Adventures at the Toronto iPhone Tech Talk

Yesterday Matt and I had the grueling task of traveling to the iPhone tech talk here in Toronto, the first Apple event for me. We travelled by foot, streetcar, train, bus….no planes. When we got there I was pleasantly surprised by the experience.

In my mind I had envisioned some weird, up tight Apple love/hate fest. On the love side I could see Fanboys clutching their newly purchased Macbook Pro’s, preaching the gospel of Cupertino. On the hate side you have disgruntled devs waiting to pounce on any Apple official, just desperate to exact some form of revenge in retribution for the wrong they’ve be subjected. Then you’d have the actual Apple employee’s, acting way too cool for school, emanating displeasure for even having to speak to you.

Thankfully the above scenario never played out. The attendants were all just normal people, eager to learn more about the platform that they’ve come to love, but pining to have much needed questions answered. Apple employees were friendly and more then happy to help you with any questions or concerns you had.

The day started off with the tech kick off. A great little intro to why we were there, and just how many possibilities there are on the platform. In all honesty it felt a little “markety” (not a word) to me. I don’t want to be over sold, I’m here aren’t I? But it did make me feel good about myself, like in some wide-eyed way I’m apart of something special.

Your body cannot process that much blue cheese, it just can’t!

After being hoisted up to feel that I too can be a globetrotting game developer, I came back down reality, I’m here for the nitty gritty. I want the details.

At this point Matt and I split up. Matt being the audiophile he is, he jumped into “Audio Development Tips for iPhone”. I stuck around in the main room for “Effective iPhone App Development”.

I had a feeling that this talk would be a little basic, and it was, but it did have some good tidbits of info regarding the way the local file system works and strategies for properly caching data.

After that Matt and I switched it up. He caught part 2 of “Effective iPhone App Development” and I caught “Adding In App Purchase to iPhone”.

Now I wouldn’t call the In App Purchasing talk electrifying, it was what it was, but it gave a great view of how the whole system works from start to finish. Very needed information for our next super secret application - shhhhhh.

Up next, lunch. Not a bad lunch. A tasty little sandwich and salad. Included was a nice dose of wit, a shiny red apple was added to round out the meal. Oh Apple, you are hilarious!

Now came the talk I was really interested in, “Mastering OpenGL ES”, a 2 parter no doubt.

Now I’m no OpenGL expert, I can get some primitives spinning around without the Apple template, so I wasn’t sure what I was in for. How advanced is this gonna get I asked myself. Will I be forced to leave due to an unaddressed brain hemorrhage? I can tell you’re worried, so rest assured the worst did not occur. Actually the talk was great. There were many concepts discussed to consider when approaching the design of your draw routines. Unfortunately the presenter spent a little too much time I found on ingraining the differences between the 2 different GPU’s; because of this he had to race through a lot of the texture and geometry topics. Still though, at the end of the day we came away with a lot of good stuff.

Once again it was time for Matt and I to part was. Divide and conquer is the only strategy at an event like this. Matt headed over to “Networking: From Sockets to GameKit”, which he described later as “informative” (That’s a lie, I can’t remember what he said, except that he now wants to make a multiplayer game). I went to the lab to get some questions answered.

It was this part of the event that really sold me. You’ve got all these Apple Engineers, there to help. Bring your laptop, plunk in front of them, point at the screen and ask “why?”. It seemed for the most part they were helping a lot of people out. Unfortunately for me they couldn’t answer the question Dayton keeps bugging me about - how do you tint the background layer of the keyboard? The New York Times does it, Starbucks does it, do I need to bribe them with free coffee and subscriptions? (They did give some things to try, so if I figure it out I’ll post it up here.)

I then caught the Push Notification talk (another important element to our super secret app), which once again was informative, but nothing too exciting to report.

At the end Matt and I retired to a bench to gorge on cheese and drink some wine. I would have preferred sliders and beers but I guess that’s just not Apple’s style.

All in all it was a great experience. The information and support that was available was invaluable and the price tag was pretty nice as well, I guess that’s where our $100 goes for a developer account.

And with that I will leave you with some champion advice that will no doubt guide you through the course of your career and life. Your body cannot process that much blue cheese, it just can’t!