Response to iPhoneDevCamp has been overwhelmingly positive. Since last year, there have been several independently organized events using the name, and there are a few exciting ones coming up that we’d like you to know about:
You are welcome hold a BarCamp-style event, using the iPhoneDevCamp name.  Our only request is that you contact us to go over publication advice and to remind your organizers to review the iPhone SDK license. We’d love to list you here; all we need is your Wiki page (we recommend BarCamp.org).
During the playback, you’ll notice some visual flutter on occasion. This is a result of having to crop from one portion of the Connect video window to another, while our Satellites tuned in. The audio should be seamless, however. In the future, we’ll avoid having other video feeds showing while Keynote presentations are in view.
What an incredible weekend! We are simply floored by the quality and diversity of the attendees and the resulting work. Here are the Hackathon winners in order of most valuable prize to honorable mention:
This year, the buzzword is: Games. ngmoco CEO Neil Young gave a compelling Keynote on the revolutionary nature of the iPhone specification for gaming. He also announced nglabs, and their offer to incubate 10 free apps without claim to any of the author’s intellectual property.
iPhoneDevCamp alumni Nicole Lazzaro, Greg Schwartz, and Estelle Weyl made a great social game inspired by 2 truths and a lie and earned themselves a 17" MacBook Pro w/ 4GB RAM + Applecare .
Louis Gerbarg and Rob Marini created a way to get debug data from the iPhone itself, and serve it up locally to your Mac via webservice. They plan to Open Source the tool when ready. This feat earned them a white 2.1 GHz MacBook, sponsored by doubleTwist.
The stunning thing about this achievement it was entirely developed over the course of the event. The team earned themselves a copy of Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium, and plan to Open Source the project when it’s ready.
Tod Huffman demoed the full potential of this app privately before the proceedings, and then told us how he did it on stage. From the iusethis summary: “One area of innovation is our tag prediction UI. We do this to reduce the amount of typing it takes to properly tag an image. In the middle panel of our screen shot notice the tag ‘brushfire’ yields a predicted set of ‘fire, smoke, losangeles, california, wildfire’.
From the iPhone the organized photos go up to our server, which outputs geoRSS streams organizable by user or tag. The data can be imported into GIS systems such as Google Earth, as well as Common Operating Picture systems used by organizations such as the Red Cross or fire departments."
In a recent training exercise in San Diego Todd’s team imaged a real-life brush fire and got the data displayed in the command center 30 miles away within two minutes. Todd earned himself a $500 Apple Store Gift Certificate, sponsored by Tapulous.
The major value of iPhoneDevCamp is Open Source. This year, we saw a trio of projects (XML, HTTPD, and JSON) called TouchCode, that were used during the event. For his selfless efforts and generosity, Jon Wight (aka @schwa) received an Apple Store Gift Certificate for an iPhone 3G from the Apple Phone Show.
Taxi is a fine example of utility and simplicity. It gives you the cross-streets, and the nearest cab company. With one tap it will call that cab (photos by Andrew Mager):
The plan is to use text messaging to arrange the rendezvous in the future, but it’s already faster than all other methods of cab-finding:
For their ingenuity and focus, Viewzi was proud to award the team an Apple Store Gift Certificate for a new iPhone 3G.
Here’s an instrument with a built-in education. Tap the circle of fifths, stay in a minor key, or just multi-touch the scales and you are learning how to play the harp on iPhone. Sciral received Adobe Dreamweaver CS3, a copy of VMware, and an Axio Messenger Bag.
For this demo, CEO Alex Bratton from Lextech Labs controlled 12 high-end security cameras in Chicago with an iPhone in San Francisco. You can pinch and expand to zoom in and zoom out, and swipe to turn the cameras. Here is a video demo.
Listen to the spontaneous awe in the audience as the multitouch controls are demonstrated:
We thought it would be very hard to judge the ‘Coolest App’ category, but controlling cameras over 3G with an iPhone is undeniably rad, and there was unanimous assent.
Three Lextech team members flew to the San Francisco gathering and three attended the satellite location in Chicago. Lextech also donated expertise and equipment to the event by providing a backup video broadcast to the Satellites.
The team received a backpack & TruePower from Axio, and a iV battery charger and U-Charge AC adapter from FastMac, as well as a copy of VMware.
Zac White actually demonstrated this for the first time on Saturday, asking for developers to include it in their code for the cross-application Copy/Paste demo on Sunday. Check out Andrew’s video of the act. Zac’s history-making innovation is 100% legal using the iPhone SDK. This earned him a Messenger Bag from Axio, Etymotic Earphones, a copy of VMWare, and a crafty but humble reputation.
