Tweeting without Twitter

During my flight to WWDC this year I could not really sleep, and the 12 hour flight was the source of memorable tweets that will never make it to Twitter. Because of timing and context, and also because of the inexcusable lack of wifi network in some major airlines.

Anyway.

I used Pages during the flight to keep track of all those insomniac, bilingual tweets, while the plane was a going through the Atlantic and Canada towards San Francisco. Some are about the flight itself, others about the Argentine film “El Secreto de sus Ojos”, and finally some about the Football World Cup. Project yourself in the situation, and enjoy the rants. I certainly did :) Continue reading

iPhone and Mac OS X Developer Conference Roundup

Here’s a quick review of the most important iPhone and Mac OS X developer conferences I’ve found on the web (in no particular order). Definitely, there’s no shortage of conferences when you need information about the latest Cocoa, Mac OS X and iPhone technologies; check this out!

  • Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference or WWDC, held every year in San Francisco, CA (USA), usually around June, and featuring presentations from Apple employees; if you’ve never been to one, believe me, you should;
  • Voices That Matter iPhone Developer Conference to be held in Boston, MA (USA) next October 17th and 18th, with (among others) Erica Sadun, Aaron Hillegass, Stephen Kochan and Marcus Zarra;
  • NSConference, to be held from January 31st to February 3rd next year near Reading (UK), and from February 21st to February 24th in the Georgia Tech Institute, GA (USA), featuring (among others) Matt Gemmell, Marcus Zarra and Aaron Hillegass;
  • The 360|iDev conference that just finished in Denver, CO (USA), which featured (among many others) Bill Dudney, Brent Simmons, and Marcus Zarra (definitely, Marcus Zarra is everywhere!);
  • The iPhone Developer Summit in Santa Clara, CA (USA) next November 3rd;
  • The iGames Summit, a conference targeted to iPhone game developers, held last March in San Francisco, CA (USA), featuring (among many others) Neil Young (from ngmoco), Andrew Lacy (from Tapulous) and Mike Mettler (from AdMob);
  • The Macoun Entwicklerkonferenz which happened last September 26th in Frankfurt (Germany);
  • The iPhone developer conference in Köln (Germany), in December 1st and 2nd;
  • And finally, the JAOO iPhone Dev Day in Zürich (Switzerland) next October 8th, featuring Raven Zachary, Alex Cone and… many others ;)

Also noteworthy, but not so much about software development I think, is the Mobile Enterprise Conference in Amsterdam (Netherlands) on November 3rd, which has a couple of tracks about the iPhone in enterprise.

Feel free to add links to other similar events elsewhere in the world!

Update, 2009-10-02: Here’s the link to Jonathan ‘Wolf’ Rentzsch’s C4 Independent Developers Conference.

Update, 2009-10-03: The Øredev 2009 Developer Conference in Malmö (Sweden) next November has iPhone / Mobile tracks too. And so will the Scandinavian Developer Conference 2010 in Göteborg (also in Sweden).

Myself on the Swiss Press

This is something that does not happen that often to me, so it deserves a blog post of its own: here’s two appearances of yours truly in the Swiss press last week. The first one is an article in the Tages Anzeiger of last Wednesday (full text available online), and the second one is an article (with photo) on the SonntagsZeitung last Sunday. Since the SonntagsZeitung article is not available online, here’s the scan of the article.

Yay! :)

Best WWDC Ever

… and WWDC 2009 is finally over.

This year’s event has been nothing short of amazing; maybe because not only the technologies presented blew my mind, but also because I met and spent some time with incredible guys, and getting in touch with the right people changes everything. So, to all of you, many thanks: @cigumo, @dlpasco, @sophiestication, @davemark, @jeff_lamarche, @markuspalmanto, @serpah, @raminf, @geraudch, @ayasin, @octopus_prime, @pjay_, @2009wwdc and all the others, in and out of Twitter, like Julio from Guatemala, the guy from Adobe (met in the queue to the hotdogs in the beer bash of Yerba Buena gardens), Sandro (aka “The Crazy Swiss Guy” of the Stump the Experts session), etc, etc, etc… with whom we’ve shared laughs, ideas, emotion, friendship and beers.

WWDC is an inspiring event: listening to the above guys, or the conferences from Smule or ngmoco:) talking about their companies, and how they grew up the past year, all of that makes me think about this new path I’m taking right now:

akosma software is born. Expect a lot.

WWDC 2009: a message for Scott Forstall

I won’t go into details into all the stuff shown during the keynote; this is just a single comment for Scott Forstall: STOP THE BLOODY DEMOS. Last year it was pretty unbearable, yet this year you managed to make it even worse.

Thankfully I am not the only one who thinks that the interminable series of demos is just a waste of our time, when all we want is to see new stuff in the SDK. We’re developers, not marketing people.

WWDC

I arrived to San Francisco yesterday night, after a dreadful connection in Frankfurt (note to self: to never, ever again book connecting flights with less than 90 minutes in between) and a great flight accross Greenland and Canada. My internal clock insists in saying that I had breakfast at 5 o’clock, but other than that, I feel great, really excited!

That flight, by the way, could have been dubbed the “WWDC Express”, as the number of guys (and gals!) typing code on Xcode was waaaaaay above the average. I had the opportunity to chat with Markus Palmanto from Finland and he showed me his amazing Accordio application! Check it out on the App Store. One of the best music instruments I’ve seen so far on the iPhone – from a great musician, too!

I won’t go through all the fuss and rumors about the next version of the iPhone… but indeed, I’m sure that we’re ready for big surprises tomorrow; for the moment, I know that tonight I’ll be attending sfMacIndie, and tomorrow evening the iPhone Intelligence party; I hope to meet many of you this week!

iPhone SDK 3.0: A New Beginning

Last year I blogged about the upcoming SDK 2.0 for the iPhone 3G, and boy did it change my life. For those who haven’t followed closely everything that happened in this blog lately, there’s been this (that’s me in the WWDC keynote main room at the Moscone center) and then that (yours truly talking at the first ever European iPhone conference). All of this has been the result of going to San Francisco last June. That particular trip changed everything; I never thought that a simple plane ticket could generate this much.

The iPhone has literally changed my professional life. But it was only the beginning. Last Tuesday, Apple announced the iPhone SDK 3.0, and I’ll expose here some thoughts about what’s coming next. Continue reading