This year, we gave a talk at GDC called “Making Night in the Woods Better with Open Source”. In it, we talked about how Night in the Woods, which came out last month and you should totally go buy, used the open source process in its development.

Unlike most of our other talks, we did something a little ridiculous with this one - we built an entire presentation system, from scratch, into Night in the Woods. We’re actually pretty proud of this, and so we put together a video showing how it was done. Check it out!

The talk from GDC is also available online, and we've embedded it below:

It's May and we're off to a whole lot of conferences, all in the USA:

• IA Summit 2016, in Atlanta, Georgia 
  • presenting How Do I Game Design? covering how and why games do what they do
• OSCON 2016, in Austin, Texas
  • presenting, together with Tim Nugent, Swift programming for iOS, OS X, and beyond, covering the latest in Swift
• Write The Docs 2016, in Portland, Oregon
  • presenting, together with Tim Nugent, Code the Docs, looking at live programming and documentation environments

If you're at any of these events, come say hello, email us, or tweet us @thesecretlab!

At Linux.conf.au 2016, in Geelong, we presented a talk on our experiences building video games at open data hackathons, such as GovHack. The video and slides are now available! The video is available on YouTube, and embedded below, and the slides are available on SpeakerDeck.

Paris Buttfield-Addison https://linux.conf.au/schedule/30351/view_talk Open data is cool, especially when it comes from government. What's even cooler than open data? Games. Games are cool. So why not combine them? This talk explores the potential for spreading the word about open data, as well as providing for deeper engagement with data, through game development.

We had a great time preparing and delivering this talk! You can check out our GovHack entries from 2014 and 2015 online.

We've spent the last week at O'Reilly Media's fantastic OSCON conference, in Portland, Oregon. We presented a whole bunch of talks, ranging from Swift programming to Kerbal Space Program. Friends of ours, and other interesting people, also presented great stuff. Our talks were:

• Programming with Swift – Github Repository (presented by us, together with Tim Nugent)
• Cross-device, cross-platform: Designing for the entire mobile universe (Mobile Design Tutorial) – Wireframes, and Slides (presented by Paris, together with Christopher Neugebauer)
• How Do I Game Design? – Slides (presented by us, together with Tim Nugent)
• The Mün and Back: A Kerbal Tale – Slides (presented by us, together with Tim Nugent, Alasdair Allan, and Paul Fenwick)

And great talks by our friends, and other interesting people, included:

• Rolling dice alone: Board games with remote friends – Slides (presented by Tim Nugent)
• High adventures in sniffing my own metadata – Slides (presented by Josh Deprez)
• Test-driven Repair – Slides (presented by Christopher Neugebauer)
• Internet archive: Universal access. Open APIs (presented by VM Brasseur and Alexis Rossi)
• The Future is Awesome (presented by Paul Fenwick)
• Situation Normal, Everything Must Change (presented by Simon Wardley)

We also did a book signing (or two), which was as strange-but-awesome experience as ever. We're looking forward to OSCON in Amsterdam! Our photos from OSCON 2015 in Portland are on Flickr.

First, books!

We're very pleased to announce that our latest two books are now available! The first, Learning Cocoa with Objective-C Fourth Edition, is an update to our previous third edition book, this time co-written with our frequent collaborator and co-conspirator Tim Nugent. It covers everything existing programmers need to skill up with the latest in iPhone, iPad, and Mac development technologies. 

The second new book is the iOS Game Development Cookbook; it provides a huge range of recipes for common things you need to when building a game for iOS (or any other platform, if you're willing to translate the examples out of Cocoa and Objective-C, or even for things that aren't games if you're creative!)

We're really proud of both of these books, and hope you find them useful and enjoyable! Let us know what you think, or if you have any questions. You can find more details, and links to sample code, on our books page.

Second, training!

If you like our books, then why not try our training? Check out our previous blog post to learn more about our upcoming Melbourne iOS developer training.

Finally, conferences!

We're very pleased to be speaking at the (very awesome) O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) again this year – for the fourth time in a row! We'll be presenting our mobile app design workshop “Unfortunately, Design Tutorial Has Stopped”, and Other Ways to Infuriate People With Mobile Apps with frequent collaborator Chris Neugebauer, as well as the session How Do I Game Design?, exploring the basics of game design. 

Additionally, Tim Nugent (our co-author on the latest Learning Cocoa book) will be presenting the session My Friends Keep Leaving and it is Ruining Board Games Day, which explores the state of augmented and remote board gaming; Chris Neugebauer is also presenting the session Portable Logic/Native UI exploring best practices for building mobile apps that need to run on multiple platforms. It's all sure to be excellent! Do try it.

At OSCON this year, @chrisjrn, @desplesda and I presented a 3-hour tutorial on "Android-Fu: Awesome Apps for Ice Cream Sandwich and Beyond". We had a great turn out, and it was a lot of fun to present at OSCON for the second year in a row (last year we presented the well received Android for people who hate phones, a similar topic in a similar style).

You can also find the code from the activity on GitHub, as well as the final binary (APK) for installation on your Android 4.0+ device.

We hope you enjoyed it! Please get in touch if you have any questions or feedback!