More details:

Hi all,

You may have noticed that there haven’t been any Cocoaheads meetings
for a few months.  That seems like a shame for an area with so many
Mac devs, so I have decided to try my hand at getting the group
started back up again.

My first task was to find a place for us to meet.  I contacted several
local companies and found that the only ones who were interested in
doing it didn’t have the space.  However, while looking around I was
referred to a new project called BrainSilo (http://www.brainsilo.org),
which has possibilities.

BrainSilo is intended to be an open space where tech folks can meet
and work on projects, a bit like Backspace is during the day.  Right
now it’s very much a work in progress;  there’s a lot of construction
debris laying around and the place has a vibe reminiscent of an
unfinished basement.  But they do have some nice work tables and
chairs, and Internet access, and they would be happy to host our
meetings.

There’s no charge to meet there but they do have a donation bucket,
and it looks like they occasionally send out requests for help with
painting and such.  Participation in these things is 100% optional.

It’s located in North Portland a bit northwest of the Rose Quarter, in
an older industrial area.  The Albina/Mississippi Max Station (Yellow
Line) is about 3 blocks away, and there is also plenty of car parking
on the street.  Widmer Gasthaus Pub, McMenamin’s White Eagle Saloon,
Mint 820 and Gotham Tavern are all within walking distance, for before-
meeting dinners and after-meeting drinks.

The address is 611 N Tillamook and directions can be found at
http://brainsilo.org/wiki/Location.  The most important bit of info on
that page is that the entrance is in the alley in back.

So, with the disclosures and benefits out of the way… as I recall
the previous meeting schedule was on the 4th Wednesday of the month,
which will fall on July 28th.  Therefore, we will have our first
meeting at BrainSilo that night, at 7:00 pm.  The main purposes of
this meeting will be to assess interest and give everyone a chance to
see the space;  we’ll give everyone a chance to share what they’re
working on, and discuss ideas for future meetings.  Then head to one
of the aforementioned establishments for beer and munchies.

See you on the 28th!

janine

Even more impressive is the excitement people have over developing for the Macintosh/iPhone these days, and how they want to share that excitement with others by attending meetings like this.. I wonder if big CocoaHeads meetings like the Silicon valley chapter have that same feel?

Thanks all for a great night!

We’ll meet at the Lucky Labrador Brew Pub (915 SE Hawthorne Blvd) at 6pm, and hang out and chat about WWDC – bring your questions and those of us who went will answer what we can.

I’m planning on eating dinner there, so you are welcome to join.

If you haven’t been to a meeting before, nows a good time to come out and meet folks in a relaxed setting.

Update: Thank you all for the great conversation, it’s great to have such supportive friends in Portland. I’m not sure what we are doing next month, or the location.

The topic is Core Animation, folks will be showing little examples that they’ve written, and what they learned about Core Animation.

5:30 pm – snack and chatting before we start
6:00 pm – Q&A Session (bring your Cocoa questions)
6:30 ish – Show and talk about Core Animation
7:30 ish – finished, hang out time

Feel free to arrive at 5:30 pm for some snacks and chatting before we start up. If you arrive late (past 6pm), you will need to call my cell phone and we will send someone down to let you in.

Apologies for the late details – join our Google Groups list to get the very latest:

http://groups.google.com/group/pdx-cocoaheads

Extensis Portland (Google Map Link) – 1800 SW 1st Ave, Portland, OR – Suite 500

Update: Thank you for the very cool demos and good discussion – and the hangout time afterwards! I hope to post code later on in the month.

I’ll be giving a small presentation on NSOperation and NSOperationQueue, two really useful classes that are available in Leopard for doing background operations. They are particularly important in todays’ day and age of multi-core Macintoshes, and useful for doing background processing in a nice manner on an iPhone or iPod touch.

5:30 pm – snack and chatting before we start
6:00 pm – Q&A Session (bring your Cocoa questions)
6:30 ish – Presentation on NSOperation and NSOperationQueue
7:30 ish – finished, hang out time, show cool things time, show iPhone apps??

Feel free to arrive at 5:30 pm for some snacks and chatting before we start up.

Extensis Portland (Google Map Link) – 1800 SW 1st Ave, Portland, OR – Suite 500

Until then, tomorrow, Wednesday, March 12th at 6pm is CocoaHeads Portland. And we’re going to talk about the iPhone SDK. I’ll probably initiate the discussion, by giving an overview of the sdk. But I encourage the attenders to bring questions and answers, and if they want their laptop to show something cool!

Feel free to arrive anytime after 5:30pm, the downstairs doors tend to get locked at 6pm. Food will be provided.

Location details:
Extensis Portland (Google Map Link) – 1800 SW 1st Ave, Portland, OR – Suite 500

John sent me his presentation, feel free to download it and play with his examples.

