Spilling the Beans
September 28th, 2009
Remeber NSCoder Night this Tuesday (29th of September 2009) 19:00 at Café Retro, Knabrostræde 26, Copenhagen. Bring your Mac and come code with friends, please leave a comment below if you are attending.
September 21st, 2009
Remeber NSCoder Night this Tuesday (22nd of September 2009) 19:00 at Café Retro, Knabrostræde 26, Copenhagen. Bring your Mac and come code with friends, please leave a comment below if you are attending.
September 12th, 2009
Remeber NSCoder Night this Tuesday (15th) 19:00 at Café Retro, Knabrostræde 26, Copenhagen. Bring your Mac and come code with friends, please leave a comment below if you are attending.
September 11th, 2009
CCDC is approaching, and I am taking a moment, to provide all participants with some more detailed information.
CCDC will be held at KEA – Lygten, which is a school that, amongst many things, educates multimedia-engineers.
CCDC will pay nothing to Lygten for using their fabulous venue, that is why CCDC is so cheap. The 150 DKK is to cover expenses for cleaning the school afterwards, the schools cleaning company will do the job for 2500,- any money left will be given to a charity, please email me if you have any ideas.
There will be three meals during the whole weekend, saturday “Øredev 2009? is sponsoring brunch and dinner. “Øredev” is a conference for software developers that takes place in november in Malmø.
Sunday “comprendo” will be paying for brunch, comprendo is an advertising agency, and a pioneer of iPhone application development in Denmark, through a network of peers known as “iPP”.
The food will be delivered by the catering company that normally works at the school, MealsOnWeels, and I heard from the schools principle that they make delicious meals.
It is a good idea to bring fruit and refreshments for the rest of the event, the school is located on Nørrebro, that means there is several of pizza joints nearby if hunger should strike you durring your late-night coding.
Friday there will be a bar for the students of the school, we are welcome to mingle with them, the CCDC introduction will start at 20:00 friday.
During the introduction the “theme” will be announced, all applications that wish to enter the competition must reflect the theme. After the introduction the “pitching session” will commence, this is the time you find the project you want to work on, and the team-mates you want to work with, everybody can contribute with ideas, and as soon as your team is established, and registered (through an online google form), you are allowed to start coding.
There will always be someone at the school, though you can leave during the evenings to sleep at home, it is possible to sleep at the school, just remember to bring your camping gear (you will be sleeping indoors, so leave the tents at home).
If you do not want to participate in the competition, and just work on your own project from home, you are more than welcome. We would love to se what you are working on during the “open mic” session saturday night.
All applications must be handed in to the judges at 14:00 sunday deployed on a device, or a simulator, the App presentations will start 14:15, after everyone has been heard, the judges will decide who wins the loot, sponsored by nabz.dk, comprendo, and Joachim Bondo (we are looking for more loot, if your company wants to sponsor the event with physical goods, then let me know).
Information for programmers.
You need the development tools installed (developer.apple.com), and if you want to deploy your code on a device, apply for the iPhone developer program, getting in can take some time, so you better do it sooner or later. One person from the team would need a developer license, but if you want to be sure you can deploy your code on a device, go to developer.apple.com and pay + sign-up.
Most of the lectures assume that you know Objective-C, and at-least understand the basic principles of the language. If you want to get the most out of the event, and the lectures, CCDC recommends you to take a day to dive into the fabulous world of XCode and Objective-C, several resources are listed below.
Remember the lectures will be Saturday, and we already start coding Friday night, so it is essential for participating programmers to have some experience with objective-c before we start.
Information for Designers and Artists.
There is not much you need to prepare, just bring your own computer, though reading the iPhone HIG could be a good thing, it can be found here.
September 9th, 2009
As the first western government in the world Canada has probed it’s citizens for their opinion, on what Canada’s next copyright reform should consist of (if any other governments have done this, please correct me). The deadline for voicing your opinion on Canada’s next copyright bill (C-61) is this Sunday, so remember to email your suggestions to the Canadian government before then.
