If you're like me, you've probably been spending every waking moment you have eating, living, and breathing the iPhone SDK. Since March 6th, that's pretty much all I can think about once I get home. So, what do you do if you want to learn how to write iPhone apps, but you want to become a pro at iPhone SDK programming? Its one thing to read the SDK, page-by-page until your eyes bleed (what I do for fun), but most people like to hang out with other developers, get hands on, do labs, see demos, and generally get their hands dirty.
Lucky for us, there is such an iPhone boot camp coming up in June , Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) 2008 in San Francisco. If you were there last year, you might have even seen me present my experiences with developing the same application for WPF and Cocoa on Leopard. It was a life-changing experience for me and you'll have to chop off all my limbs to keep me away from SF this year in June. So, what can you learn about the iPhone at WWDC? Here's just a few highlights from the published session list:
3D Graphics for iPhone using Open GL ES
Address book
Core Animation Lab
Rich UIs in Safari
CSS Transforms and Animations for iPhone Web Apps
Instruments (the profiler/analyzer tool)
Objective-C, Migrating from Other Languages*
Xcode
Intro to Mac and iPhone Dev*
Intro to the iPhone Dev Tools*
iPhone Application User Interface Design
iPhone Multi-Touch Events and Gestures
Mastering iPhone Table Views
Mastering iPhone View Controllers
OpenGL ES Lab
Quartz 2D Lab
Text Input on iPhone
Understanding Table Views
Understanding View Controllers
Understanding Xcode project managment and builds
XCode: source editor, refactoring, debugger, SCM
What's new in Objective-C
Offline Data in Safari
This is just the preliminary list of sessions that they have published. I'm sure the list will be growing. Also, keep in mind that this is just the list for iPhone apps... there is an entire track for Mac OS X desktop application development and entire track for IT folks looking to understand and utilize Macs.
* = If you're new to Mac programming then these should be on your MUST list. A LOT of long-time Visual Studio users have a tough time adjusting to Xcode, even to the point of declaring hatred on the tool and walking away from the platform... Hopefully sessions like these will prevent that from happening as Xcode truly does kick ass, but it does so in a unique way that can feel alien to VS2008 programmers.
So, let's run through the pros and cons.
Pros:
An entire week of learning
An entire week hanging out with people who love Macs
iPhone!!!
Awesome tips and tricks for OS X programming
literally thousands of Apple engineers on-site who will actually answer every question you ask (unlike other *cough* conferences where they send project managers and salespeople instead of actual coders)
It's in San Francisco
Cons:
It's in San Francisco
Some people have an aversion to SF, so I listed it as a possible con. I can't find any downsides to this conference, so get off your butt and get an early-pricing ticket. Also, I think if you get the premium Apple Developer Connection membership, you get a free WWDC ticket with it!
About Kevin Hoffman Kevin Hoffman, editor-in-chief of SYS-CON's "iPhone Developer's Journal" is one of the most popular "iPhone" and "Silverlight" bloggers on the Net. Kevin has been programming since he was 10 and has written everything from DOS shareware to n-tier, enterprise Web applications in VB, C++, Delphi, and C. He is coauthor of Professional .NET Framework (Wrox Press) and co-author with Robert Foster of Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Development Unleashed. Kevin authors "The .NET Addict's Blog" at ".Net Developer's Journal" (dotnetaddict.dotnetdevelopersjournal.com).
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