Next month I’ll be doing a talk on NSOperation and NSOperationQueue, as it’s something I need to learn about for my personal programming project I’m currently working on. March 12 at 6pm, mark your calendars.

(Via Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog.)

Some great advice from Dan Wood on what he would change if he went back in time to when he started his mac indie company.

Feel free to arrive anytime after 5:30pm, the downstairs doors tend to get locked at 6pm. We’ll start off at 6pm with a round of Q&A, as that worked really well last time, and start the hands on talk at around 6:30pm. Food will be provided.

Location details:
Extensis Portland – 1800 SW 1st Ave, Portland, OR – Suite 500

Our schedule is going to be this:

- bring your questions on anything Cocoa, hopefully the brainpowers in the room will be able to shed some light on it

- we’ll giggle like schoolgirls about what Steve announced, and see if we can afford to charge one to our well-used-over-Christmas credit card. (subnotebook with blu-ray anyone?)

More info is here:http://www.cocoaheads.org/us/PortlandOregon/index.html

More details are here.

I hope you can attend – we’ll start at 6:30pm at the Lucky Lab Brew Pub on Hawthorne. I and Jennifer will probably be leaving about 7:30pm, as we’ve been baking up a storm to give tins of sweets to friends. And we have to get it done!!!!!!

If you haven’t been before, and don’t know what I look like, here’s my Bruce Willis look-alike picture.

I gave short presentation on what’s new in Cocoa, highlighting what excites me about Cocoa in Leopard. We had a lot of good discussion during the presentation, which lends itself really well to the location and amount of folks there.

I followed up my small presentation with some demos of Leopard only applications, including a new application under development by Fraser Speirs, the author of FlickrExport for iPhoto and Aperture.

The Panic folks finished the meeting by showing us a new Leopard only application – which in typical Panic fashion is beautiful, full of the little touches that one comes to expect from Panic, and really from any Mac program.

Our next meeting will be December 12th, and we’re going to meet at a pub/bar for food and drink and chat. Stay tuned for a location.

—-

CocoaHeads Portland meets tonight, Wednesday, November 14th at 6pm at Panic’s offices in the Pearl in downtown Portland. Here’s the url to map, they are on the 3rd floor.

I will be giving a presentation on what’s new in Cocoa in Leopard – and I’m really excited about all the new features and API’s that Apple has given us in 10.5. I’ll have some slides and some demo applications that show off these new apis and controls.

The outside doors at Panic also get locked around 6pm, so please call me at 503-819-8904 if you arrive and they are locked. We’ll start with some introductions, a brief history of Panic, and then my presentation. The presentation will start at about 6:20.

We have a google group that I encourage you to join, I send out email reminders to that list. http://groups.google.com/group/pdx-cocoaheads

I also have access to edit the cocoaheads.org web page for Portland – please bookmark it.

Our December meeting will be fellowship at a pub or bar somewhere, if you have a good suggestion for one that doesn’t have smoking in it, please leave me a comment.

Also – last months meeting had Brian Doyel presenting on custom controls in Cocoa. He has provided a url to the example project he showed, it is located at http://www.balance-software.com/CustomSlider.zip.

PS: MarsEdit rocks for writing blog posts.

Once again we’ll be providing some food, and the doors tend to get locked by 6pm, so try to arrive before then. If you arrive later and the doors are locked, give me a call at 503-819-8904.

Brian Doyel is going to do a small q & a presentation on an application he’s recently written, in his words “… an application I wrote for a client recently. It has a fairly interesting UI that is all Cocoa but doesn’t look like it and it has at least one non-trivial custom control”.

It should be a very interesting talk, I hope you can make it.

It’s at Extensis (url to map, we’re on the 5th floor).

Food will be provided, and please arrive before 6pm because the doors are locked.

We’ll start off with some food and chit chat, and give a chance for folks to ask any questions. Bring them all, easy and hard, we’ll see if we can get them answered. If you have something you want to show, feel free to bring that as well.

The main attraction this month is a presentation by myself and my wife Jennifer Crumrine who attended the C4[1] independent developer conference in Chicago last month. We meet a lot of pretty cool people, and heard some great presentations on Mac development.

PS: I also encourage you to join our Google Group to keep up to date with meeting announcements: http://groups.google.com/group/pdx-cocoaheads

Kevin Hewitt started a weblog, and his first post is the Python examples he showed us at this months meeting.

Thanks to the folks that attended. Future plans – November is talk about and show Leopard – bring your cool Leopord example apps. I am thinking about doing a presentation for September on my learnings at C4[1] this past weekend.

And if anyone knows more Macintosh developers in Portland, please let me know. I need to promote this more!!