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360iDev – You do Mac apps?

Have you ported your app/game to the Mac Appstore? Thought about it?

The current video on the 360|MacDev home page is Dave Wiskus and Kyle Richter talking about building an iOS app that lead to building a Mac App.

360|MacDev 2010 was pre Mac Appstore and the dialogue was great. Tons of talk about what the future would look like post App store.

Guess what, it’s the future!!! Come talk to Mac app successes, and learn from the best and brightest! Check out the rock star line up and schedule.

Don’t miss out! Register now!

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360iDev 2011 – Survey results

For those who attending 360|iDev 2011, thank you for doing the post conference survey. It’s now closed, so if you didn’t, shame on you! That survey is really important to us in planning the event, and getting sponsorship!

Before announcing the winners and their prize i wanted to post some details of the survey. First, we had 355 tickets sell for 360|iDev 2011. We planned on having 300, but let in an additional 55 people. On the other hand the post conference survey only had 113 responses. About 1/3 of our attendees answered the survey. Hopefully that ratio gets better next year. This survey helps us when sponsors ask how many people are X skill set. How many are designers vs. developers (5% are designers of those who responded). If you attended but didn’t do the survey, well you missed out on helping us, but more importantly, missed out on a chance to win a $500 prize.

Years of Experience with iOS

 

I mentioned this in the keynote too but it’s clear that 360|iDev is NOT a hobbyist conference. In Fact it’s clear that the best and brightest who’ve been around the block since there was a block are attending 360|iDev.

I think a chart like this is really healthy for an event. If it was too heavy on the less than a year of experience side, there’d be too little hands-on knowledge to share.
If there was too much “I’ve been doing this forever”, there wouldn’t be enough people to learn. Part of what makes the iOS community so awesome and healthy is the sharing of knowledge and welcoming of new blood.

This type of distribution to me is healthy and what we aim for with 360|Events. It’s a community, not an exclusive club where only the anointed can hang out, and it’s not a intro to community class where no one knows what they’re doing.

 

 

I love that the iOS community comes from so many places. Many think it’s people who were doing Mac Desktop stuff, etc. but in fact as you can see, it’s people who were doing Flash stuff, other mobile technologies, even Java… :)

Background

 

It’s great to see that there’s no real well spring of iOS developers. Anyone can do it. Anyone can be successful.

 

How many 360|iDev events have you attended

There’s a ton of data in the survey, but I think I’ll end with a really promising bit of information. As you can see, we had a ton of new people show up to 360|iDev 2011. Not only was it the first 360|iDev to sell out, but it had a huge turn out in new blood for the community. Maybe they just haven’t been doing the conference thing, or as we saw above are new to the platform. In either cas that’s awesome. Very very awesome!! We’re very happy to have so many people finding 360|iDev and enjoying it.

 

It’s good to know what we do is being enjoyed by so many! It helps re-enforce why we do it :)

 

Oh yeah and the winners. Did you know when we do these post conference surveys we give away two $500 prizes.

 

Chris Patterson & Nick Bhardwaj are the lucky winners. They’ve got an email waiting for each of them with their prize options.

 

Thank you again to everyone who took the survey, and to those who came to 360|iDev 2011. You’re a part of something awesome, and we’re truly honored to be a part of it, and look forward to even bigger and better things in 2012!!

 

John

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360iDev 2011 – Party like it’s 1999, except it’s 2011 and Prince isn’t here

Though you never know, Prince could show up… Ok probably not, but still.

So you know there’s parties during 360|iDev but what are they?

Well they start Sunday and go thru Wednesday!

Sunday night we have a welcome reception in the hotel from about 6-8pm. It’s a nice and mellow way to start the conference. Meet new people and re-connect with folks you know from twitter and the internet or only see at conferences.

There’s a Speaker Sponsor dinner from 5-6 to show our awesome speakers and sponsors how much we love them (don’t worry attendees we love you too and you get lots of parties).

There’s also a Night of Meat forming. More here.

