In my career, I’ve done my fair share of training and mentoring for consulting customers, but not much that’s been open to the public. Well, the time has come to change that. Next month, from the 22nd to the 24th of February, I’ll be hosting the first-ever Beginning iOS Development Workshop here in Stockholm. Actually just a bit outside the city, in lovely Norrtälje. In this three-day workshop, I’ll show newcomers how to use these technologies to get started building their own apps.

Note that this is not intended for people who are new to software development. I’ll expect all attendees to have professional knowledge of object-oriented development in one or more languages, so we won’t get bogged down in details about “what programming is”. If you’ve got experience in Java, C#, Ruby, Python, or even C++, you will be well equipped for this course.

For more details, see the workshop page, and please contact me if you have any questions or concerns. Hope to see you there!

This book is the latest edition of what was previously known as Beginning iPhone X Development, where most of those X values were in sync with the latest released iPhone at the time of writing. Now times have changed, iOS has spread from the iPhone to the iPad, and this year brought no new iPhone 5 to keep our book title in sync, so we took the obvious step of re-naming the book after the latest iOS version instead.

For the current edition, we’re not only covering lots of the great new things included with iOS 5, we’ve also updated the entire book to cover Xcode 4.2. This means that you can use the latest and greatest Apple tools to work your way through the examples in the book, and everything should look and work just as we describe it in the book. The previous edition covered Xcode 3.2, and anyone who’s been following the evolution of Xcode is probably familiar with the huge changes that occurred with the Xcode 4 release. Overall, this edition is probably the most significant rewrite since the first edition. If you have an older edition of the book and need a refresher, I think you’ll find this new edition to be a great resource for expanding your iOS development skills. And of course if you’re a newcomer to the book, I’d absolutely recommend you start with this latest edition.

Funny story: We actually did a whole lot of writing for Xcode 4.0 over a year ago, when we were working on the previous edition of the book, but had to backtrack when the public release of Xcode 4.0 was delayed. Then, as fate would have it, Xcode 4.0 was released to the public just a few weeks after the previous edition came out, which really felt like a kick in the rear. For the new edition, there were so many changes between Xcode 4.0 and 4.2 that we abandoned the Xcode 4.0 work we had done earlier, and recreated all our examples and descriptions from scratch for Xcode 4.2. Oh, the things we do for you people!

Anyway, the book is now available for purchase. If you want the print version, you should probably get it from Amazon which sells it way below the Apress list price. Amazon also sells a Kindle edition of course, but if you want to go the ebook route you may want to buy it directly from Apress, where for a few dollars more you have a choice of formats (epub, mobi, PDF). And don’t forget to register for free at our official forum to get access to the archive containing all source code and other resources used in the book. Happy hacking!

And so I thought: How about skipping the now-traditional holiday app sale, and instead have a holiday app giveaway? And I said to myself, “what the heck”, and so it is done. All of Rebisoft’s paid apps, normally priced between $0.99 and $2.99, are FREE today. That means that the full versions of my games Scribattle and Diabolotros, along with the alternative web browser Goldy can all be had for the low, low price of nothing at all. Now how much would you pay?

But wait, there’s more! My employer Toca Boca is also joining in on the holiday spirit, putting all our apps on sale for just $0.99 during the Thanksgiving weekend. Ka-ching!

So get ‘em now while they’re cheap and/or free! Visit Rebisoft’s App Store Page for the freebies, and Toca Boca’s App Store Page for the cheapies.

Thank you, and you’re welcome, and happy holidays!

And there it stands still, the Shrine to Scapedog, now updated just slightly for the modern era but still showing its 1990s roots. If you’ve got flash you can listen to the songs in a playlist doohicky on the page, and if not, you can download or listen to each track individually by clicking its title. No muss, no fuss. The only leanings toward modern HTML you’ll find on that page is the inclusion of a viewport spec in the header to make it display decently on mobile.

You could say our style was grunge or punk, but we started playing before most people had heard the term grunge (I know I hadn’t heard it), and I never called what we were doing “punk” or heard it described that way until someone said it years later. “Oh yeah,” I replied, “I guess we were kind of a punk band.” Whatever, we were just trying to make awesome music with little means and have a good time, and I think we succeeded to some degree on all points. My own personal favorite is definitely Baba Yaga, but by all means, feel free to browse around there, have a listen to some tunes, and make up your own mind.

