Dienhart.com

I attended the MobileX Technology Conference at Awesome Inc. today. I went specifically for the iPhone development workshop.

Nick Holland kicked things off with some words of wisdom based on his experiences running SideHobby, Inc. He made a lot of good points about things that should be considered when developing an iPhone app, most of which had a lot to do with making sure you do your homework before making critical decisions. This included making sure that you do a "Penny Gap Analysis" to ensure your app is appropriately priced for optimum ROI. He shared his experiences with the app store, which holds as a reminder that Apple is holding all of the cards, so it's critical to play by their rules and keep your fingers crossed that they don't change the rules again. He covered a lot more, but this is what stands out the most for me.

Justin Raney (Apax Software, VP of Development) ran the Beginning iPhone Development workshop and did an excellent job of walking through the tutorials and covering a lot of material in a short amount of time. I was at a bit of a disadvantage, as when I decided to take the iPhone/iPad development plunge, I bought a mac mini, so my primary pc is a windows laptop. I've already gone through a lot of tutorials and created some test apps on my own, so I just took some good notes. I've already got C/C++, Delphi (Pascal), PERL, PHP... programming languages under my belt, so it's just a matter of weeding through similarities and differences to add ObjectiveC to the list. The guy next to me had no programming experience, and although he followed along quite well, I helped him debug missing semi-colons and other common issues that a beginner may have.

There was a cool pitching contest after the coding workshop. Wes Brooks won it "Hands Down" with his excellent pitch for wedding caption by Fotonetics.

Luke Murray, the owner of Awesome Inc. wrapped things up with a really cool and interesting speech about where he sees technolgy going and some up and coming technologies to look out for. While wrapping up, he did mention that a Chapter of MobileMonday will be starting up in Lexington in May. I'm looking forward to joining that group when it gets started.

I'm looking forward to future events and with getting more involved with this community of creative and talented minds.

Best Regards,

David