Anthony and I (drnic) recently started reading a new Cocoa blog from an Australian developer Matt Gallagher (Cocoa with Love) and it is chock full of weekly awesomeness, like Drawing gloss gradients in CoreGraphics and A Cocoa application driven by HTTP data.

Matt is now coming up to our next Brisbane CocoaHeads meeting to talk about things that are top secret, highly-classified, and no Apple staff allowed. Sounds very exciting!

He's also release an iPhone app to the AppStore (FuelView) and works as an iPhone consultant in Melbourne.

His own blurb:

Matt Gallagher is a professional Cocoa/Objective-C programmer working for his own software development/consulting company, OnceBuilt, in Melbourne, after previously working research roles in computer vision, image processing and human-computer interaction as well as programming for console games and embedded systems.

Outside of work, his blog, cocoawithlove.com offers programming advice, tips and tutorials for Cocoa developers. He has also released Magic Number Machine (a free, open source, extended precision, "expression view", scientific calculator) and recently, FuelView (an iPhone and iPod touch application for accessing FuelWatch prices in Western Australia).

So, definitely come along on the 6th of October, 2008 at the Toowong Library around 6.30-7pm until 9am for a taste of interstate Cocoa love.

Last night we had our third Brisbane Cocoaheads meeting, great to see we picking up steam and seeing some regulars.

First of all we had Rob Keniger give us an introduction to the WebKit Bridge, which allows you to use HTML and Javascript within a Cocoa app, and bridge between Cocoa and Javascript. Download the code

Next up we had Dr Nic assisted by Anthony Mittaz try and throw together a quick app to download a contact list from Highrise and display it it an iPhone Table View, when we had to pack up we had the table view almost working correctly, and the data fetching was still to be done.

Watching someone else code, I picked up two shortcuts name Cmd + Double Click a class name to view its header definiation Option + Double Click on a class name to view its documentation

Next Meeting: 7pm October 6th @ Toowong Library

Also if you haven’t subscribe to the cocoaheadsau mailing go do so now, the Brisbane list will soon be retired

This summary is a week overdue but I think it's still worth putting up.

Last Monday's Brisbane CocoaHeads meeting was a great success. There were some new faces and some good discussions. It started early for some members with some general hacking around waiting for others to show up.

Presentations

Anthony Mittaz

Neither of the planned presentations were given, however a few good impromptu ones did! The meet up officially started with a few people introducing themselves around the table, each explaining their interests, projects, and development history. We got about half way through the introductions when one of the members, Anthony Mittaz, started a brief commentary on threading using the NSOperation class. Pretty quickly, a whiteboard marker was put in Anthony's hand. Of course, the whiteboard failed miserably (it was too dark and the marker only lasted about two words), so we all volunteered him to show us some code using the projector.

Forty minutes later or so, we had all had the pleasure of seeing the inner workings of two of Anthony's applications: a Cocoa application for searching RealEstate.com.au and an iPhone version of the same. He walked the new Cocoa users (almost all of us) through the life cycle of the application search function, giving a nice summary of how NSOperation is used and how it contrasts with other threading approaches.

We also got to see how his app integrated with QuickLook and used metadata to be index-able by Spotlight. All of us kept begging for source and information. By the end of our demands we'd also got to see some Core Data code and listen to Anthony's challenges porting the application to the iPhone. These challenges included finding a useful XML Parsing library and memory management.

Anthony sent me a beta version of his RealEstate application, which besides a few bugs was overall pretty impressive (I'd certainly use it over the realestate.com.au website). Unfortunately RealEstate.com.au are afraid of exactly this and are trying to block its release.... Bastards! I'll ask Anthony if i can post a few screen shots for any who had missed the presentation.

Bodaniel Jeanes

I (Bodaniel Jeanes) then gave a bit of rant about jail-broken iPhones and showed of some of the file system on my device. I have been experimenting with Carrier Bundles and hidden preferences and thought I'd share some of my findings. Mostly easy stuff but still fun for me nonetheless!

Wrap-Up

One would have hoped we'd get back to the rest of the introductions after two hours of ranting and frantic discussion. Unfortunately, I am pretty sure there were a few voices who didn't get heard. If so, make sure you speak up next time and we'll get the introductions out of the way first thing!