So why do I bring this up now? Well, I had honestly forgot that these pages were tucked away in the nuthole until it all came tumbling down. And there’s a part of me that forgets, when I’m sitting in front of a screen for hour upon hour, day after day, that I used to spend my weekend evenings (or weekday evenings for that matter, if the opportunity arose) on stage with a group of friends, rocking the hell out of the little campus bar we usually played at. What good parts of your past have you forgotten about? How much do you miss them? Could you have them back now, if you wanted to? I just wonder.

For anyone who doesn’t know, Oredev is a software development conference that brings in speakers from around the globe and from a wide range of fields. There are expert programmers focused on particular platforms, there are process people focusing on agile practices, there are testers, designers, and plenty more. Almost anyone doing modern software development will find something of interest at Oredev. The conference has several parallel tracks (you can switch between them at will) focusing on different fields and technologies, and there’s a quite high ratio of attendees to speakers (about 10% of the attendees are speakers), so there are lots of experts around all the time.

That may all sound a bit dry. But apart from the basic facts, there is an overall vibe running through Oredev that I haven’t really felt at any other conference I’ve been to. Attendees and speakers, in general, all seem to be open to learning and curious about what everyone else is thinking about and working on. There is a pervasive feeling that everyone there is really interested in honing their skills and improving their knowledge, for themselves, for their employers, and more broadly, for everyone. A rising tide raises all the boats, so to speak.

Beyond that, Oredev is also a true nerd kingdom, and I mean that in the best way possible. I’m not the biggest nerd I know, but I consider myself a “nerd’s nerd” and am most happy in the company of other nerds. Going to Oredev the first time was a bit like finding a home I didn’t know I had, and going a second time was like a “nerd homecoming”, but without the dance and the football game (whew!). Both times I’ve been there, I’ve befriended some great people, and had good times all around. Huge thanks are in order to Emily, Kathy, and Mattias for arranging a great event this year!

Until I have time to fix that, I guess it’s just time to start blogging from scratch. Let’s start with the links to the presentation I gave today at the Oredev 2011 conference:

• Become a Blockhead (PDF version)
• Become a Blockhead (Keynote version)

My latest book project is now done! Unlike what I’ve done before, this isn’t an entirely new book, but instead a new update of what’s been a highly popular series of books [1, 2] by Dave Mark and Jeff Lamarche. Now I’ve been added to the mix, and I think that what we’ve come up with is a great new edition that will appeal to anyone starting off with iPhone/iPad development. Even if you already have a previous edition, there’s plenty of new stuff:

• New chapter on background processing, and the use of Grand Central Dispatch for building concurrent applications. Contains what Mark Dalrymple called the best “quick intro to Blocks and GCD” I have seen.


• New chapter on iPad issues, showing how to use the new splitview and popover components.


• All projects recreated from scratch with latest dev tools and SDK (Xcode 3.2.5, iOS 4.2), so as you follow along you’ll see nicely matching descriptions.


• Every piece of source code has been checked and double-checked to improve efficiency and clarity.


• Existing chapters have been re-worked to show you the new methods iOS 4 provides for implementing things that were already covered in previous editions. For example, Chapter 15 (“Taps, Touches, and Gestures”) now shows how to use UIGestureRecognizer, and how to make your own subclass for a custom gesture; and Chapter 17 (“Whee! Gyro and Accelerometer!”) adds gyroscope input where we previously covered only acceleromter input, and is built around the new APIs introduced in iOS 4 for dealing with both.


• All text has been carefully re-read with an eye towards improving clarity and explanatory power. Hardly a single paragraph has escaped the hammer of our combined intellects.

The ebook version is available now from Apress.com, and the print version is available for pre-order from Amazon.com (should ship within a week). Thanks as usual to the Apress team for getting this book to print within a few short weeks after the text was completed!

A couple of weeks ago, I had a chance to visit this year’s Øredev conference. Øredev is a software development conference that’s been held each of the last 6 or 7 years in Malmö, at the southern tip of Sweden. Not only was this my first time in Malmö, it was also the first time I’ve given talks myself at such a large conference, and I thought I’d share some thoughts with anyone who cares to listen.

The conference started off with a sort of “pre-conference”, consisting of a couple of days of lengthy workshops, which my schedule didn’t allow me to attend. I did get there in time for the speakers’ dinner the day before the main conference started, which was quite nice, and was preceeded by a glögg-drinking session at the tightly-packed apartment of Magnus Mårtensson. The dinner was a great chance to break the ice a bit and meet some interesting people.

