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.

Jon from Secret Lab presenting at Swipe Conference 2012

Last week in Sydney was the second ever Swipe Conference –– an Australian iOS and OS X developer event. Secret Lab was again in attendance and, as always, the Apple developer community was great fun to hang out with and learn from –– and the organisers, Jake MacMullin, Mark Aufflick and Sean Woodhouse really put on a fantastic event. We were also again fortunate enough to have a chance to contribute to the conference (Paris spoke at the first ever Swipe Conference, in Melbourne last year), with Jon presenting Cocos2D for Fun and Profit, a quick guide to the Cocos2D graphics library. Designed as a fast introduction to this time-saving library, this talk leads the audience from a minimal starting point to a full game.

We're incredibly fond of Cocos2D, as it provides a very nice middle option for people who want more power than what UIKit can provide, but don't want to deal with the.. joy that is OpenGL. With Cocos2D, it's straightforward to create a scene comprising a number of quads, and even more trivial to animate these quads in useful ways.

We've uploaded the code and slides to GitHub and Speakerdeck, and encourage you to take a look! We had a number of people approach us after the talk and mention that they were now interested in making games with this library, so hooray, we're sharing the love!

We also took a lot of photos at Swipe Conference –– you can find them on Flickr.