Click for larger map

Monday Night Push.io is hosting a party at 1-Up. If drinking a 40 of King Cobra while playing Dig-Dug is your idea of fun, 1-Up is for you. Actually even if that’s NOT your idea of fun, 1-Up is a blast :) It’s a classic Arcade game bar. The entire space is arcade games and pinball machines. It’s a blast from the past for those of us old enough and a damn fun time for everyone!

 

Tuesday Night On3 is sponsoring a party at Mellow Mushroom, just a few blocks from the hotel on the 16th St Mall. The entire restaurant is ours, including the awesome patio. There’s TVs all over so don’t think we won’t be doing some Rock Band or youtube roulette or something else fun. The bar is open (beer only, sorry wine people) and the food will be flowing. Not only will there be an awesome buffet set up but the entire menu is open to us so if there’s something you want they’ll whip it up for you. How awesome is that!

The Parties start at 7pm. That gives you time to drop of bags and such in your room and make your way out of the hotel. Groups will form in the lobby to head out together and our awesome volunteers will be stationed along the route to make sure you know you’re almost there :)

 

The map right over there on the left has points for Mellow Mushroom (B) and 1Up (C). The easiest way to get to both places is the 16th St Mall Shuttle. It runs up and down 16th st all day. You can get on at Glenarm and get off right in front of Mellow Mushroom, and get off at Market St. Station for 1Up. It’s the easiest easy to get there. Depending on the weather it’ll be a nice walk too. 16th St. Mall is a great walk with lots of people watching and is a great slice of Denver (yes, that means hobos and tourists as well as locals)

 

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360iDev 2011 – 31 days to go!

You know how many tickets are left? Less than 40.

Yes less than 40 tickets left for 360|iDev 2011. That means we’re closer to selling out than we’ve ever been. EVAR!

 

What’s that mean? Well if you haven’t bought a ticket, better get on it. Not only are tickets running low, so are hotel rooms. We’re gonna own the Crowne Plaza.

If you have bought your ticket, well you’re gonna be in some truly awesome company.

 

Sure there’s lots of other iOS conferences, but none are focused on the community like we are. Don’t miss out!

Register now!

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360iDev 2011 – Community App Awards Nominations

We did this in Austin, and this year we mean to make it a little more formal and classy :)

Got an app or game or twitter client you love and think deserves some attention? Nominate it! Use this form. Voting will start in a few weeks.

Spread the word. Let’s really show the world how the iOS community supports each other.

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360iDev 2011 – Not too late to Volunteer

Can’t quite cover the cost of travel, hotel and conference ticket? Well we can’t help too much on travel and hotel (Though there’s plenty of folks looking for roommates) but we can give you a free ticket. All we ask is that you volunteer to help make 360|iDev rock!

 

We need folks to help work the registration table, handing out shirts, and badges, as well as attend sessions to record the session videos.

 

Yup that means you still get to attend the conference, go to sessions, hit up the parties at night, all that good stuff.

You actually get all the benefits of an attendee, so you don’t miss out, we just assign you sessions to record. We do our best to make sure the sessions you’re recording are ones you want to attend as well.

We need a small army of volunteers, so don’t be shy. Check out this page for more information on submitting to volunteer. Hurry up, 360|iDev is almost here! Spread the word

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360iDev 2011 – Just 39 Days to go!

Are you a game developer? Want to be? Maybe just want to brush up on your dev skills with a little out of the box development.

 

The Game Jam is for you. And as it turns out, by you. The 360|iDev 2011 Game Jam will take place Tuesday night, sponsored by the iOS community!

The Game Jam is a great place to build your first game, or your tenth. To share what you know and learn new things.

Check out the official page, managed by our pal (and speaker) Mike Berg.

The first time Noel Llopis suggested the Game Jam to us, we loved it. Ever since then we’ve been more than happy to have one take place.

The Game Jam starts around 7pm, and goes until around 8. It’s fully hands on, bring your laptop, we’ll supply the red bull, coffee and snacks.

Then if you like, you can show off your hard work during lunch on Wednesday at the Game Jam Review.