Øredev 2010 featured 3 days’ worth of speakers split across a number of tracks (smartphones, java, web, agile, etc). You could mix and match things however you liked, and I spent most of my time on the smartphones track, partly because that’s where I gave my presentations and partly because that’s where my interests lie. Fortunately, all the presentations will be made available for free online viewing later on (in fact many of them are already up), so it’s possible to catch up somewhat on whatever you missed during the conference.

The smartphone track was pretty iOS-centric (which suits me fine), but most of the other smartphone platforms were represented as well. Overall I was pretty pleased with most of what I saw, though most of the iOS presentations were quite basic and didn’t expect the audience to know much of anything about Objective-C or iOS development in general. This critique covers my own talks as well, by the way. I think that in a way, Java developers have an easier time presenting more advanced topics, because they can assume that everyone has a basic understanding of the language. With Objective-C, that’s not so much the case, since you may have a number of people who are still stuck in “what’s with all the colons and square-brackets”-mode. At any rate, I felt a little leery of presenting too much advanced material, and I think I perceived the same in my fellow iOS developers’ presentations.

Apart from the smartphone track, I probably spent the most time in a very different track, something that Øredev calls Xtrack. Xtrack contains a variety of topics that are quite far from the world of software development, many of them centered on music. Several sessions were hosted by Kathy Compton and Thierry Holweck, who together form the pop duo Panda Transport. It was really great meeting both of them and talking about music. They also performed one evening, as evidenced by the embedded video here. Too bad this recording didn’t pick up the audio very well, it really sounded great live.

As for my own talks, the first one, on using the Cocos2d framework for making iOS games, unfortunately suffered from too little preparation. I think that the material was solid, but didn’t have quite enough visual examples to tie things together. I have only myself to blame, but considering how crazy this fall has been for me in many ways, it’s understandable that I didn’t have enough prep time (if you knew, you’d understand too). I hope to remedy this some time by fixing up the slideshow with additional content, and perhaps recording a screencast.

One thing that stood out for me about this talk, both during and after, is that none other than Nolan Bushnell, a true pioneer in video gaming and home computing, was sitting in the audience! I’ve looked up to Nolan since I was a kid, and if you had ever told me that I would some day give a talk about some gaming technology and have Nolan in the audience, I probably wouldn’t have believed you; but, there it is. Fortunately Nolan is a really nice guy who I got to meet before my talk (and spent quite a bit of time with during the rest of the conference as well), so this unlikely situation didn’t stress me out one bit.

My other talk, on the last day of the conference (in the last time-slot as well), seemed to work a lot better, both for me and the audience. This time I was talking about making money on the App Store, a topic that is always in my head anyway, so preparation was easy and hardly necessary. This talk is completely non-technical, not a single line of code is shown, so it should be pretty accessible to anyone interested in how the App Store ecosystem works. It’s already online at Vimeo, so check it out if you’re interested.

Apart from the sessions, I learned a lot and got some great insights from a variety of discussions between sessions, at meal breaks, and evenings out with a huge range of people from all across the development spectrum. To me, this sort of thing is really what makes conference attendance worthwhile. It’s the people you meet and connections you make that really stick with you even after the content of the sessions has faded from memory; I guess we are social animals after all. I met so many great people I couldn’t properly list them all, but particular shout-outs are in order to Piers Cawley, Chris Hughes, Mattias Rosberg, Fredrik Olsson, Nolan Bushnell, and of course Øredev organizer Michael Tiberg, to name a few.

I’m not a regular conference-goer, so I don’t have much to compare with, but over all I’d say this conference was a huge success and well worth my time. I’m already looking forward to Øredev 2011!

Spent all day yesterday at the Nordic Mobile Developers Summit, where I gave a talk on developing iPhone/iPad apps, a lightning demo of how some of the dev tools work, and took part in some panel discussions and Q&A.

Several of the other speakers and panelists are people who are more deeply involved in the handset manufacturers’ side of things, including representatives from Microsoft, Nokia, and SonyEricsson. I assume the organizers tried to bring in someone from Apple, but it seems that Apple doesn’t really do that sort of thing much, at least not here in Stockholm; So they got me!

I had a great time, and met lots of interesting people during the breaks, and got some new perspectives on what the “other side” of the smartphone industry is doing. And let’s be clear, by “other side” I really mean “losing side”. It’s not often that my technology of choice is so clearly on top of the world the way that iPhone and iPad are right now, so I won’t hesitate to rub that in when I can! I also couldn’t help but make some unnecessary jabs at Microsoft during my talk. As if it matters what I think about Microsoft! Ha ha.

