iOSDevCampDC wrap-up

Last Saturday I had the privilege of speaking at and attending iOSDevCamp DC (which actually took place in Reston, VA). iOSDevCamp DC is a single day, single track conference that is now in its 4th year. This was my 2nd year attending. Unlike most conferences, this one groups all the attendees in a single (large) room for the day (stocked of course with plenty of beverages and snacks as well as breakfast and lunch). This aspect really helps facilitate the mingling and conversations that make attending conferences so valuable.

I was the 4th of 6 speakers and I gave my matrix transformations talk for the 3rd time in 5 months. This time I deliberately cut the introductory material somewhat and spent more time on folding and flipping animations plus touched on some general graphics tips like anti-aliasing, rendering retina bitmaps, and avoiding off-screen render passes. I think it went well. I forgot to sacrifice to the demo gods beforehand though and got the dreaded bootstrap server error that prevented me from running my demo app in the iOS Simulator. Fortunately, I had it on my iPad and with the help of the HDMI adapter was able to run Instruments while projecting the iPad screen.

I enjoyed the other 5 talks, but especially Ken Yarmosh‘s talk on gestures and Jonathan Blocksom‘s iOS concurrency talk. I think I picked up about 3 different nuggets from Jonathan’s talk alone that made attending worthwhile.

Slides from my “Enter The Matrix: Reloaded” talk can be found here (latest version here), and the code can be found on GitHub.

(Presenter tip: If you use a retina MacBook Pro or a new 2012 MacBook Air to present, remember to pack a MagSafe to MagSafe 2 converter so that you can charge your laptop using the power adapter that’s hopefully installed on the podium.)