Excuse the last minute notice, but we’re having a CocoaHeads Portland meeting tonight at 6pm at Extensis (url to map, we’re on the 5th floor).

Pizza again will be provided. Arrive before 6 so that the doors downstairs are still open. If you get here after 6pm, call or text me on my cell phone.

Unfortunately the guest I was hoping to have didn’t materialize, so we’re going to talk about the WWDC keynote and the iPhone. If you want to demo an application, bring it along! If you have cocoa questions, bring them along. We’ll have a door prize drawing, the one we forgot to do last time!

Also, before we break for the night, I’d like to set a standard date for the meetings so that folks can plan in the future (like the 2nd Thursday or Tuesday of every month).

Update: We had a pretty good meeting, with a few more than last time. We had a great chat about Leopard and WWDC, and then talked about the iPhone (3 of us had stood in line to get one).

Our meeting time is now the 2nd Wednesday of every month, so the next CocoaHeads Portland meeting is August 8th at 6pm in downtown Portland. I had a few people volunteer to potentially do small presentations, which is an awesome thing – community building at its best when members want to teach and show other members. It makes me very happy.

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

I just finished reading this really great article on a point of sale application called Checkout by Apple’s Developer Connection group.

The interesting part in my eye is that it’s written in Python and calling Cocoa. I’ve never used Python, but I hear there is a lot more built in support for this in Leopard.

Having worked on Quicken for 3 years and QuickBooks for 3 years, I’m always interested in new entries into this market. In my opinion Intuit never fully supported their Macintosh products, and any new entries like this help Apple and help the Macintosh ecosystem.

I’m still looking at the new entrants into the personal finance market, to replace Quicken.. I’m frustrated with continually giving my money to Intuit without getting something new and exciting in return.

I made my way over to the Apple Store in San Francisco tonight to attend the CocoaHeads Silicon Valley meeting tonight.

Wil Shipley, Daniel Jalkut, and Gus Mueller all gave short presentations on different topics about being an independent Macintosh developer, and then they were joined by Brent Simmons for a long Q & A session where they took questions from the crowd.

They all did a great job. Gus talk about the various things you need to do to stay focused during the day, because, well, it’s only you. Daniel talked about payment processing, which in my mind seems to be the hardest part when one is actually ready to start charging people to use your app. Wil talked about hype.

Tidbits that are good to remember:

• Give out eval copies to people who want to review it. If they sell one copy, you are ahead.

• Give free copies to anyone with an apple.com email address. Really because these people are the Macintosh’s biggest fans, and they’ll push your app when people ask for a suggestion.

• Work on a great product that people want to use – don’t worry yet about a company or marketing.

• Do your own leaks – consider giving an exclusive to a rumor site, which a TON of people read.

• Watch your weblog traffic, see where traffic is coming from and keep track of it (regarding the last tidbit)

• Advertise on the Google search network, not on the Google content network.

• Have a thick skin. Always apologize to your customers.

When I remember more, I’ll try and post them.. it was well worth the no dinner until after the talk. (Which, well, hasn’t arrived yet in my hotel room).

Oh – on my way back up to the hotel room another guy who went to the meeting was in my elevator.. I asked him what he though, and he said “it was great, but I don’t want to give up my day job”. I laughed and said ya, but perhaps it will inspire us who have day jobs.

Local Portland company Panic is celebrating 10 years of being alive – great that small organically grown companies can continue to be successful and grow.. and release a new product Monday morning.

Ten Years (And Counting)

(Via ~stevenf.)

The Impact of MacHeist: “It’s been interesting tracking all the MacHeist-related activity on Cocoa Blogs. There are some very passionate people writing Mac software, and I’m not sure we’d see anything like this on the Windows side…”

(Via Theobroma Cacao.)

Well worth reading, it’s probably the best I’ve read on MacHeist so far.