Anyway. A few people were asking yesterday if my slides would be up anywhere. I know that everyone’s slides were gathered, but I don’t know when or where the NMDS people will put them all up, so here are mine, both in the original Keynote format for modern Mac and iPad people, and PDF for everyone else.

Keynote version (Contains amazing animation on one slide! You have been warned!)

PDF version

This is the sort of evening where Stockholm flirts with me. I’ve spent too long with colleagues I seldom speak to, talking about things we never talk about during work hours. It’s so entertaining, I lose track of time, and suddenly it’s too late, I’m missing my train, and I may as well wait. A few colleagues invite me out to a pub, but I’m just short of time; going there would mean I’d miss even the next train.

Leaving the office, the air is wet but remarkably warm for late April. I could take off my jacket, but I know that would be an invitation to Thor. In the alley, I witness a short but intense gang-fight. At first I can’t tell the combatants apart (these people look the same to me in the gray dusk), but eventually I get clear sight of one of them: It’s a fox. So close to the city. I clap my hands and shout, and he runs off, leaving the cat alone to lick its wounds in the bushes.

Walking on, here it smells like pipe tobacco. Not a person in sight, just grey concrete, but the scent is unmistakable. When is the last time I smoked tobacco in a pipe? Ten years? Fifteen years? Some habits leave a trail that you can never run from. Stockholm is more than flirting with me, it’s kissing me hard and grabbing my crotch. Every vista, every beetle, every shout heard around a corner, reminds me why I live here.

It’s true! At long last, after months and months of late nights, the book is done. Available in digital and paper form from Apress, as well as Amazon.com and elsewhere. I’ve also set up LearnCocoa.org to be a gathering-place for readers of the book; Right now, there’s not much there except for links to buy the book, and to a discussion forum where you can post questions, and also find the source code to all the example apps created in the book.

Big thanks once again to everyone who made this possible!

So, sometime in January, the book should appear on bookshelves near you! Or, if not near you, at least it’s on Amazon and elsewhere. More info when I know the exact release date.

Anyway, this has been a huge project. Lots of work, and extremely satisfying on any number of levels. And now that it’s basically done, I find that I already miss it! I guess I’ll have to go on writing.

It has come to my attention that I haven’t said a word here about my current side project, which I’m spending all my spare time working on: I’m writing a book! This comes as a surprise to me as much as anyone, but there it is. Through a happy set of coincidences, I’ve been given the opportunity to work on the upcoming Apress book “”http://www.apress.com/book/view/1430218592">Learn Cocoa on the Mac" along with Dave Mark and Jeff LaMarche, not to mention Mark Dalrymple doing tech review, and of course Clay Andres and the rest of the team at Apress.

This opportunity came about through a string of coincidences. Some of them hinge on things that I’ve done over time without any hope or intention of writing a book, which goes to show, perhaps, that sometimes when you reap what you sow, the harvest may be quite unexpected!

Anyway, this is a huge undertaking, and I feel like a bit of a hermit, eschewing the watching of TV and the reading of blogs in favor of the writing of pages, but I am truly having a blast.

You have no idea how hilarious this revelation was.

• Number of live performances: None
• Number of recording deals signed: None
• Number of paid sales of our songs: None
• Revenue from merchandise sales: None
• Number of rehearsals where all band members were present: None
• Number of drug-related deaths: None
• Number of hotel rooms destroyed: None
• Amount of money spent on equipment: None
• Number of days traveling on the road: None
• Total radio plays of all Band of None singles (approx): None

As you can see, we don’t have a lot to be proud of! Be that as it may, I’d strongly encourage you to check out our website and maybe even our myspace page and listen to some of our future classics. “Hoffburger” may be the best, but “Your Myspace Page” has something going for it as well.

Things for you to see and do:

• Diabolotros info page
• Diabolotros “sneak preview” on YouTube from a few weeks ago
• Dave Mark’s kind words about the game
• Purchase Diabolotros on the App Store
• Download Diabolotros Lite on the App Store

Aaron Ardiri also presented his experiences developing his series of games, and John Chang talked about some of the things he’s dealt with working on Skype’s iPhone app as well as some insights from his previous work at Apple. There will be some video available later, I’ll post a link here when it’s up!

Big thanks to Hannes Dernehl for arranging and hosting the event, and Cristobal Viedma for asking me to be a part of it!