Category Archives: Writing

on iPhoneDevCamp and a lack of writing

Geekdad, Technology, Writing

do not blog in this roomThings have been quiet at Global Spin lately, but not because I have nothing to talk about. I’ve just been doing my writing elsewhere, like these two stories about my recent trip to iPhoneDevCamp. From GeekDad:

I had a great time at iPhoneDevCamp 2 in San Francisco last weekend. Lots of geekdads and their kids were in attendance. Joe Michels got an iPhone so he could show off photos of his kids, but now he’s writing apps. Carlos McEvilly (pictured) wrote code while his daughter Annika playtested games for other developers. Ray Valdes and his kids worked together on a mermaid game, while Camp organizer Dom Sagolla’s infant son Leo offered to judge the Tastiest App award.

And the apps? I’m biased, but Fwerps is so awesome! A fwerp is a virtual pet–think tamagotchi tribble without the trademark infringement. The idea came from LC Boros, who also served as art director and “fwerp herder”. We wanted to make something that was unique to the Touch platform, so we concentrated on the accelerometer (rocking it to sleep), touch gestures (petting), sound/vibration (purring), and network (reproducing). Our “code gopher” Matt Paul hunted down utility code, and I put the pieces together in Xcode.  It took round-the-clock coding and a lot of help from other developers, but we got something that worked well and didn’t crash during the demo! (Video of the demo is already online.) [Read more...]

…and from Webmonkey, another Wired blog:

Wow. If there was any doubt that the iPhone is a hot platform, iPhoneDevCamp 2 just squashed it like a tank tread over a pile of Zunes.

Hundreds of attendees got together for a weekend of iPhone application hacking, discussion and beer. Buckets of beer and piles of pizza, all supplied by sponsors eager to find out who might have the next killer app. And apps there were aplenty; 44 teams submitted them for the hackathon, including 3 top apps from satellite camps.

I didn’t mention sleep, because there was none. This was my very first time developing for the iPhone (or in Objective-C at all), so I coded into the wee hours of the morning just to get things to compile. My team got a lot of help from Objective-C gurus on site, too. [Read more...]

I also started a project page for Fwerps, because you know I need more projects to work on.

nanowrimo update

NaNoWriMo, Writing

As you can probably tell from the dearth of new material here, I’ve been a bit busy lately. I’d love to say I’m working on some exciting new project, but the truth is I’ve been sick, traveling, working, or combinations of the above. It has succeeded in making Jack a dull boy, so I’m going to take it a bit easier this November than I originally planned.

That’s right, no NaNoWriMo for me this year. Karen is still participating, and hopefully she’ll take some time to post occasional updates here (nudge nudge). I won’t be completely out of it, though. I’d like to edit a first (and possibly second) draft of my entry from last year and present it here for you to read by November 30th, a kind of NaNoEdMo if you will. We’ll see how that goes.