Is everyone (in Canada) ready for the long weekend? I know I am! I thought I’d write a post before I head up to my parents’ cottage for the weekend, where I won’t have a computer, let alone access to the internet.

Wednesday night we had the 2nd Toronto iPhone Developer Meet-Up, which was a great success in my mind. We had two great presentation by local iPhone devs. James Eberhardt was able to secure us space at the Rich Media Institute, which turned out to be perfect. There was beer that could be bought, and we had a great conference room with a projector for the presentations. I’m extremely pleased with where the meet-up seems to be heading. I think everyone who came, that I talked to, enjoyed the format. I think we’ll try to stick with the format of two short (15 mins or less) presentations, followed by socializing and drinks.

If you missed the meet-up, the presenters have graciously posted their presentation slides on their sites.

• Rules You Should Break in the App Store (www.xinsight.ca – PDF) – Jason Moore from xinsight gave a presentation on tips and tricks for making the most of the App Store.
• iPhone + Box2D (blog.zincroe.com) – Luke Lutman from zinc Roe Design gave a presentation on using the open source Box2D physics engine with iPhone. He has posted his short presentation slides (that we saw) as well as a longer presentation and an example source code project.

A big thanks to both presenters! It was a great way to kick off the new format for the meetings. I think everyone enjoyed it.

If you haven’t already, please join the Facebook group for the meet-up. It’s called Mobile Developer & Designers of Toronto. I look forward to seeing you in June!

As I mentioned previously, I had be writing a chapter for a book on iPhone development. I’m pleased to say that I submitted my first draft to the publisher this week. As such, I was able to do some coding towards the end of the week. Yay!

I started working on stuff for the Dapple 1.2 update. The biggest new feature will be the inclusion of world-wide leaderboards for the game. I’ve decided to use Google’s App Engine as the server-side technology, as it scales nicely and it means that if I did somehow introduce some kind of server-side security flaw (which I don’t think I have), it’s not running on my own web server.

I’m two days into things and I’m quite impressed with the App Engine stuff. Sure, I had to learn Python pretty quickly, but at this point the server-side stuff is pretty much done. I’m sure it will need some tweaking once I actually hook the game up to it, but all my tests are working. I can add high scores to the database and I can retrieve them in a few different ways. Today I’ll be starting to work on the game-side implementation, which will probably be more work than the server-side. I have to make a few UI changes in the game to support local vs. global high scores and handle all the error cases around connecting to the server. I’m hoping to have something I can send out to testers by mid-late next week.

It feels good to get back to coding again. There are a few other things I want to put into the 1.2 update as well. I’m hoping to submit to Apple by the end of the month. After that, I’ll actually be able to start working on my next project. Shocking!

Have a good (long) weekend everyone!

Owen

This entry was posted on Friday, May 15th, 2009 at 8:44 am and is filed under iPhone, iPhone Dev Meetup, Technical, Testing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.