hypeway

Last night I attended the Cocoaheads WWDC 2009 meeting for the first time at the Apple Store in San Francisco downtown. I had the pleasure to meet some awesome Mac and iPhone developers, and listen to their fantastic presentations on how to become successful Mac and iPhone developers. The ideas and experience the guest speakers shared with the audience were just incredibly insightful and useful. This is by far the best users group meeting I’ve ever attended.

One of my favorite developers on the guest speaker list is Sofa, who developed Versions (which just won the Apple Design Awards) and Checkout. The Amsterdam design firm also created gorgeous icons for companies such as Mozilla, TomTom, and Nike. Another one of my favorite developers is 280 North, who developed 280 Sildes, a sexy Web-based presentation application equivalent to Keynote on the Mac. The development team of 280 North also created an open source framework, named Cappuccino, which aims to make it easy to build desktop-like applications for Web browsers. The framework, written in Objective-J (also developed by 280 North), is largely based upon Apple’s Objective-C and Cocoa frameworks. Even Cappuccino’s IDE, named Atlas, feels and operates like Apple’s Xcode.

Almost.at, a real-time event feeds application built using Cappuccino, is another impressive product demonstrating how developers can harness the power of Objective-J to build desktop-caliber applications that run in Web browsers.