akosma software

As a part of the DevDay for iPhone in London and Geneva you will have the chance to win one of three iPads!

These are the rules and conditions:

• It has to be a new application (for iPhone, iPod touch, iPad or, even better, all of them at once) not yet available in the Apple App Store;
• The deadline for registering for the contest is April 1st, 2010;
• The deadline for submitting your application is April 25th, 2010;
• Only one application per registered developer;
• The application will be tested by the Jury (composed by members of the program committee for the DevDays);
• The Jury will provide developers with the UDIDs of the evaluation devices.

I’m a happy user of Fat Free CRM by Michael Dvorkin. I’ve been using it since the start of akosma software to keep track of my projects, clients, prospects and even as a simple to-do list. It helps me as a “corporate memory”, tracking every interaction I have with my clients and partners (phone calls, meetings, new projects, quotations, etc).

As I said many times before, if you are not using Fat Free CRM, you should. A CRM, I mean, not a CMS

But, as an avid iPhone user, I was lacking the ability to use all of this information while I was in the road. I wanted to be able to access my “company wide” address book, check my tasks for the day, or add comments about the latest meetings right from my iPhone. So that is why, in cooperation with Michael and the marketing geniuses of Zerofee (who suggested the name and contributed the icon), I’ve written Senbei, a small, lightweight iPhone client for Fat Free CRM. And not only that, I’ve also made the source code available to anyone with a BSD license, as usual, in my Github account!

Right now Senbei costs USD 0.99 (CHF 1.10), but I will increase the price until USD 4.99 (CHF 5.50) in every one of the next 5 updates. I have new features in the pipeline that I want to add… including an iPad version!

Aberla is organizing a Mobile Marketing & Branding Seminar in Zürich, on Tuesday, April 27th, 2010, from 1300 to 1800, at the Renaissance Hotel, Thurgauerstrasse 101, Zurich.

This event will feature presentations from world-class thought leaders, about the strategies required to succeed in the world of mobile applications – not only for the iPhone but also for Android, BlackBerry, and other platforms!

• Sumit Rai, Founder of Kulu Valley;
• Harald Horber, Plattform Manager Mobile in the CFF / SBB;
• Raven Zachary, founder of Small Society and creator of the iPhoneDevCamps;
• KC MacLaren, Manager of Retail Consumer Technology for Starbucks.

The inscription is open! As a special offer, readers of this blog can get 15% off the ticket price using the code akosma. Register now!

I haven’t blogged about the iPad until now on purpose; I wanted to let the waters calm down, as January’s announcement was certainly one that left nobody indifferent.

The iPad is a disruptive device. Not in the sense of groundbreaking, because there is nothing on the iPad that you couldn’t find in other devices. I mean disruptive in the sense of creating a new blue ocean, a new category of devices where the interaction with the machine is done through a completely different kind of approach. Apple is, once again, redefining the word “personal computer”, setting itself apart from the competition, and making us drool all over again.

The iPad is the dawn of couch computing, with all what this phrase means.

Those of you who have been following me for long might remember an article I wrote in my personal blog two years ago (in French, translated here):

Why can’t we have conferences like this one, with mini events like this one in parallel in the French-speaking part of Switzerland? Or even like this one? Or like this other one! Or that one!

For all of you non-French speakers, this blog post is about a dream, about bringing to Switzerland quality speakers, for a world-class conference about technology. Something that this part of the country, at least, was lacking.

Well, my dream has come true: following the success of the 2009 Zürich event, and 2 days after the 2010 London edition, I hereby proudly announce the Dev Days for iPhone 2010 in Geneva, on Wednesday, April 28th, to take place in the Geneva Business Center in Petit-Lancy. The conference is co-organized by Trifork, Hortis and akosma software, and sponsored by none other than O’Reilly.

The conference is built around a double track, one for business people, the other for developers. As for speakers, we are immensely proud and happy to have on stage Raven Zachary (creator of the Obama iPhone app back in 2008, owner of Small Society and one of the most important figures in the iPhone business world in the USA), Daniel Steinberg (author of Cocoa Programming and Zero Configuration Networking, and frequent writer in the ADC site or O’Reilly’s MavDevCenter), and Neelan Choksi (founder of Lexcycle, the company behind the Stanza iPhone application).

Faithful to the “think global, act local” meme, the event will also feature business presentations of local interest, highlighting the thriving ecosystem built around the iPhone in Switzerland, including presentations Frédéric Layani and Nicolas Marion from Tag Heuer, and Jérôme Layat from the Hortis team, who have recently collaborated in publishing an astonishing iPhone application.

In any case, a world-class, unique event, without any doubt the most important iPhone-related event to happen in Switzerland in 2010. We hope to meet you there and share some interesting insight about the iPhone business!

For any inquiries about the event, don’t hesitate to contact Geeta Schmidt (+ 45 87 32 87 87, gsm@trifork.com) or myself.

Yesterday’s presentation in the Skills Matter meeting is available in Slideshare!

Update, 2010-02-05: The kind guys at Skills Matter have also published the video of the whole conference; check it out!

As the title suggests: check out the official nib2objc page in Softpedia!

Preparing the path for the amazing iPhone Dev Days 2010 in April, next week I’ll be giving some tips and tricks about iPhone development, in London!

This will happen in the Skills Matter’s meeting, at the The Skills Matter eXchange, 116-120 Goswell Road, London EC1V 7DP, on Tuesday, February 2nd, at 18:30.

I hope to see you there! The event is free so don’t hesitate to come by.

Our first blog post of 2010 presents a tool that we’ve been using internally and that might be useful for other people.

As you might have experienced, prototyping applications in Interface Builder is fine as long as you don’t deal that much with UITableViewController instances. Prototyping user interfaces with tables and navigation is not as easy as drag-and-dropping some components, and you usually have to implement a small UITableViewController subclass from scratch yourself, including some kind of navigation logic.

Enter EasyTableView, a set of classes inheriting from UINavigationController and UITableViewController, ready to use in your own projects, to quickly simulate interfaces using navigation and tables. I’ve been using this code in several prototypes, and it allows me to quickly craft navigation-based applications loading several different tables. The AKOEasyTableViewControllerDelegate protocol allows other classes to be notified of taps on cells or on accessory buttons.

The code is available, as usual, in Github with a liberal BSD license.

Whenever you are, whichever language you speak
akosma software wishes you happiness and health for 2010!

Thanks to Claudia for the artwork and to Omniglot.com for the phrases