MeshU: Three of the smartest developers in the world, and me

posted by pete on February 11th, 2009

Word has started to go around today that I’m going to be giving a talk called Is that an iPhone in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me? at MeshU. It’s true — I really can’t spare you when there’s an opportunity to say something cheeky.

I seem to have a distinct knack for getting myself smack in the middle of people that are several orders of magnitude more important than I ever hope to be. For example, check out this lineup:

From left to right, that’s Microsoft’s Chris Wilson, who wrote IE. Then there’s Douglas Crockford, who invented JSON. Then Aaron Gustafson, a mover in the standards and accessible web development community. Then me. Then John Resig (he created the jQuery JavaScript framework), and finally Joe Walker of DWR fame. Too funny!

So the development track of MeshU is going to be Chris Wanstrath from GitHub and Ezra from EngineYard, who represent 20% of the top ten Ruby programmers alive today. “Rails Hero” Ilya isn’t just one of the most helpful members of the Rails world, but he’s a wizard at performance optimization, too.

Me? I’m humbled and slightly intimidated by my esteemed company… but I’m going to do my part to deliver a really information-rich session on iPhone development. From the summary, here’s what I’ll be discussing:

• The difference between native applications written in Objective-C and Ajax web apps running in Safari
• Site Specific Browsers (SSBs) and hybrid native/web applications
• Submission, pricing, approval, and promotion of applications on iTunes Application Store (ITMS)
• Using helper applications and custom protocols to do things that are “impossible”
• Things Apple doesn’t want you to do
• A quick overview of iPhone development books, blogs, and other resources

This is not a coding workshop! My goal is to educate attendees about their options for targeting a relatively new platform. Specifically, our company has a lot of experience with hybrid native/web applications that wrap an instance of Safari to communicate with a web service providing content customized for the iPhone. We believe that this is the best of both worlds: hybrid applications have the advantages of being first class iPhone apps that can be updated immediately, without waiting for Apple’s approval to push out a minor update.

Are there things not on the list which you think would be good to address?

I went to MeshU as an attendee last year and was genuinely impressed at the quality of the sessions. This is a cheap, no-bullshit event that Toronto geeks would be ill-advised to miss.

Update: It occurs to me that I’ve never heard of a Ruby programmer dying. Someone call Ray Kurzweil.