Download the OzCHI app for the iPhone on the iTunes App Store here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ozchi-2010/id403124532?mt=8.

Please direct any support enquiries to support@secretlab.com.au.

Just a note to say that if you’re fortunate enough to be attending the awesome /dev/world/2010 then you should stop by and hear some of us speak!

Jon and Paris, as well as a few other friends and colleagues of, and at, Secret Lab are presenting the following talks:

• Failure Is Not An Option – on UX and intuitive design – Paris Buttfield-Addison (co-founder)
• Awesome Things You’ve Missed in Python – on Python, and how awesome it is – Chris Neugebauer (friend of Secret Lab)
• Using and Enhancing Mapkit for the iPhone/iPad – on being clever with MapKit – Tim Nugent (occasional coder and friend of Secret Lab)
• Computation on iPhone/iPad - on being efficient on the iOS – Alex Berry (Mobile Engineer at Secret Lab)
• An introduction to OpenGL – on the basics on Open GL on Mac OS X - Andrew Bennett (former co-founder)
• Not Lego: Doing Everything with Blocks and Grand Central Dispatch – on the power of Apple’s latest coding enhancements – Josh Deprez (frequent Mobile Engineer at Secret Lab)
• Using Web APIs in iOS Apps – on talking to the ever-important web backends – Nic Wittison (frequent Mobile Engineer at Secret Lab)
• 2D Gameplay Tips and Tricks – on building 2D games for iOS – Jon Manning (co-founder)
• Designing for Touch & Multi-touch – on designing killer iOS interfaces – Paris & Jon (co-founders)

Phew!

In short, it’s going to be an awesome conference.

Jon and I will be speaking at the awesome new conference (& expo), APPCON in Las Vegas in August. If you’re interested in mobile app development, on any platform, you need to be there!

App development conferences are a dime a dozen, but all of them are narrowly focused on one platform or another. Even the big must-attend conferences run by the overseers and owners of each platform (such as Google’s I/O, Apple’s WWDC, and RIM’s BlackBerry DevCon) are, by virtue of their provenance, limited to a single platform.

That’s why we’re really excited to both be speaking, along with our fantastic co-author Neal Goldstein, and the Product Evangelist of our favourite game development tool, Tom Higgins of Unity Technologies, at APPCON in Las Vegas – their holistic approach to covering mobile apps is a breath of a fresh air. It’s definitely a conference anyone who is serious about this industry needs to be at – even if you only develop for one of the big mobile platforms, you’re not doing yourself justice unless you’re also keeping up with the others!

Hope to see you there! Let us know if you’re there, we’d love to see the interesting things that you’re working on, or show you what we’re up to!

Paris Buttfield-Addison
Production Lead

After a busy month of teaching iPhone, iPad and Game Development and Design in Hobart, Brisbane and Melbourne, Jon and I are back in San Francisco/Silicon Valley to catch up with our clients here, as well as attend Apple’s annual developer love-in, WWDC 2010.

If anyone else is in the area and would like to catch up, please let us know! We love meeting other iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, Game and Unity Developers, as well as chatting to fellow eccentrics of all kinds! You can find out contact details here, please do get in touch!

We’ll keep everyone updated with our reactions to the exciting things that are surely going to be announced at WWDC.

Until then!

Paris Buttfield-Addison
Production Lead

We got to San Francisco from Palo Alto via an exciting train journey, where we found that this weeks issue of SF Weekly has an interesting tagline about an interesting sounding article on San Francisco. After that, we had some steak and relaxed; we went to the movies to see both “Cop Out” (awesome, but completely stupid) and “Alice in Wonderland” (typical Tim Burton genius). At the cinema, we were fortunate enough to see the Old Spice “I’m on a horse” ad on the big screen – which would more than made up the price of admission, even if the movie had been rubbish!

Soon enough we registered for GDC and checked in to our glorious hotel rooms. We’re staying at the San Francisco Marriott on 4th, and it really is quite high. After attempting to pose the Secret Lab business cards against the view and miserably failing to show off both the awesomeness of the view or the majesty of the business cards we gave up and got more food, this time far too much pasta (some of which is still sitting in our hotel room fridge!) We went for a wander to Union Square, and wandered around Borders for far too long – and, as usual even though we both use Sony eReaders, came away with more books.

The next day, GDC started! After being welcomed by a threatening Wario banner we proceeded down the grand (ahem) staircase of Moscone North before figuring out that we actually needed to be in Moscone South – after a swift adventure through a maze of tunnels, we found ourselves underneath Moscone South. We planned to attend the 10th Annual Game Design Workshop after having heard so many good things about it.

A host of amusing personalities, led by the seemingly inimitable Marc LeBlanc begun leading us through, and lecturing us on, a variety of fascinating topics on game design. The first thing we did was create a new set of rules, and a new setting, for the game SISSYFIGHT 3000. Paris’ team came up with “Constructing Thermonuclear Robot Wars” in which we used the papercraft Wario that Nintendo gave us as parts to represent building a robot. It got far, far more complex from there.

After some vigorous playtesting, brainstorming and laughing the activity changed, and we started to brainstorm “Epic Performance” moments of a game, with an eye to improving the “epicness” when a player fails. It was fun, but I’m still not entirely sure what we came up with! Following that, we moved to inserting a rule for player behaviour into a game called “100 Zombies”. Let me tell you, trying to figure out how a character labelled “Math Whiz” moves and fights zombies is no small challenge. So far, we’ve come up with a system whereby he “triangulates” the position of zombies, throws set squares and kills the zombies on the tip of a 3-4-5 triangle. I’ll post a diagram when I get a moment. We also, of course, collected our free phones from Google!

After that, we went to Unitys iPhone Networking Reception, and met up with the ever-friendly Tom Higgins from Unity and a whole host of other awesome Unity users and iPhone developers. From there, we set off to Chieftan’s Irish Pub (at the recommendation of Tom) and grabbed some dinner (including Bangers & Mash and Irish Stew!) with a small group of developers, artists and sound designers. It was great to meet so many awesome people in one day!

So, today (Day 2) we’re going back to the Game Design Workshop to continue work on “100 Zombies” and other exciting things! Tomorrow, the conference begins in earnest!

And now, since it’s 8:20 AM and the conference begins at 10AM, it’s time to go and have coffee! More photos are here.