Mobile Orchard

Visualize the population of iPhone owners. There’s a lot of them, so you’ll need an abstraction: picture them filling the seats of a sports arena. You’re at the center of the playing field looking out at them. This is a high-tech stadium: you can arbitrarily move seats and arrange the people without any hassle or [...]

Join me for drinks tomorrow/Thursday at 8:00pm at Karl Strauss in Sorrento Mesa. I’ll be in San Diego doing a dress rehearsal with Noel Llopis on his iPhone OpenGL class and, well, I’m social. Email me or call (612) 423-3694 to let me know you’re coming.

If, a couple of years back, you’d told me that people would expect to be able to shake their phone or blow into the mic to make something happen I would have laughed. And here we are. Detecting a shake gesture is straightforward, all the more so in 3.0 with the introduction of motion events. [...]

Join me for drinks this Weds at 7:00pm at Smith in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood! I’ll be in town to teach my sold out iPhone programming class and, well, I’m social. Email me or call (612) 423-3694 to let me know you’re coming.

There are a lot of reasons to use the iPhone simulator and a few reasons not to. During development, I like to see my changes in the app ASAP; I use the simulator because waiting while a build is pushed to a device interrupts flow. Later, when it’s time to create an app screencast, it’s [...]

iPhoneDevCamp 3 is this Friday, Saturday and Sunday on the Yahoo campus in Sunnyvale. It’s $50 to attend, and more than 400 people have already registered. iPhoneDevCamp is an unconference for iPhone developers in the a BarCamp model. BarCamps emphasize participation. Instead of having a fixed schedule of presenters talking to an audience the roles [...]

Join me for dinner/drinks this Thursday at 7:30 at Gordon Biersch in Palo Alto! I’ll be in town to teach my sold out iPhone programming class and, well, I’m social. Email me (dan@mobileorchard.com) or call (612) 423-3694 to let me know you’re coming. The more the merrier: invite a friend, pass it on and let [...]

I’m pleased to announce Mobile Orchard Workshops’ iPhone OpenGL Programming Class. Developed and taught by gaming industry veteran and iPhone indie game developer Noel Llopis, this two day class is specifically designed to teach Cocoa-Touch/UIKit iPhone programmers how to create high-performance, 2D and 3D OpenGL applications on the iPhone. We’re holding the inaugural class in [...]

A couple of days ago, I received a note from James DonFrancesco about an unexpected behavior change introduced in iPhone 3.0: In 2.X, apps could launch a tel:// url to dial the phone without user input. In 3.0, Apple introduced a verification box to obtain user permission when an tries to make an outbound call. [...]

I’ll be speaking at the 360iDev conference. Here’s my rough-draft level-of-finish submission for the topic: Title Warm, Clothed and Fed: Developer Run iPhone Businesses. Description As developers, we bring a certain set of skills, biases and preferences to business. These act as a double edged sword; we make great business people when we play to [...]