360iDev Impressions - Day 2

November 11, 2010    

Tuesday opened with a informative panel that covered a bunch of issues including the upcoming Mac App Store, and Android vs. iPhone development.

Then on to Tim Burks’ Get Your Head in the Clouds talk. I learned about a lot of really cool tools I hadn’t dealt with, especially ASIHTTPRequest, which I think I will find a lot of uses for. Tim was very prepared, but it was at times a difficult talk, as he got questions ranging from subtle differences between Heroku and AppEngine to “What is this Amazon S3 you keep mentioning?”. It’s really hard to speak to an audience of just widely ranging needs and skill sets, but he did so admirably well.

Next, I went to Brent Simmons-Epic Software Re-use talk. It had many great and wise architecture insights, but I, personally, was expecting more detail, or in other words more code. The insights, though, were very valuable, so I expect as I look back on it over time, I’ll be able to get over my initial missed expectations.

Lunch was Jessica Kahn from Tapulous, now part of Disney talking about GameCenter. I really enjoyed her talk at the iPhone development class that Stanford University put up on iTunes, and her hands-on demo of GameCenter didn’t disappoint.

Next I took Brian Robbins’ class on Building a Non-Hit Driven Business, 6 months later. I had bought and watched his talk from the previous 360iDev, so it was good to hear the follow-up. I appreciate his candor and practicality, and it was the kind of real information that doesn’t show up much in books.

Group session on Tuesday ended with the “Think First, Code Later” panel, with several authors and app developers talking to us about the processes by which they design apps. A wide range of educated and experienced opinions on display there.

And then, Tuesday night, all night, we had the Game Jam, which I wrote about here.