fidgetware

The 360iDev conference was really great.  I met so many talented individuals who were so willing to give of their time.  The sessions were really good and many a time I had a hard time choosing between two sessions that were on at the same time.  For the most part I did the business track as I have many years of development experience and wanted to improve on my marketing skills.  Along with ways on how to market and track your your apps it was also great to hear about the trends in iPhone development.  The sessions on using Cocos2D and Open Feint were great.  You can get a simple app up and running without too much development time and have some excellent functionality.  Just to prove it, some of the games developed during the gamejam were built on these two technologies.  Despite all the focus on games the trend is towards more serious business apps.   Can the iPhone be the one platform for all users.  I doubt it.  The iPhone is not a serious business phone.  It takes me way longer to find contacts on my iPhone compared to Palm Treo.

Time to get back to work to implement all the great ideas I now have.

I have been attending the 360idev conference in Denver for the past two days and it has been totally awesome.  Sunday started off with some great advanced debugging tips from Kendall Helmstetter Gelner.  I was glad to have updated to Snow Leopard as many of the new debugging tools are already built in.  I had used some of the tools before but Kendal showed us some great tips.  So often when you work by yourself you discover things about a tool and you continue to use it in same manner from then on.  But watching other folks work you often get those “Hey what did you do there” moments.  I can’t wait to get back to coding to see what these tools have to say about the code I written already.

Today’s sessions were great too.  It was a bit depressing hearing more than once that the only way to succeed is to get a contact inside Apple who will act as your advocate.  That is just not realistic for the ordinary independent developer as only a handful of apps will get Apples attention.  I do feel that you should aim to create really great apps, but don’t count on getting the Apple nod to be successful.

Dan Grigsby from Mobile Orchard gave a refreshing talk on Being Warm, Clothed and Fed.  He focused on the 99% of the iPhone developers that will not break into the top 25 apps.  His thought is that yes the iPhone platform can sustain life for mere mortals and that things were looking good despite the huge increase in the number of Apps as well as developers attracted to this platform.  There was also a good discussion on marketing for applications, where to market and how much effort should be spent on marketing.

I am looking forward to tomorrows sessions.