CocoaHeads LA

This site has not been updated all that frequently in recent times but we are going to try to change that. To start, we thought it might be a good idea to provide an overview of recent developments.

Last month we had a great meeting where Aaron (@drunknbass) discussed the making of the iPhone game TapStar. It was ridiculously interesting and we had the longest meeting that I can remember. One interesting technology that he used was cocos2d which is a “framework for building 2D games, demos, and other graphical/interactive applications.”

Next month (August) our meeting should be on Thursday August 13th. As of this moment there is not a speaker and/or topic lined up. If you or anybody else you know would like to discuss something, please send an email to Ross (if you have his address), me (Jonathan Badeen), or to the CocoaHeads LA mailing list. Alternatively, if there is something that you would like to see discussed specifically let us know that too. Either another member might already be an expert and might be willing to talk or perhaps somebody would be willing to research the topic and prepare a presentation for it.

There has been a lot of chatter and confusion recently involving the introductions of several NSCoder Night meet-ups. A few months ago people including myself began to discuss the organization of NSCoder Night on the cocoaheadsla.org mailing list. Due to the vast size of Los Angeles and the difficulty in finding a convenient location which everybody was happy with, we decided to split up and start multiple NSCoder Night locations.

Now you may be wondering what NSCoder Night is and what it has to do with CocoaHeads. They actually have nothing to do with each other except that many of us attend both and that NSCoder was spawned through the CocoaHeads mailing list. CocoaHeads, which I’m sure you know since you are already on this site, is a monthly Thursday meeting of Cocoa developers. The format typically involves a speaker sharing something to do with Cocoa. This isn’t incredibly formal and usually results in discussions or chats during and/or after the presentation itself. NSCoder Night, on the other hand, is even more informal. It meets every Tuesday night and essentially has no format. It is simply an excuse to get those interested in Mac/iPhone development together in one place to code, discuss, get help, etc. For this reason, these meet-ups are usually in public venues where coffee and food are available. I have been attending the Santa Monica ones and we usually end up just chatting about everything from Cocoa (obviously) to ActionScript to funny YouTube videos. Ideally attendees bring their laptops and code. It’s totally acceptable and encouraged to work there and to ask others questions about their current issues. It is basically a good way to find a group of people who can help each other out since so many of us don’t usually have a network of Cocoa developers readily available.

As you can see, NSCoder Night and CocoaHeads are different in nature. This means that NSCoder Night is not meant to take over CocoaHeads but can instead augment it. To make things a bit easier to visualize I have created a Google Map (link) which shows all of the CocoaHeads and NSCoder Night locations and details that are known to me.

I’d also like to mention that a lot of Cocoa developers such as myself use Twitter to communicate. It’s simply an awesome tool to get wired into the Cocoa community and find out what is new. Whenever you see a name with an “@” in front of it on this site (or many others) that is a reference to an individuals Twitter account. For instance, mine is @badeen. It is the primary means of identifying those on Twitter and directing information to them. Twitter clients also make tweeting a much more pleasurable experience. I use Tweetie on the Mac and iPhone but there are many many other very popular and powerful clients.

Enough of this, get out there and write some awesome code and share it with us at whatever venues you attend!

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