I’ve been spending the last week or two absorbing information at a pace I’m very much not used to. 360iDev was very informative. Sort of like an ultra-condensed university course without obligatory courses. A lot of really cool people were there (if you sift through all the self-important blobs of goo that were scattered throughout those actually cool people), and I’m looking forward to meeting them again, if the opportunity presents itself.
Kendall Gelner, Noel Llopis, and many other hugely talented but yet pleasant to be around folks were inspiring.
Only thing I regret about the thing was eating those veggie burritos. Man they were grody.
iPadDevCamp was a super-intensive “hack something together a-zap and present it two days later” thing. Actually it was roughly 1 whole day of working, with only a few hours on the Friday eve and Sunday morning to do last minute fixes. I ended up with a group of 4 others doing a ‘multi-device game’ called (eventually) Tank or Die. The idea was to be able to add iPhones as game controllers and iPads as playing fields in this ‘control the tank and try to shoot the other tanks’. There were 3 developers (4 even) and one graphics designer. Everyone decided to start working on things on Friday, but due to transportation issues, I couldn’t actually join them until Saturday. My task ended up being the connectivity between iPads (the playing fields) and I just didn’t have enough time to figure out how to get it all working in time for the demo, so when we won “best game” award, I felt a bit like a cheater when I took that wireless keyboard from the prize pile.
Was a learning experience though, and I don’t regret participating. It’s a very nice feeling when you are convinced that “if I were tasked to do this with the things I know today, I would have succeeded”, and I am.
Now I’m going to be doing some work and relax until Friday, when I go up to Seattle for the last conference in my “conference tour”.