“It is aaaall over!” To quote Mike Goldberg of the UFC. To be honest, the finish wasn’t all that exciting, I got a baby-blue T-shirt. The event was a bit different from other events I’ve been to. First of all they made it very clear that the event was under NDA, meaning no bloging (oops), no photography (oooops) etc. Very Apple to prevent the community to share ideas and  solutions.

The event was all about introducing application development to newcomers to the Mac family and more specifically the iPhone platform. Not surprisingly 95% of the attendees raised their hands on the question “are you new to iPhone development?”, being such a new platform I can’t see many people outside of Apple who consider themselves senior iPhone developers. They day was divided into different sessions:

Introduction & Development overview
The emphasis was on “what makes an application great” and “how to build a great application”. It was very interesting to hear Apples’ own receipt to a great application. Key ingredients for a great application:

  • Write an application statement – what is your application supposed to do. Keep this as short and simple as possible.
  • Spend more time on design than what you would normally do. Apple suggests you spend 35-40% of your application development time on design.
  • Less is more. Don’t bloat your application with features. It’s better to have less features which are perfect. If you don’t have time to perfect the feature, discard it.
  • Focus on performance and stability. Slow or crashing applications doesn’t get good reviews and applications with bad reviews doesn’t sell.
  • Use animations to inform the user what is happening on the screen. For example: adding a sliding animation when changing views makes it easy for the user to understand that things changed on the screen. Avoid, or be very cautious, using animations just because it’s cool or fun. It can quickly become annoying for the user.

iPhone user interface design
They basically showed the controls available to create applications. Not very exciting.

iPhone integration and application development for IT
I made a choice to attend this one, unfortunately. There were split sessions and I thought this session would be more about developing apps for the enterprise, which it wasn’t. It was all talk about how to set up configuration profiles etc to roll out iPhone as a device in the business. Boring.

Developing iPhone applications with UIKit
This session was hosted by an apple developer specialist from Italy, who just like me had a cold. It was an interesting session showing controls in UIKit and some hints on when to subclass them and not. There were also some performance tips. After the session I got a chance to ask the specialist (I can’t remember his name), about interface rotation which I did struggle a bit with in my application. It turns out I did things right, there is no built in support for only rotating a part of the application. In my application I have an image gallery which is much like in the Facebook app and I want to support rotating the images but I don’t want the entire app to rotate. A feature like this must be implemented by yourself. He seemed a bit confused about the whole scenario, “Why wouldn’t you want to rotate the entire application?”. I might write up a demo app that support this scenario, I bet there are quite a few people who faced the same problems I did.

Submitting apps to App Store
Another Italian guy, the same who held the introduction, talked about how to get an app onto App Store. I am about to start a submission process for the first time myself so this was very interesting. Emphasis was on localization and how to make the best application launch possible. There were many jokes about the French being very anal about having everything localized in French.

That was that. I got a tee before I left that I will try to sell on an on line auction to see how much geeks are really willing to pay. I accidentally sat down right next to an old colleague when arriving for the first session and I also noted that Mikael Runhem from EPiServer attended the tech talks.

Pictures secretly taken with my iPhone. Don’t tell!

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