Remember, join the Google group at http://groups.google.com/group/brisbane-cocoaheads for notices, discussions, queries, etc. You can also catch most of us in #cocoaheadsau on FreeNode.

Anyone want to step up for a presentation at the next meeting? The next meeting will be as always on the first Monday of the month at the Toowong Library. Be there at 6.30pm for a 7pm start.

Great meeting you all!

This month, we have Dr Nic is showing us what he has been learning with Nu, which is a LISP like scripting language for Cocoa development, including running Nu on iPhone. Bodaniel Jeanes is planning on showing us some RubyCocoa provided his hacking goes, according to plan, and Alan Harper is hoping to give a crash intro to CoreData.

There will probably be some time for hacking, so by all means bring along your Mac, and we’ll probably have some 3G internet access.

When? Monday, August 4th, arrrive 6.30ish for a 7pm start
Where? Toowong Library, Toowong Village Shopping Centre (rooftop parking is closest)

Afterwards we’ll be going to Jackpot for a bite to eat and a drink or two

Pragmatic Programmers are at it again, with an iPhone book due out in December. I am a fan of their books, usually getting me up to speed on Rails, TextMate, and a few other topic, so I’ll be keeping an eye for this one. No beta book as of yet, which would be nice, I guess it’s just too soon.

With the release of Apple’s SDK for building iPhone applications, many have plunged head-first into this new platform for the first time, with the new-found excitement that comes in discovering something entirely new and innovative. The energy surrounding the iPhone has been building steadily since its release last June, and Apple’s initial “beta” offering of their SDK gave developers many of the tools they needed to get engaged. Within a short time, however, the community hit a brick wall in many respects, leaving many disenchanted by the restrictions imposed on developers. While Apple insists that the SDK provides the same tools used to create their own software, developers have found that they don’t have access to the same low-level functions of the iPhone, such as the ability to run applications in the background, build certain types of objects, or use low-level frameworks such as CoreSurface, Celestial, or LayerKit — all of which provide direct access to graphics and sound components. These, along with many other features, are found in Apple’s own applications, but nowhere to be found in the SDK.

Read On

Well Vodafone, have announced their plans today, and juding from Twitter and Mactalk, people are not happy.

Basically 24 month contract, $69 cap with only 250MB data, and $189 for the 8Gb iPhone.

Come join us on #cocoaheadsau on freenode, discussing this and and good old Cocoa

UPDATE: pricing has been pulled again, looks like they realised people have an issue with the pricing

Yay we had our 1st meeting!! 9 developers attended plus a wife and child. We all sat around the tables and I gave an introduction to Objective-C and Xcode/Interface Builder to build two apps: one for Cocoa and one for the iPhone.

Well, it was one app – the RandomApp from Hillegass’s great book on Cocoa Programming

The iPhone app was almost a direct port of the Cocoa app. We used the “Cocoa Application” template for the Cocoa app, and then “View-based Application” template for the iPhone app. The latter creates two NIBs (.xib files), so you use the one who’s name starts with the application name (not MainWindow.xib). Both had the two buttons (“Change seed” and “Generate number”), both had a label for the output, and both had a controller to connect it all together.

The significant difference was that you use a UILabel for iPhone instead of NSTextField (configured as a Label). A minor difference in the Interface Builder – both called ‘Label’ in the Library – but their “set a value” APIs are different.

The NSTextField has both setStringValue: and setIntValue: methods via the NSControl superclass. The UILabel class did not; instead it has a text property (giving setText: and text setter/getter methods). So, to convert the generated integer into a string, we used:

Whereas for the Cocoa version with NSTextField we just did:

Finally, the iPhone app was demonstrated being built and run on an iPod Touch. Sexy!

After the meeting, several people indicated they’d love a weekly “NSCoder” hacking session. No presentations, just sitting around and coding. What a great way to learn new things. More information to come.

It was a great first meeting. The next CocoaHeads meeting will be the 4th of August.

AGENDA:

Beginners: there are lots of Objective-C/Cocoa design patterns to discuss. Perhaps more useful for Cocoa + iPhone is delegates. Who’s up for doing 20minutes introducing them and showing a few very common uses of delegates + protocols?

Advanced: this will be our first meeting since the iPhone will have been released on the 11th of July. I’m confident various people will want to show off the interesting frameworks + code examples; such as for the GPS!