Whew. That’s a long title for a long day! I got out early this morning to catch the Amazon Web Services Developer Garage and the iPhone Dev Camp Satellite at Cohabitat here in Dallas. It’s a great amount of crossover for me. I’ve developed web sites applications before and have often considered developing my own applications for market. Now that I’m in a position that is more creative and less monotonous, I have a lot more mental energy to pursue these. So, Amazon Web Services is a great way of rolling out applications. In addition, my new role at work actually involves Macs, and my new department is responsible for developing iPhone applications. The day seemed like the perfect way of getting involved with the community and getting some new knowledge in the bargain.
The AWS Dev Garage started first. The presentation was good, presenting a lot of information regarding the benefits of the platform, as well as some information about using the built-in features that Amazon offers to make money by selling products that Amazon offers. A nifty bonus for those who have this interest. The presentation that we had was light on the technical detail that I really wanted to see, so we didn’t get into the nitty gritty of actual usage. I think a lot of us there were developers, and would have liked to see this. To be fair, when I originally got the invitation for the AWS, it did list lab stuff after the presentations that were supposed to last until 4, but the afternoon was usurped by the iPhone Dev Camp. I made a suggestion that we should have an all day lab sessions to cover account creation setup, image loading, and applications deployment, as well as S3 integration. I’m going to be hunting for an AWS ninja to help me out with this, I think.
The iPhone Dev Camp satellite started after lunch. Despite a few projector and technical difficulties, we finally got a chance to watch the iPhone Dev Camp introductions, as well as the keynote speech by Andrew Stone (@twittelator). After the fascinating keynote, we spent a bit of time drinking root beer floats and chatting about the platform. There was a lot of opinion regarding the future, and the was, rightfully, a small amount of fear when chatting about Google Voice and what has transpired recently. In a room full of people relatively new to the platform, there is always a moment of hesitation in spending your time learning a new platform, programming a great app, and then having it rejected from the app store, or worse still, accepted and then completely removed later for arbitrary reasons. There are definitely issues that have to be addressed to allow developers to be more comfortable on the platform, befre
We discussed the Android platform, too. There was a general feeling that the Android platform still has plenty of room for growth, and the adoption of Android by multiple carriers as well as the various Android devices coming to market are sure to create and expansion of demand for applications on that platform as well. The issue with the Android system is that the “open” nature allows the system to take a number of forms and work on a number of devices with various configurations. This means that applications developed on Android may be limited to specific devices based upon the applications configuration needs (screen size, device/processor speed, etc). In the end, for all it’s faults, the iPhone looks poised to remain the largest “develop-once” mobile application platform. 40M strong, and likely to grow.
After the discussion, we broke off into a few groups. Most of user were essentially newbs, so we all broke off into a single group to review application basics, as well as getting familiar with XCode. It was an enlightening introduction, and really gave us an starting point for understanding how to get our application going. We also discussed books for the beginning iPhone developer:
Beginning iPhone 3 Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK
Programming in Objective C 2.0 (Second Edition)
A shout out to Chris Stewart (@socialtopher) for running our group of fresh iPhone wannabes.
Additional shout outs go to Ray Gao for setting up and running the AWS Developer Garage, Gene Kim for setting up the iPhone Dev Camp Satellite, and Blake Burris for letting us chill out at Cohabitat to do it all. It was a great time, and I met a lot of interesting people.
August 1st, 2009 | Uncategorized