Brisbane Cocoaheads

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!