 

See you there! Make sure you register before we sell out!

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360iDev 2011 – Just 58 days to go!

You know what’s in 58 days? 360|iDev 2011. The only 360|iDev this year.

Space at the hotel is almost gone, staying elsewhere is always an option, but we’ve got a good rate with the hotel might as well save some money… Don’t ya think?

This post is the beginning of a series of posts I’m gonna write counting down to the conference. Not daily or anything, but often. Each will have things you should know about the conference.

 

The first and most important thing you should know about 360|iDev is why we do it. We do it because back in 2009 we recognized that the iOS developer community had no central event to come together around. We launched 360|iDev to offer that. We found speakers via forums like Touch Arcade, and the Apple Dev forums. We reached out to people we knew or had heard of via twitter.

We didn’t make any money, but we didn’t expect to either. Making money is a huge plus and we wouldn’t have been upset if we had, but it wasn’t the goal. Nor was filling a conference center with 600 people.

 

In fact the first 360|iDev in 2009 only had 166 attendees, some 30 of which were speakers. We jumped to 222 in Denver in 2009. Our return to San Jose in 2010 brought 301 attendees. Our most recent 360|iDev in Austin TX saw a slight decline in numbers, 235.

We never wanted to be a 600+ person conference. The community can surely support that, and based on the popularity of iOS conferences this and last year, surely there’s interest in events. But what we always thought was special about 360|iDev and our other events was that we don’t want to be the biggest conference ever. We want to be the one where you can walk the halls and say hi other developers and know that those people know the pains of Cocoas2D, or Gamekit, etc.

We wanted to be the conference where rockstars in the community are eating lunch with a developer who’s just getting started, maybe he’s just decided to go indie and live his dream. The conference where the speaker from the session you were just in is sitting next you in this session, because while she’s a bad ass at OpenGL ES maybe she’s still wrapping her head around something else.

 

From the start we believed that providing an event that brought the community together was reward enough, we still do.

 

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360idev 2011 Labs

Having trouble with your code? Maybe need some design feedback?

This year we’re launching the 360|iDev labs. Labs work like at WWDC and other events, our awesome speakers have agreed to hang out in the new lab area and help our attendees.

The lab schedule is below the regular schedule. Take a look.

We left a few spots open for drop in lab help.

We how the labs will be a great way for the community to grow and he each other.

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360iDev 2011 – WWDC Recap

Well another WWDC has come and gone, my liver survived, mostly. Hope yours did :)

As always WWDC is a week of crazy parties, sessions, more parties, sessions, a beer bash, and a few more parties. And thrown in in-between, meeting new folks, and re-meeting folks you already know.

Of course the nights were packed with parties, some open to all, others not so much. I can’t say what those parties are like, but this post seems to sum up who was at those parties and what they were like. I attended awesome parties aimed at developers and open to all, like the really really fun push.io party! and others by folks like Mobclix, iPhone Alliance, SFMacIndie, and more. WWDC Parties are a ton of fun, and a valuable experience in and of themselves, I wish I had more of me to attend the ones I missed!

This year like last, i opted to not buy a WWDC ticket and simply attend parties and be around all week. I don’t write much code now, so why take a ticket from a dev who really wants to be there for sessions? Didn’t make much sense.

Being outside also gave me time to hide USB drives around for our annual (3rd annual if you can believe that!) WWDC USBHunt. All but 1 drive was found/claimed. The last drive was found or at least moved, but not claimed. Seems to happen to 1 drive a year. Odd.

Other than the missing drive, the USBHunt was a huge hit, no drive was in the wild for more than about 30 minutes, not bad! Having $600 worth of software from awesome indie devs doesn’t hurt one bit! Congrats to everyone who found the drive, and hope to see you in September!

I’ve got to come up with something bigger for next year!

If you haven’t booked your trip to denver this September you should probably get on it. We’re still about 4ish months out, but have already sold more than 50% of our tickets. This is shaping up to be the biggest 360|iDev ever.

 

See you there!