 | A two day (10 session) conference with presentations from some of the worlds top Mac developers aimed at intermediate to advanced Mac developers
The ethos of NSConference is intended to be community. As well as technical sessions we have a great conference dinner on the Monday evening
To ensure everyone gets a chance to meet everyone else we are intentionally keeping the conference small.
This year there will be a maximum of 200 spaces at each venue so make sure you book early to guarantee you get in.
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NSConference 2010 (Europe) Mac Developer Conference
1st-2nd Feb 2010: £299+VAT (£199+VAT for Students)
Book Here
NSConference 2010 (USA) Mac Developer Conference
22nd-23rd Feb 2010: $499 ($329 for Students)
Book Here
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Day 1: 08:00
Registration Opens |
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Day 1: 09:00 to 09:30
So This Is NSConference! |
Find out what's going on , when it's going on and how you get involved with it all
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Scotty |
 | Scotty is the founder of The Mac Developer Network, host of the MDN Show and co-organizer of NSConference. |
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Day 1: 09:30 to 10:30
Conference KeyNote: Engineering Life |
What if you could program the universe the way you can program a computer? What awesome feats could you accomplish with the ability to debug reality itself? Would the weight of responsibility drive you to use your powers for the good of all mankind? Are software engineers just glorified programmers, or are they latent superheroes? These questions and more will be answered with mind-bending thought experiments, and reports from the field.
| | Mike Lee |
 | Mike Lee, the World’s Toughest Programmer,is the founder and CEO of United Lemur, a philanthropic revolution disguised as a software company. Mike also cofounded Tapulous, whose titles include Tap Tap Revenge and Twinkle. Prior to iPhone, Mike cut his teeth and won an Apple Design Award at Seattle-based Delicious Monster Software. Mike is originally from Honolulu, is a popular blogger and occasional pundit, and has been seen on twitter as ©bmf. |
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Day 1: 10:30 to 11:00
Refreshment & Networking Break |
| We will provide the refreshments you do the networking |
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Day 1: 11:00 to 12:00
Spelunking OS X |
Mac OS X isn't just a sealed bucket of bits you receive on shiny optical discs -- under the hood is software just like you and I write (just lots more of it). It's beholden to the same laws of software-physics as you and I must obey. Together we'll spelunk the moist caverns of Mac OS X using tools like otool, otx and class-dump to explore the mach-o file format. Then we'll cover current injection technologies like Input Managers (incompatible with 64-bit), AppleScript Additions, mach_inject DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES. Finally, we'll talk about extension technologies like mach_override and JRSwizzle.
| | Jonathan "Wolf" Rentzsch |
 | Jonathan 'Wolf' Rentzsch is a long-time Mac software developer located in Chicagoland. For over ten years he's lead a local monthly Mac developer meet-up and also runs C4, an Apple-flavor indie developer conference. |
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Day 1: 12:00 to 12:30
Refreshment & Networking Break |
| We will provide the refreshments you do the networking |
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Day 1: 12:30 to 13:30
Clean Code |
There's a myth that in order to ship, you've got to get the product out the door as quickly as possible at all costs, code quality be damned. It's my belief that writing clean, quality code is nearly as important as a working product. I'll go over both the long- and short-term benefits of clean code and offer some advice on how to write clean code.
| | Dave Dribin |
 | Dave has been writing professional software for over thirteen years, and programming since the days of the Apple ][. After five years programming embedded C for GSM infrastructure at Motorola and a brief stint riding the Internet bubble, Dave decided to venture out on his own. Since 2001, Dave has been providing independent consulting services. In 2006, he incorporated Bit Maki to provide consulting service for his customers. In 2008, he founded Bit Maki Software with Jonathan "Wolf" Rentzsch to write their own apps. |
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Day 1: 13:30 to 15:00
Lunch |
| Lunch will be provided at the conference venue |
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Day 1: 15:00 to 16:00
Data Presentation in Mac Apps |
It's hard to imagine an application that doesn't present any data to its user at all. In fact, designing a user interface is largely a question of establishing how best to expose the internal data representation of an application to the user. Data presentation can range from the very simple, such as a single text field, to more advanced but standard controls such as NSTableView and NSOutlineView, right up to completely custom visualizations and graphs. In this presentation, we'll take a look at the resources available to a Cocoa developer for the presentation of data, and the circumstances in which each one is suitable. The question of when to use standard controls and when to search for a custom solution will also be addressed.
| | Drew McCormack |
 | Drew McCormack is a scientific programmer and researcher in the Theoretical Chemistry Department of the Free University in Amsterdam. He is a board member and regular contributor on the MacResearch.org web site, and develops the Cocoa flash card application 'Mental Case' in his spare time. Drew has written articles and tutorials on Cocoa development for the Apple Developer Connection (ADC), O'Reilly's Mac Dev Center, and MacResearch.org, and co-authored the book 'Beginning Mac OS X Programming' with Mike Trent. |
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Day 1: 16:00 to 16:30
Refreshment & Networking Break |
| We will provide the refreshments you do the networking |
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Day 1: 16:30 to 17:30
Core Animation |
In this session, Marcus will be discussing Core Animation and how to develop complex models. Throughout the session Marcus will walk us through the more complex explicit animations as opposed to the more common implicit animations that are in wide use. The goal of this session is to get more comfortable with the more complex and interesting explicit animations and a better understanding of some of the things we can do with Core Animation.
| | Marcus Zarra |
 | Marcus S. Zarra is the owner of Zarra Studios LLC and the creator of seSales and iWeb Buddy as well as being a co-author of "Cocoa Is My Girlfriend", a wildly popular blog covering all aspects of Cocoa development. Marcus has been developing software since the mid-1980s and has written software in all of the major technological fields. Marcus has been using Core Data since its original release in OS X 10.4 Tiger and has released numerous applications and papers covering all of the topics of Core Data. |
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Day 1: 19:00 to Late
Conference Party |
| The arrangments for the conference party will be slighly different depending on location. Each will however involve food, drink and spending time being as geeky as you like. |
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Day 2: 09:00 to 10:00
Making Mistakes Impossible |
Software usability isn't just about making your app intuitive and discoverable and guessable, it's also about what you do when the user makes a mistake. Users make mistakes all the time, and it's almost always because the app allows them to. There are certain attitudes and conventions in software GUI and functionality design which inevitably lead to user errors - and they can be avoided. in this session, we'll discuss why users make mistakes, and how you can design your app to make many mistakes impossible.
