Brief notes about the iPhone Tech Talks

Posted: November 29th, 2008 | Author: Panos Karageorgakis | Filed under: Personal, iPhone | Tags: iPhone, Rome | No Comments »

Last week I’ve been in Rome for the iPhone Tech Talks, Apple’s so-called worldwide event promoting iPhone development. Apparently the moto “Stay where you are. We’re coming to you.” didn’t apply to Greece, so I decided to fly to Rome and attend the one-day seminar. In the beginning of the day, we were informed that the event was considered to be confidential and we shouldn’t blog/tweet/facebook about it, but I think it’s ok to express my impressions about the event as well as my (probably useless) comments about my trip.

Roaming with the iPhone

Apart from the original frustration of not being able to connect to any cellular network (because for some stupid reason my carried switched roaming off when I upgraded my plan), the iPhone’s done well roaming into a foreign country. I don’t know if italian 3G networks are slow or if it was the roaming, but even on 3G everything was pretty slow.

Getting to the event

When I walked to the La Sapienza University, I thought I’d spot the familiar Apple logo on a banner or something, directing me to the place where the event was held, but as much as I looked around, I saw no apples at all. And almost everyone I asked was either unaware of it, didn’t speak english or would rather not talk to a stranger. I spent about 15 minutes asking and going from one place to the other, until I finally found it. They had a banner, but it was up on a balcony at some place.

Event sessions

The day consisted of many sessions, some of which were more informative than the others. I’d rather like it if all sessions were tech talk, but hey, it’s their promotional event. Information on the actual technical stuff was coming fast enough so you can keep up and yet include as much as possible. Some people were taking notes but I think it wasn’t really useful to do so. I wouldn’t consider most of the talk being confidential, since in essence it’s all written down in the Apple documentation about the iPhone, but oh well.

One of the reasons I wanted to attend the event was to get to ask some questions to an Apple evangelist, but I wasn’t that lucky. The only chance to ask a question was to find the one Apple guy during the breaks, but that means fighting your way through the crowds that engulfed him instantly the minute the sessions ended. And all this talk between the developers and the Apple guy was in italian, so it was useless to me. Well, at least I had time to visit the buffet, but hey- don’t forget it was a free event.

It was funny that I was the only non-italian person attending, so the host had to speak in english throughout the sessions even though he was italian as well. Sorry guys!

Some interesting notes

Being there among all those italian developers, I quickly came to notice some stuff (most of which I Tweeted about anyway). First, I thought everyone would have an iPhone, but that was not the case. However, almost all laptops were Macs, I didn’t spot a PC in there. New MacBooks could be seen, but old aluminum Pro’s, plastic MacBooks and even my 12″ PowerBook G4 diversified the gamut.

When the audience was asked, quite an impressive amount of people raised hands about using Xcode and Objective-C. Less people were actually developing an iPhone app, and about a dozen and half already had an app deployed on the app store. I wonder how many of the rest of the developers are actually going to build an app, since it was a free event and it was obvious that some people attended maybe out of curiosity only.

Evaluation time

So was it worth it? Well, if they come to your city, it’s definitely worth it to go if you’re interested in developing for the iPhone. But flying abroad just to attend the event (at least the European schedules) wasn’t something I’d recommend, since most of the stuff is readily available in the documentation. The event was probably a good chance to hook up with other developers (an italian start-up was looking for developers there) and often great start-ups form out of such meetings. So if you’re an upcoming developer that haven’t dug deep yet into iPhone development, you should definitely go since it puts you into a mood and briefs you about the technical difficulties involved (i.e. memory management etc.)

As for me, I tried to increase the value of my trip to Rome to make it par with the money I’ve spent, so I took a nice walk the evening after the event, re-visiting most major sites in the historic center. Piazza Di Spagna, the Pantheon, Piazza Navona, Campo Di Fiori, Fontana Di Trevi and other small piazzas here and there, a taste of italian pizza and buying souvenirs and gifts for my wife made that evening worth the trip! And since it’s all about the iPhone, here’s a (slightly enhanced) night shot of the Pantheon using the iPhone’s built-in camera.

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