This event has now passed! Stay tuned for our next training workshop!

For more information, or to register, visit the event page.

This event has now passed! Our next training is in Sydney, February 2013!

We're exceptionally pleased to announce another training course! Join us for three days of intense iOS training in Melbourne, where you'll learn Objective-C and iOS development from the ground up. We'll be running the course from December 14 to 16, in the heart of Melbourne's CBD.

For more information, look no further than this here internet web page site link!

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.

This month we were lucky enough to sponsor and attend PyCon Australia, hosted (for the first time) in our hometown of Hobart! PyCon Australia is the national conference for users of the Python programming language. This was the third year that PyCon Australia has run since being founded in Sydney. We greatly enjoyed meeting members of the Australian and international Python communities, hearing their stories, tips and interests. All the sessions we attended were fabulous, but amongst the many highlights were:

• CodeWars – entertaining programming-as-a-spectator-sport problem solving to kick the conference off. Hosted and designed by our talented friends Tony and Josh, respectively. A great place to spot some amazing nerd gear!
• What to build. How to build it. – the first keynote, presented by Mark Ramm, took us on an entertaining romp through the idea of applying experimental methodologies to product design. Great stuff!
• Virtual robotic car racing with Python and TORCS – Python and virtual robot cars! What's not to like?
• Python for Humans – the second keynote, presented by Kenneth Reitz, was a thorough and useful discussion of making Python more user (programmer) friendly. Exactly the sort of stuff that should be a keynote!
• Lightning Talks – we always love lightning talks, and these were no exception. Lots of quick talks, mostly useful, and highly entertaining!

We also thoroughly enjoyed the dinner (a cruise to Peppermint Bay, followed by a fabulous meal and cruise back to Hobart!) as well as the coffee (which was a tasty blend called "African Swallow", designed specifically for PyCon Australia by Ritual Coffee). The coffee for all attendees was sponsored by Secret Lab, and we were proud to have our logo on every cup. The attendees all really seemed to enjoy the coffee, and we're very proud to have been involved in a small way in the running of such an excellent conference in Tasmania. PyCon Australia returns to Hobart next year as part of their 2-year cycle. We can't wait!

You can find the rest of our photos from PyCon Australia 2012 on Flickr and the videos from PyCon on YouTube. Congratulations to our friend, and frequent collaborator, Chris on the meticulous organisation he and his team undertook to bring us PyCon Australia!

Our next scheduled general enrolment developer training is scheduled for November 23 to 25 in Melbourne, Australia. For more information, or to make a booking, head to our training page. For enquiries, please email events@secretlab.com.au

While at OSCON this year, Jon and I were lucky enough to be interviewed by our editor, Rachel, for O'Reilly Radar. Find the interview embedded below, or check it out on O'Reilly. Our upcoming book, Learning Cocoa with Objective-C Third Edition, can be preordered now if you're interested! It's going to be amazing.