iPhone hack day at Viget Labs

<a href="http://s3.amazonaws.com/brentmc79-prod/files/10/original.jpg?1250189401"><img style="margin:0px 0px 5px 5px" src="http://s3.amazonaws.com/brentmc79-prod/files/10/medium.jpg?1250189401" alt="photo.jpg" width="300" height="225" align="right" /></a>I recently spent a day hanging out with a few of the guys at <a title="Viget Labs homepage" href="http://www.viget.com" target="_blank">Viget Labs</a> hacking on the iPhone.  <a title="Ben Scofield's professional blog" href="http://benscofield.com/" target="_blank">Ben Scofield</a>, the Technology Director at Viget Labs, was leading an iPhone development primer for a few of Viget's finest, and they were nice enough to let a handful of "outsiders" join the fun. My iPhone development experience at that point was very minimal.  I had done a few online tutorials and walk-throughs, but nowhere near enough to really understand what I was doing.  On top of that, my Objective-C knowledge was pretty much non-existant.  Fortunately, none of this was a problem. We spent the first half of the day going over the basics.  Ben walked us through Xcode and Interface Builder, and we talked about basic project layout, the different types of iPhone apps (list, view, and navigation-based, etc). We then broke off into small groups, pairs mostly, to do a little hacking.  <a title="David's professional blog" href="http://davideisinger.com/">David Eisinger </a>and myself put our heads together on something amazing.  The Text-EmBIGiner, we called it (or something like that).  Picture this, a text field, a button, and a label.  You enter your text, hit the buttom, and BAM -- the label is updated with your text.  Fucking amazing.  We thought so at least.  Many high-fives were had. Lunch was provided in the form of <a href="http://www.amantepizza.com/">Amante Pizza</a>.  Thanks Viget! In the afternoon we moved on to talk about ways of makin iPhone development less painful.  In other words, removing the Objective-C.  We briefly talked about <a href="http://rhomobile.com/home">Rhomobile</a>, an open source framwork for building cross-platform mobile apps. The remainder of the day was spent talking about and playing with two other frameworks, Appcelerator's <a href="http://www.appcelerator.com/products/titanium-mobile/" target="_blank">Titanium</a> and the open source <a href="http://phonegap.com" target="_blank">PhoneGap</a>.  Both frameworks allow you to build your app using primarily HTML and javascript, but they still give you access to the iPhone native controls and features.  They were very cool and I could definitely see myself playing with these more in the future. Overall it was a really fun day, and I'm looking forward to putting my new knowledge to good use. Thanks again Viget! 2009-08-13T21:27:25Z My follow-up on the iPhone Hack Day at Viget Labs 33 iphone sdk apple hack appstore titanium rhodes appcelerator viget labs objective-c true iphone-hack-day-at-viget-labs iPhone hack day at Viget Labs

2009-08-13T21:30:40Z