ByteClub

Last week Mike and I went to the 360|iDev conference in San Jose, which was great: got to meet many fellow iPhone developers and listen to some very interesting presentations.

Sessions that stood out, in my mind:

Julio Barros (@juliobarros) talked about differences between iPhone and Android platforms. He is a freelance developer who started the New York iPhone developer meetup, which happens roughly every month and is a great chance to meet other iPhone developers from around the tri-state area. His presentation generated many questions from the audience and quickly turned into a very lively discussion. Android platform is definitely worth keeping an eye on.

Owen Goss (@owengoss) did a great presentation that covered things that he learned while creating an iPhone game called Dapple. Owen came to develop for iPhone after years of working in the game industry and much of his talk was focused on best practices and advice that any game developer, beginner or not, would do well to heed. Things that stood out for me: prototype your game early and often - it can save you much time, money and frustration. Another point that I wasn't aware of because we never had to deal with things like this before: licensing a font for your game can cost you thousands (or even millions) of dollars. Crazy.

Azeem Ansar (@zeemer) shared some stats that his company (Pinch Media) was able to extract from all the data that they collected as part of their iPhone app analytics-gathering framework. An online version of that presentation is available on their web site (http://www.pinchmedia.com/appstore-secrets/). Insights that I found interesting: 1) Only a small percentage of free apps make money on advertising, and 2) Ranking is all about the number of downloads in a rolling window of roughly 24 hours - nowadays, you need more than 20,000+ downloads a day to get into the Top 25 free apps listing.

Christopher Hughes (@chews), expressing views of his own and not of his employer AT&T, did a fine job convincing almost everybody in the room that it was a good idea to jailbreak (but not unlock) their iPhones and at least glance at all those features that Apple isn't exposing via the official SDK. We had the pleasure of hanging out with Chris before the session - he is a fascinating guy that seems to be living the dream, giving away all of the software that he creates, yet making a good living by working for the likes of Google and AT&T. Highlights of the session: 1) Chris was the first person to jailbreak the phone and upload a custom ringtone to it - it took roughly a month to do so. 2) Chris introduced Jay Freeman, who was present in the room - apparently Jay doesn't own a Mac and compiles all of his iPhone apps on the iPhone itself.

Sean Christmann (@seanalltogether) from EffectiveUI talked about using Quartz 2D, with tons of code samples, which are available on his blog. The session was very informative, with Sean doing a great job demo-ing all of his code. The highlight of the presentation for me was an example of creating the "magnifying glass effect that Apple uses inside textfields on the iPhone, but in a more generic way so anything on the screen could be magnified" (also described on his blog).

Jay Freeman (@saurik) is the guy behind Cydia, a graphical front-end for Debian's "apt" that allows for easy distribution of legitimate but not-Apple-approved apps on jailbroken iPhones and iPod Touches. Jay has also written other cool apps such as Cycoder (which allows you to use iPhone as a camcoder) and Veency (a VNC server for iPhone). In his session, he talked about launching an alternative app store built on top of Cydia and allowing developers to easily sell such apps there. It was an interesting glimpse into a world of un-official iPhone development and the people behind it. Highlight: more than 2 million iPhones and iPod Touches use Cydia (which means that there are at least that many jailbroken devices out there).

My own talk about multiplayer iPhone games went well (or so they tell me). At the very least, people asked questions, which is encouraging.

Regrets:

• Didn't get to see Noel Llopis' (@SnappyTouch) presentation about becoming an indie after working as a professional game developer. It collided with Christopher Hughes' session about un-official iPhone development and our original plan of "sit in for a while and then leave" didn't really work...
• Somehow, missed all of the Rock Band/Guitar Hero fun due to dinner arrangements. Oh well, more reasons to come back :-)

What about East Coast?

One not so great thing about the conference: it's a long haul for those who live on the East Coast (On the other hand, who am I to complain, given that Chuck Smith (@ChuckSmith) flew in all the way from Berlin!).

John Wilker (@jwilker) and Tom Ortega (@LordBron) (two great guys that organized the whole thing) mentioned alternating sides of the Mississippi every once in a while, so hopefully it'll be a bit closer next time.

Can't recommend this event enough, very glad that we got to go there. If you get a chance to attend one of these in the future - DO IT!

-- Peter Bakhyryev

What's new and exciting here at Byteclub, you ask? A couple of things: our multiplayer platform beta is growing and the conference presentation is coming along nicely.

The private beta is moving forward and we are getting some excellent feedback from the participants, which resulted in an update to the SDK being released a few days ago that included some important bugfixes. Some of you have been asking about the business aspect of what we are doing and whether our product will be available for free. Short answer is "no": it's a commercial enterprise that should provide quite a bit of value (that is worth paying for, in our opinion) and it costs us to run it. However, since we intend to target the indie developer community, we are trying our best to keep entry barriers as low as possible, which will be reflected in how the product is priced. If you have questions about this, don't hesitate to contact us.

Other than that, most of our time is being spent on preparing for the upcoming 360|iDev conference. Lets face it: public speaking and making presentations don't seem to make the list of skills that some software developers possess. Which is why lately I've been busy downloading and glancing through Kindle book samples that talk about these exact topics. So far, Dale Carnegie's "The Art of Public Speaking" is proving to be a helpful but dense guide. "How to Give a Damn Good Speech" by Philip R. Theibert is entertaining and easy to read. Next in line to be looked at is "Presentation Zen" by Garr Reynolds, which comes with some praise from the likes of Guy Kawasaki and Seth Godin, which is encouraging.

-- Peter

I am very excited to announce that my fellow byteclubber Mike and I will be speaking at the 360|iDev conference this year (March 2-4; San Jose, CA). The session is called "Making multiplayer iPhone games: Theory and Practice" (a working title). We'll share what we learned while creating/distributing/running Scramboni and talk about what's involved in designing and implementing multiplayer games for iPhone and iPod Touch. The presentation is evolving as we gather enough material to fill our 80 minute slot. I'll be updating this post as it takes shape.

BTW, tickets are still available! So, if you want to attend, pop over to http://360idev.com and reserve yours today! Some excellent speakers will be giving talks - don't miss it.

-- Peter Bakhyryev

The winners of the Great Indie Bake-Off 2008 have been announced - congrats to Appy for proving that outsourcing works (not to be confused with "off-shoring", BTW) and Chirp! for making a great looking piece of dessert - home made, a true "indie".

The lucky voter that will be getting showered with prizes is Sean Waters - spend those iTunes gift cards wisely ;-)

This contest once again highlights what's so great about the indie crowd: the willingness to put everything you got on the line, come up with innovative ways of producing and marketing your product, and manage to have fun along the way. You might or might not care about becoming a millionaire, you might or might not get a chance to make it "big" - but you know that it's all in your hands, you enjoy doing what you are doing and will not give up easily - that's the spirit!

Many thanks to Gavin Bowman from Antair Games for organizing this event, to everybody who contributed cakes and prizes, and to 148Apps for hosting the voting.

Hopefully we'll get to do this again in 2009!

-- Peter Bakhyryev