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Matt Legend Gemmell |
 | Matt Legend Gemmell is a freelance Mac OS X and iPhone developer based in Edinburgh in the UK. Matt has been developing for Mac OS X since 10.0 Developer Preview 4 in late 2000. Matt is a prolific contributor to the Cocoa open source community and focuses primarily on intuitive interaction and interface design. Matt has source code in use in more than 60 third-party applications (that he knows of; likely many, many more). Matt host the incredibly popular "World According To Gemmell" segment if The MDN Show |
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Day 2: 10:00 to 10:30
Refreshment & Networking Break |
| We will provide the refreshments you do the networking |
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Day 2: 10:30 to 11:30
Cocoa Design Patterns that Leverage the Objective-C Runtime |
It's no surprise that Objective-C is a dynamic language, and that dynamic nature allows many design patterns that would be utterly painful in less dynamic languages with a more constrained object model. In addition to providing great flexibility, the Objective-C Runtime can be leveraged to maximize code reusability. By creating abstract superclasses that leverage the runtime to detect the properties created by their subclasses, methods can be written that do not need to be subclassed. Additional "free" functionality can be provided to subclasses using the runtime's ability to dynamically create and dispatch messages. In this session, you'll see how to leverage the inner workings of the Objective-C Runtime to reduce code clutter in your projects and create extremely reusable code that can be used in multiple Mac and iPhone applications without modification.
| | Jeff LaMarche |
 | Jeff LaMarche is the co-author of the award winning book Beginning iPhone 3 Development, one of the best selling books on software development of recent years. He is also co-author of the upcoming More iPhone 3 Development and maintains, is a contributor to the upcoming book Learn Cocoa, and was the technical reviewer for the book Learn Objective-C. Jeff also maintains a fairly widely-read blog about iPhone software development and has written for both MacTech magazine and for Apple's Developer Technical Services' website. |
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Day 2: 11:30 to 12:00
Refreshment & Networking Break |
| We will provide the refreshments you do the networking |
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Day 2: 12:00 to 13:00
Brushing Up On Core Image |
Learn how to create your own digital watercolor brush in this session. Topics to be discussed include: using OpenCL to model the physics of how the watercolor pigments move around and are absorbed into the paper, and using Core Image to model the optics of compositing two watercolor glazes.
| | Andy Finnell |
 | When not living in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and two cats, Andy Finnell is often thought to be out of state, or even -- in extreme circumstances -- out of country. Andy is currently a partner at Order N Development, LLC, a software contracting company specializing in developing Mac and iPhone software and awkward company names. His interests include Core Image, his wife, and oxygen. Tutorials and other articles can be found at his blog, Safe from the Losing Fight. |
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Day 2: 13:00 to 14:30
Lunch |
| Lunch will be provided at the conference venue |
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Day 2: 14:30 to 15:30
The Many Faces of Data Persistence |
This session will include a discussion of storing to and loading data
from sqlite, webservices, webdav, ftp, archiving, Core Data,
PostgreSQL, Tokyo Cabinet as well as others. Be ready for Code Snippets,Pros and Cons,The limitations of the Entity-Relationship model,Versioning,Change histories and more
| | Aaron Hillegass |
 | Aaron Hillegass is the founder of Big Nerd Ranch and the author of "Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X". As a programmer, he has developed several applications including topsXtreme (an orthodontic practice management system) and Campwhere (an iPhone app for locating public campgrounds). In the past, Aaron worked at both NeXT and Apple. |
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Day 2: 15:30 to 16:00
Refreshment & Networking Break |
| We will provide the refreshments you do the networking |
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Day 2: 16:00 to 17:00
Cocoa Rumble |
This mystery session will remain, well a mystery. All will be revealed to those who attend.
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Day 2: 17:00
The Mac Developer Conference Closes
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"Just wanted to say a huge thank you for NSConference. I've tried all weekend to find something negative to write but have failed!! NSConference was 'awesome' as our American friends would say! Great venue, plenty food, amazing speakers and sessions and the whole thing ran like clockwork. The effort you guys went to was very much appreciated.
The community spirit was also fantastic - us Mac developers are a real friendly bunch aren't we!
Can't wait to do it all again next year."
Gordon Murrison
Open Planet Software
"Pretty much everything was perfect! I'm amazed by the quality of it, for the 1st time."
Stuff MC
Pomcast
"First and most important bit of feedback: NSConference rocked and I'll likely be the first person to register again next year if you do another one."
Martin Pilkington
MCubed Software
"I thought I should let you know that one of the sachets of milk in my room had gone off. I mention this because after a great deal of thought it is the only negative thing I could think off."
Gavin MacLean
Open Planet Software
"Firstly, a huge well done - the whole thing from my point of view as a visitor went smoothly. Tim even helped carry my luggage to my room - what a star :) The sessions ran pretty much to time, everything was where it was meant to be, so a huge well done. It's the kind of thing that gets missed I think - you delivered what you promised, and that's actually very hard :)"
Michael Dales
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