Carrboro Creative Coworking

Info from Blake about the next Cocoa meetup:

Carrboro Cocoa Consortium Meetup - a regular iphone and cocoa developer event
Date: Tuesday June 9, 7pm - 9pm
Where: Carrboro Creative Coworking

Topic: Going Social w/ Cocoa Touch - Integrating with Facebook & Twitter
Speakers: Blake Watters & Jeremy Ellison of Objective 3, Rachit Shukla of Two Toasters

Facebook and Twitter offer us an exciting set of tools to build applications that are better connected, more viral, and often just more fun than our standalone offerings. At the June meetup, the group will examine the development possibilities and marketing opportunities available to us through social media integration.

From a development perspective, we'll examine:
- Facebook Connect for the iPhone
- MGTwitterEngine, a full-featured Twitter library for Cocoa & Cocoa Touch
- Various goodies from around the web

On the marketing front, we'll discuss a few questions:
- How can social media extend our application lifecycle and bring users back more often?
- How can smart utilization turn our users into recruitment and advertising assets?
- How can Facebook & Pinchmedia interoperate to provide killer market insight for my app?

Come join us as we explore the technical aspects & business of utilizing social media in iPhone & iPod Touch applications. As usual, we'll meet up at Carrburritos at 6pm to grab some delicious food before heading over for the meetup. Hope to see you there!

Info from Blake about the next Cocoa meetup:

Carrboro Cocoa Consortium Meetup - a regular iphone and cocoa developer event
When: Wednesday, May 13, 2009 @ 7pm
Where: Carrboro Creative Coworking, 205 Lloyd Street, Suite 101, Carrboro, NC 27510

Topic: iPhone XML & HTML Parsing with ElementParser
Speaker: Lee Buck
http://touchtank.wordpress.com/element-parser/

Let's face it: working with HTML is a total pain. Though a superset of XML, the evolution of the web has brought unique
challenges to developers who want to parse and manipulate HTML programatically. HTML is a world of unclosed tags, poorly composed data, and is, at best, a loosely interpreted specification. High level tools like Hpricot and Nokogiri have removed quite a bit of the sting from working with HTML -- provided you are blessed enough to be working on a platform like Ruby.

But what about Cocoa and Cocoa Touch? Apple offers us only two options: the NSXML family of classes and the low level libxml2
library. Each of these options can be painful -- they really want well-formed XML and don't offer high level query API's such as CSS selectors. We'll explore these existing options and introduce a new kid on the block: ElementParser.

ElementParser is a new XML & HTML parsing library designed to give you "just enough" parsing and querying magic to be productive with HTML on everyone's favorite mobile device.

Come join the Carrboro Cocoa Consortium as we spend an hour exploring the HTML & XML world on the Cocoa Touch platform and take a tour of the new ElementParser library.

As usual, we'll meet up before the meeting at 6pm @ Carrburrito's for some delicious Mexican food and geeky conversation.

Check out the Carrboro Cocoa Consortium Facebook page for more info.

Info from Blake about the next Cocoa meetup:

Carrboro Cocoa Consortium Meetup
Lightning Talks & Elevator Pitches

When: March 11, 2009 @ 7pm (Doors open @ 6:45)
Where: Carrboro Creative Coworking

As we learned last meet-up, the Triangle is full of talented and inspiring Cocoa developers cranking away on some really cool apps. This meet-up is going to be all about who we are and what we are doing.

Have an app you are developing and want to share it? Got some cool ideas you'd like to start cutting code on? Need a designer, developer or partner in crime to pursue the vision with? Bring you stories, ideas, and friends out to the Cocoa Consortium Wednesday, March 11 and let's have at them. Talks should be relatively short and highly interactive. We want to see your app, play with it and collaborate with you to take it to the next level.

If you are planning to present an app or pitch an idea, please throw a teaser on the group Facebook wall so we have some idea what we'll be working with. After we've worked through the queue of talks, we'll mingle and network until 9pm.

Two hours not enough? Join us at Carrburritos @ 6pm for a burrito and a beer before we head over to CCC to get the meet-up going!

See you soon!

Wondering what the hell Cocoa is? Check out the wikipedia article.

Last night's iphone/Cocoa meetup was giant! I counted 20 people at one point. A few CCC coworkers and a bunch of guests. Pretty amazing considering it was only promoted a little bit. (By social media standards anyway.)

There was a lot of discussion about the process of getting an iphone app in the iTunes store. Plus some serious talk about the challenges of marketing your app. A bunch of good strategy and practical experiences were shared.

To keep up with crazy developers join their Facebook group called the Carrboro Cocoa Consortium [requires login] or friend their Twitter user @CarrboroCocoa. Dude I'm loving the C's!

This is the bio they wrote for the Facebook page:
The Carrboro Cocoa Consortium is an RTP based group focused on the design, development, and business of Mac OS X & Apple iPhone/iPod applications. Topics range from the exploration of all things Cocoa to the voodoo economics of the App Store. Come join us to learn, network, collaborate... and just maybe build the next killer app.

Thanks to Blake and Jeremy of 3 Cube Technologies for sponsoring this. They were hilarious and brilliant!

CCC coworker Blake Watters of 3Cube Technologies is holding a iphone/Cocoa development meetup. It's first night will be here at CCC on February 5 at 7pm. 3Cube has a popular iphone app out called Satellite. Its a client for the popular website Reddit.com. Come meet and learn from the experts!