September 8th, 2009
It appears that C64 has been pulled from the App Store, because of the ability to enable BASIC. The developer has kindly asked if he could rephrase one of his answers, and I could remove his prior answer from my blog, I have agreed to do so, if I was allowed to make a post of this redaction, so no shady business occurs.
Me: Will it be possible to program the emulator from within the emulator?
[original answer REDACTED]
Yes and no, as mentioned before, BASIC has been disabled in the current version due to the rules of App Store, “interpreters” are not permitted, we have disabled it for now in order to enable it later if we succeed in convincing Apple about allowing it back in.
I will save a copy of the original interview, and I hope to post it in it’s original form sometime in the future, but for now I will kindly submit to the developers request.
September 8th, 2009
Recently I have been watching talks on TED on the subject “biomimicry” (by Janine Benyus and Robert Full), which is the concept of looking at natures solutions as inspiration, for solving our own engineering challenges. An example of biomimicry could be cooling a building without air-condition, by looking at the way termites have cooled their mounds for millennia, this does not mean they fill a building with termites and let them work it out, they simply replicate some of the principles of mound-architecture into human-architecture.
This got me wondering if we took some of the concepts of nature into software and hardware design, like creating super-light, strong, and thin enclosures for laptops, super low-power displays yet vividly colorful, by mimicking the structure of butterfly-wings, or even compact wide-range speakers by looking at the way small animals can generate loud sounds. Hardware design has been evolutionary, but we still use square boxes for hardware, and since the first commonly available laptops, only the exterior dimensions, and internal components, have changed, it is still a hard box, perhaps by replicating the concept of a spine, which is one of natures widely deployed inventions, to develop a better hinge for the MacBook Pro, would provide us with an even sturdier product.
In software I am at the moment designing a product that relies on heavily self organizing phenomena, inspired by bird flocks, fish schools, and the audience at a sports event.
Designing software and hardware that mimics nature, both under, and over the hood, is interesting, and I believe that as the field of biomimicry grows, we will all soon have a piece of the genius of evolution in our homes, and perhaps in our pockets.
For more examples of biomimicry visit: AskNature.org
September 8th, 2009
Remember CocoaHeads Öresund tonight 19:00, in Copenhagen, for more detalis visit the Google Group, where you can singup.
September 6th, 2009
Copenhagen Cocoa “blog” is changing, mostly because I am not satisfied with it. Copenhagen Cocoa will now be in published English instead of Danish, the collaborative blogging model will be discontinued, so now its more my own personal blog, and I will be much more active than I have been before.
I want to thank everyone who contributed with great posts to the old Copenhagen Cocoa, and I hope there are no hard feelings now that I am trying a different course.
Copenhagen Cocoa will still have meet-up announcements for NSCoder Night, and CocoaHeads, I will make a category for such developer events, and you can then choose to just subscribe to that category, if you are not interested in my opinion on anything else.
So what will i blog about?
I planned on blogging on various subjects including, Web-design, Apple, UI-desing, Mac, iPhone, Graphics Design, Google, Speculation, and anything else that might hit the web. I might write some stuff regarding information-politics, since that is a subject i believe needs some exposure in Denmark, but fear not, this will not turn into a political campaign, and mostly be about technology (without the politics).
I will probably never become a programmer, even that was the reason i started NSCoder Night in Copenhagen, but I have soon found out, that for me coding is dull, and something i limit to web-development, where i can get immediate results. I will still blog about frameworks and new technologies that are programming oriented, and i will still host NSCoder Night, because it’s great fun, but if you are looking for practical code solutions or code introductions to a framework, you will not find them here.
You might be wondering what I am doing with CCDC and NSCoder Night, if I never intend to be a programmer, to that I would say that application development is more than just programming, and my heart and interests is more in the design and polish of the application, and not the code itself, with that said, i still want to know, on an abstract level, what different technologies and frameworks are capable of. I believe that it is important for a designer to know what the targeted device or platform is capable of.
I hope you still want to follow Copenhagen Cocoa, even though it just made a radical change, but change is needed for progress, and “you can’t stop progress”.
- Aron Allen