I just got back from a great micro-speaking tour in Europe. The lovely folks at Trifork invited me to Århus, Denmark, to speak at the JAOO 2009 conference. I was connected to Trifork through an old NeXT connection – their CTO is Kresten Krab Thorup, who had worked on Objective-C at NeXT in Redwood City for three years. (that’s him in the picture, introducing the conference.)
I gave a new talk on The Architecture of Advanced iPhone Applications – discussing design patterns and development strategies for managing the internal tasks of a complex iPhone app. This is a topic that isn’t really covered by any of Apple’s documentation and examples and was well received and well attended. The slides can be downloaded here.
In the iPhone track I was followed by Raven Zachary from Small Society, who is well known for doing the Obama ’08 iPhone app. He gave an excellent talk on how to successfully launch and market iPhone applications. We shared the speaker roster with a number of interesting prominent people (Dave Thomas! Martin Fowler! Urs Hölzole! Simon Peyton-Jones!). They gave fascinating talks on high-performance web applications, new programming languages and all manner of advanced computer science topics. It was an odd feeling, listening to their talks, as these topics were so important to me a couple of years ago when CodeFab was all about big web applications and we debated Ruby vs Python, Springs vs WebObjects in Java. After 18 months working on native iPhone applications it is hard for me to conjure the fire that once burned in me for AJAX and the latest features in server technologies.
After JAOO we flew to Zürich for the Zürich iPhone Developer Day event. Raven and I had the good fortune to be flown down with Trifork’s CEO in a private plane. (Piper Meridian for those curious, nothing fancy. That’s me, getting ready to climb aboard.)
There was a great crew of iPhone speakers in Zürich. Raven, Patrick Linskey and I came down from Denmark. We were joined by Jonas Schnelli from Include7 who wrote the very popular SBB train schedule application for the Swiss train system, the always entertaining Adrian Kosmaczewski founder of akosma software, who laid down the 10 Commandments of iPhone Development and Patrick Bönzli from Netcetera, who gave a great talk on automated builds and unit testing for iPhone applications.
