In October I read about the iPhone Tech Talk tour and immediately registered for the event. I’m still teaching myself Cocoa so I thought this could be helpful. Only a week before the actual start time people got their registration confirmations and I was one of the lucky few. While I can’t go into detail about the content of the event, since I’m bound by the NDA. Which is strange to say the least, wouldn’t you want people who take the time to go to your event to talk about it with others?
Anyway, the actual agenda varied from the one posted on the website. The presentations I saw were:
- iPhone Development Overview
- iPhone User Interface Design
- iPhone Development Tools Overview and Programming Concepts
- Introduction to Objective-C and Cocoa Touch
- Developing iPhone Applications with UIKit
- Maximizing Your Application’s Performance on iPhone
- Submitting to the App Store using iTunes Connect
If you compare this with their original list, you see that there were a lot more sessions than originally planned and as a result the speaker had a lot of trouble fitting it all in his schedule. Which is disappointing, removing two or three topics would have been better especially since there was a lot of overlap between some of them. User Interface Design for instance explained all the different controls available and this was repeated again in the UIKit presentation. What would have been better was explaining the concepts behind it in the first session and then actually implementing a sample application using the UIKit. Model View Controller was also explained three times, why not explain it once and show code the second time. Knowing the theory behind it is good, but actually showing us why some things are in place would have been better.
Did all this make it a useless event? Certainly not, if there is one in the future I hope I will be able to attend again and because this was the first time Apple organized something like this they probably still have to learn what content fits and what not.
And ow yeah, catering was excellent! 😉
