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:

Our book, Learning Swift, which covers everything you to know to create apps in Swift for iOS, OS X, and Apple Watch, is available at O'Reilly Media. Grab it now!

Our book, Swift Development for the Apple Watch, which will receive a huge update very soon, is also available.

This event has now passed, but we'll be doing it again in the future! Stay tuned. In the mean time, if you want to learn Swift, we recommend out brand new book, Learning Swift!

We're super excited to announce that, next week, we'll be running live online Swift programming training through O'Reilly Media. You can learn more and sign up over on the O'Reilly Media site.

The gist of it is: you'll join us live online for a day of Swift programming, where we'll teach you the language, how to use it for iOS (or OS X) programming, and where to learn more. Everyone will get a video of the training afterwards, as well as an ebook copy of our brand new Learning Swift book.

We're seriously looking forward to this! Please don't hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.

Our new book is finally out, in early release unedited ebook form! Today Swift Development with Cocoa was released by O'Reilly Media.

We're really proud of this book (which we wrote with our friend and frequent collaborator Tim Nugent), and now's a great time to grab it – O'Reilly is running a 50% off promotion on all the great new iOS 8-related books until 5AM PDT on 25 September 24!

The code samples for Swift Development with Cocoa are available on GitHub too, if you'd like to play with some Swift.

While you're at it, check out our friend Tony Gray's new book, Swift Pocket Reference – Secret Lab wouldn't exist without his encouragement and support, and he's written a damn fine pocket reference for Swift!

Stay tuned for more books, as well as the final release of these Swift books. Let us know if you have any comments on the early release editions! 

YOW! Connected

We just got back from speaking at the YOW! Connected mobile and Internet of Things conference in Melbourne – it was lots of fun (and a nice successor to Swipe Conference, which we spoke at both years that it ran).

We presented two, completely different, sessions:

• How to build games for children – on the design and production of mobile games for younger children
• Building iOS apps for IoT devices: a case study of the Holiday by MooresCloud

The slides from the IoT talk are available on SpeakerDeck now, and the games for children talk will be available soon.

We'll definitely be at YOW! Connected near year – it was awesome!

/dev/world/2014

Up next for us is /dev/world/2014 – Australia's oldest iOS and Mac developer conference. We're helping to organise /dev/world this year, and it's shaping up to be bigger and better than ever! It's happening later this month: September 29 and 30, in Melbourne.

We've announced three great feature presentations:

• Marc Edwards, from well known Mac and iOS developers Bjango, and co-host of Iterate, the mobile design podcast.
• Tom Greenaway, from Kumobius, developers of wildly successful mobile games such as Duet and Time Surfer.
• Paul Fenwick, science educator, public speaker, and occasional pirate, from Perl Training Australia (although he won't be talking about Perl!)

We've also announced many fantastic speakers, including people from Google, Canva, AccessibilityOz, Appbot, Reckoner, Fairfax, and Shiny Things, amongst many others!

There will be workshops on the use of Xcode for development, as well as one on Swift, Apple's new language (we're running that one!)

As we said in our previous blog post, Secret Lab wouldn't exist without /dev/world – we've been attending since 2008, and it's part of what helped us build a company and learnt to design and create great software. 

If you're in the developer community, and you're interested in iOS, Mac, Swift, or game or app development in general, you don't want to miss this conference.

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.