So the SAPI hackathon came and went last weekend. Many noodle boxes and Red Bulls were consumed, and at the end of the day the Medic (iOS) app from team Bonobo +1 came out victorious.
Their application helps you easily find chemists or doctors open near you. Anyone who has had to search around for a chemist late at night will immediately see the benefit in this one, not to mention the slick interface they came up with in just two days. Hopefully we’ll see it on the App Store soon.
Although there could only be one winner, the quality of all submissions blew everyone away. The guys from Sensis were really impressed and the judging panel had a real challenge on their hands to decide the eventual winner.
A big shout out to Sensis and Taboo for organising the event and to the York Butter Factory for hosting. We all had a great time and I hope to see more iOS teams at next year’s event.
A big thank you to Sensis again for sponsoring the November Melbourne Cocoaheads Meetup. They’re hosting the iOS v’s Android SAPI hackathon this weekend, so get in quick and register if you want to be eligible for the $10,000 first prize. I’m looking forward to seeing what great apps the iOS community can put together in this two-day event.
We had some fantastic presentations from Stewart Gleadow and Chris Miles which have been recorded and will be online as soon as Oliver can work through the current backlog. In the mean time, here’s some photos from the event.
Chris Miles: Augmented Reality for iOS – Escape Reality Like A Pro
Stewart Gleadow: With the advent of Xcode 4, the built in unit testing support is now bearable. I’ll go through the basics for getting OCUnit/SenTest set up on new and existing projects, including running those tests from the command line. For those with a crush on Rspec style specs, I’ll give a brief introduction to Kiwi, which wraps the built in testing framework with a block-based syntax… and then we can all argue about the costs and benefits of unit testing, and whether we should be writing them at all.
I was away for last month’s meetup at REA, so there’s no video (sorry, we took it on our holiday), but Oliver was busy as ever capturing mug shots of the various Melbourne Cocoaheads. You can find them all on Flickr here.
Big shout out to REA for hosting again, and to PlayUp and Intunity for keeping us well watered and fed over the previous months!
Melbourne iOS developers Craig Kincaid, Jessie Collis and Alex Johnston show off their latest creations at the August 2011 Melbourne Cocoaheads meetup.
This month we have Rob Caporetto giving an overview of Cocos2D, showing a few of it’s main features and how quick it is to get a simple 2D game up & running.
We also have Cameron Rogers from Marshalls+Dent Lawyers talking about copyright and other legal issues relevant to app developers.
I won’t be able to make it to this meetup, but I have it on good authority from Luke Cunningham at REA that there’ll be the usual spread of cold beer and pizza on offer.
So, after an amazing Swipe Conference I hope you’re all keen to get right back in to Cocoaheads. This month our host is PlayUp, at their new office in St Kilda Rd.
We have one speaker lined up this month. Loukas Kalenderidis will run through a few security considerations for developing iOS apps, demonstrate some attack techniques and how to mitigate them.
Jeff Bonnes has also volunteered to do a presentation on Appcelerator Titanium.
As usual, if you have an app you’d like to demonstrate or some cool tech, let me know. There’ll be some time at the start for a few lightning talks.
This month we have two presentations:
- Sadat Rahman will walk us through the finer details of his use of IBAForms in EzyReg, how to create multi-page forms and how to submit that data to a server.
- Alex Silverman will be dropping in to give us a taste of the Big Nerd Ranch experience. Maybe we should send him home with an Akubra to one-up Aaron Hillegass
As with the Sydney Cocoaheads group, the nice people at YOW! have offered 5 free tickets to the Mobile YOW! Night, but you’ll have to rock up to Cocoaheads next Thursday to be in the running. Get along to Mobile YOW! and you could be in the running to win a free Swipe Conference ticket! Man, there’s a lot of good stuff going on in Melbourne!
