks include:

  • Kostas Nasis will have a quick follow-up on the Git sync stuff he talked about last month. He’ll also talk a bit about the various “backend-as-a-service” providers that have been popping up (Parse, Kinvey, StackMob, CloudMine, etc); the differences and similarities, and his experience with trying each one out.
  • Mike Zornek will review how the Shindig team is embracing code reviews via pull requests in its various repos. He’ll show how it works, why we do it and how you might be able to get started.

Talks

Unfortunately we don’t have a scheduled talk yet. If you have something you’d like to present let me know. The fallback will be either round room discussion or perhaps group viewing of a recent programming talk (I’m thinking Mike Ash’s Defensive Programming talk from Boston VTM — it was really good.)

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

Read More

April Meeting Agenda

The next Philly CocoaHeads meeting will be Thursday, April 12th 7-9pm at IndyHall. 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’ll have pizza and refreshments available. If you can, please bring a few bucks to help chip in.

Please RSVP for April meeting on Meetup.

http://www.meetup.com/PhillyCocoaHeads/events/55239362/

This will help us make sure we have enough pizza. Important stuff!

Meeting Agenda

Group Business

  • Philly Tech Week is coming!
  • Mobile Lightning
  • April Office hours canceled for PTW.

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.

Planned Show and Tell talks include:

  • Kostas Nasis has been working on a system that uses Git binary diffs to update assets on the iOS devices. He’ll discuss, demo and take questions.
  • Corey Floyd will talk about “How to abuse NSOperationQueue for fun and profit” or YAIaRDCS (Yet Another Images and Remote Data Caching System)
  • Conrad Kramer is a young iOS programmer and recent acquaintance of our own Kostas. He’ll be showing off some of his projects and can answer your questions about iOS jail-breaking and Cyanide.

Talks

Modern iOS Unit Testing with Kiwi

Kiwi’s goal is to bring rspec style, easy to read unit testing to iOS development. In this talk Mike Zornek will show you how to get started with Kiwi, why it’s better than the default OCUnit, and how he is using in in a new iOS project.

https://github.com/allending/Kiwi

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

Read More

March Meeting Agenda

The next Philly CocoaHeads meeting will be Thursday, March 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.

Sponsor: The Neat Company

The Neat Company creates integrated software and scanning solutions that help you tame your paper moister. Transform receipts, business cards, and documents into organized digital files that are easy to user, easy to find, and easy to share. Think of it as a digital filing cabinet - a place to track and manage all your information - except without the paper, or the filing cabinet.

Neat is a Philly-based, with software products ranging from Mac and Windows desktop applications to the soon to-be-launched Neat Cloud platform, which will include iOS and Android apps.

Meeting Agenda

Group Business

  • Philly Tech Week

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.

Planned Show and Tell talks include:

  • Kostas Nasis will be showing off some new tech including the latest build of SnipSnap.
  • Michael Raber would like feedback on the tools his company has been working on. The tools make it easier and faster to build iOS app front ends.
  • The Neat Company will be demoing it’s latest products and current job openings.

Talks

Automating your Xcode Builds by Alfie Hanssen

Xcode automated build and OTA distribution via ruby, bash, and a wee bit of Apple Script. Touching on use-cases, code signing, keychain intricacies, and more.

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

Read More

February Office Hours

We’ll be holding our regularly scheduled Office Hours at IndyHall this Thursday, February 23rd, from 6pm till 9pm.

Office Hours is an event that lets hobbyists work next to experienced developers, encourages lots of question asking, pair programming and mentoring. We welcome programmers of all backgrounds and platforms but tend to focus on Mac/iOS.

If you plan to stop by please send a short email to Mike Zornek. Thanks!

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February Meeting Agenda

The next Philly CocoaHeads meeting will be Thursday, February 9th 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

Group Business

  • Assistant wanted for keeping meeting notes, spell checking, marketing help.

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.

Planned Show and Tell:

  • Anthony Coombs, looking for feedback on a new project.

Talks

Introduction to Objective-C categories and key/value coding by Michael Raber

Michael has come to love some of the cool features of Objective-C that you might not discover while learning iOS and Mac programming. Categories can be used to add methods to classes without subclassing and key/value coding can be used to set and retrieve property values.

Michael will introduce the topics and show some example use cases. If you have used categories please post your favorites to share here:

https://gist.github.com/1761047

UIViewController Containment by Matt Thomas

Matt will be doing a talk on UIViewController Containment covering:

  • The basic concept behind the “View Controller Pattern” and the difference between “content” and “container” view controllers.
  • How iOS 5 formalized the concept of a container view controller.
  • The odd dual hierarchies between “View Hierarchies” and “View Controller Hierarchies”.
  • Apple’s built-in container controller.
  • Why you would want to implement your own container view controller
  • How to implement your own container view controller, tips, and pitfalls

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

Read More

January Office Hours

We’ll be holding our regularly scheduled Office Hours at IndyHall this Thursday, January 26th, from 6pm till 9pm.

Office Hours is an event that lets hobbyists work next to experienced developers, encourages lots of question asking, pair programming and mentoring.

We welcome programmers of all backgrounds and platforms but tend to focus on Mac/iOS. If you’d like help with Android let us know in advance and we’ll try to get someone from the Android Alliance to be available.

If you plan to stop by please send a short email to Mike Zornek. Thanks!

Read More

January Meeting Agenda

The next Philly CocoaHeads meeting will be Thursday, January 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

  • Assistant Wanted for keeping meeting notes, spell checking, marketing help.
  • Should we continue doing Office Hours?
  • Any other goals for the new year?
  • Want to spruce up website a bit, volunteers welcome.

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.

Planned Show and Tell items:

UXFlip Demo by Michael Raber

UXFlip is a new technology making it easier to build and manage the building of the UI for mobile apps. We would love early feedback on the concept and for developers to poke holes in the idea or implementation.

Implementing a RFID scanner on iOS by Mike Zornek

Mike recently did a small project to prototype a RFID scanner for iOS. Was a fairly painless process. He’ll demo how it went down and what you should look for if interested.

Talks

RestKit by Corey Floyd

Per their website: RestKit is an Objective-C framework for iOS that aims to make interacting with RESTful web services simple, fast and fun. It combines a clean, simple HTTP request/response API with a powerful object mapping system that reduces the amount of code you need to write to get stuff done.

Corey will walk us through how he is using RestKit in his latest iOS project.

Cocoa Quiz

The quiz show from our canceled holiday meeting has been refactored. We’ll have a little trivia on the code and culture of Apple, awarding software license prizes as we go. Bring your thinking cap.

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

Read More