This past weekend was the NorthWestMozDev meetup.  What is that you say?  Well, the group provides a simple mechanism for developers in the North West (US/Canada) using Mozilla related technologies to communicate with each other (Yes I quote that straight from the Google group).

It was the second installment of such meetings, the first was in downtown [...]]]>  

This past weekend was the NorthWestMozDev meetup.  What is that you say?  Well, the group provides a simple mechanism for developers in the North West
(US/Canada) using Mozilla related technologies to communicate with each
other (Yes I quote that straight from the Google group).

It was the second installment of such meetings, the first was in downtown Vancouver at ActiveState.  There were a number of interesting talks – one I was most interested in was the Mozilla Labs/2010 Goal discussion put on by Mark Surman and David Ascher.  (You should check it out)

One of the surprising discussions (for me) from this meetup was somewhat political/activist/social change related.  How can Mozilla use it’s brand and following to encourage more openess on the web, support other non-profits or organizations trying to better “the greater good”.

Interesting stuff all around, I’m glad some Flock folk could make it out.

About 14 people showed up to the event and everyone was contributing and the discussion never got stale.  We talked about a lot of things: IUI, provisioning codes, 3-inches of love (don’t ask), appstore [...]]]> Well, I just got back from the event and I’m now I’m sitting on my couch about to sum it all up.

About 14 people showed up to the event and everyone was contributing and the discussion never got stale.  We talked about a lot of things: IUI, provisioning codes, 3-inches of love (don’t ask), appstore – and two ways of getting into it, disk IO, and even went through an exmaple app in objc.

An interesting thing to note came up which I wasn’t aware of;  When filling out the tax information on your app store application, choose ITIN and use “nine zeroes” as the number.  Apparently Canadian citizens are exempt and don’t need to fill out the huge forms asking you almost everything, stopping short of your blood type.

There was talk about how to deploy your app.  App store or ad hoc method?  If you go through the app store method, there were some obvious benefits – however if you’re just wanting to hack and release to a few (hundred) people or so, ad hoc was the way to go.  Why?  App store has a huge amount of gates (review process, etc) and Apple can essentially reject your application for a variety of reasons – “We don’t like it” might just be valid enough.  If you go ad-hoc, you can deploy onto anyone’s iPhone, but you’ll need their iPhone GUID and bake it into your app first, creating a new binary for that user to download and only then will it install.

Something that irked me, interpreted languages are NOT supported on the iPhone!  Now, I don’t know if this is something that will change in the future, but I have to think that it must.  I can’t see, and I’ll loosely call it, “fun integration” with web API’s etc consumable by objc alone.  I could do a lot of things really fast in script (fast as in development time), it would be laborious to code up equivalent in straight objc.  I dare not speak about my work on an “unnamed” browser platform in C++.. linking times is absolutely killing me, but I digress.

Last note is the book of choice was “iPhone SDK Development
by Bill Dudney, Chris Adamson, Marcel Molina”.  I haven’t seen it myself, but I might have to get myself a copy (currently available as a betaPDF).  First time I’ve heard of a book being in “Beta”…