In the Best of Satellite category, we had two terrific finalists. The boys from Portland won out with their simple, versatile procedural desktop-creator.
The song-lookup tool hum.itfor.us from the Denver team was a close second, edged out in an audience-vote recount. Both teams will receive JBL speakers for iPhone.
Tamagotchi is the best way to describe this app, produced by first-time coders over the weekend. If you pet Fwerps, they purr. Shake them and they get mad - you’ll need to rock them to calm down again. The team of learners received JBL Speakers for iPhone.
MagicTable is a simple yet powerful CocoaTouch developer library for building dynamic iPhone application user interfaces. If your application needs the user to enter data or make choices that you present in tabular form, MagicTable allows the you to build complex hierarchical table views with a simple XML configuration file, removing the need to write any table code.
The prize for this Open Source work is a pair of Griffin Evolve Speakers
This category was made up on the spot, shortly before the Hackathon Contest deadline. iPhoneDevCamp alumni Dan Wood of Karelia challenged himself to produce a simple currency converter in 90 minutes. Arbiter Christopher Allen attested to Dan’s agility, which earned him a MacHeist Bundle.
Honorable Mention
We had over 40 great submissions for the Hackathon Contest. These apps got a particularly good reception from the audience: Dudezap, Pushup, Paddleball, Hot iPotato, and Light Bikes. Honorable mentionees get 1 free year of web hosting, courtesy of (mt) Media Temple.
We planned for 500, and only 350 people or so are here right now in San Francisco. If you were holding off on attending due to the notice that the event was full, we have room to accommodate you. You do not need to be pre-registered to attend. Please come and join us. We’ll be here until 10pm Saturday, and again on Sunday from 9am to 6pm.
First, go register for a new account with iusethis (they support OpenID and you should too — even though you have to register the old fashioned way first… boo!).
Once you’ve got an account and your app is ready to be downloaded and tested by your fellow devcampers, you should add your app to iusethis and tag it with iphonedevcamp.
Important: in order for your app to be found, you must tag it with iphonedevcamp! That’s like the one rule, m’kay?
We encourage all satellite iPhoneDevCamps to have their apps added to iusethis over the course of the weekend so that we can all keep track of the work being done literally around the globe!
Consider this listing as definitive as we’re going to get for now (given our experience with a wiki last year, we think this is a major process improvement!) — so definitely browse the listings and mark the apps you like most — and want to use!
Update: If your app is not yet listed in the App Store, select “Beta Appstore” and use a self-hosted download URL:
Guest access is blocked during non-event hours, but please tune in for Introductions at 7pm tonight, the Keynote Forum at 930am tomorrow, our Sunday Keynote at 10am, and the Hackathon Contest starting at 2pm on Sunday.
EA veteran Neil Young has created new gaming company called ng:moco:). In addition to sponsoring our event, Neil has volunteered a new Keynote entitled “iPhone is greater than…”:
I’m going to touch on our sense that the iPhone is a discontinuous event in gaming and has the opportunity to radically reshape the landscape. I’ll spend some time talking about how large publishers view the mobile game space and what we think that the platform needs to fulfill it’s potential as the breakthrough games device that we think it is and also share some ideas of how to stimulate it.
We’re really excited to have Neil on stage from 10-11am on Sunday! For more details, check our Agenda.
I am pleased to announce that the first open source iPhoneDevCamp iPhone application is now available on the iTunes App Store. It is a very simple application, called “red:green”, which is described on our new apps.iPhoneDevCamp.org web site. It is based on a web app from last year’s iPhoneDevCamp.
I hope that this will be the first of many open source iPhone projects that will be available due to iPhoneDevCamp. If you have an iPhone application that you are submitting to the iTunes store under your own name, are planning to demonstrate it during the Hackathon Contest, and agree to make the source code available as open source as soon as your iPhone SDK agreement allows you to, we can add the information about your application at the apps.iphonedevcamp.org website.
In addition, we can assist you if you would like to have your application submitted to the AppStore under the iPhoneDevCamp “artist” name. Our purpose of this “artist” is to make experimental and open source iPhone applications available to the public that otherwise would not be released because the authors either are not able to participate in the iPhone Developer Program or have other reasons that they don’t wish to release the work under their own artist name.
For instance, in my case I didn’t want to release “red:green” under my professional iTunes App Store account because I didn’t want to dilute the brand I wish to establish for my commercial applications.
Here are the requirements if you wish to submit your iPhone application to be published under the “iPhoneDevCamp” artist name:
The iPhone application you submit to us should not be one that you plan to submit under your own iPhone App Store account.
You must agree to make the source code for your iPhone application available under an open source license as soon as Apple releases us to do so.
You must sign an agreement with me that allows me to submit it to the iTunes store under the iPhoneDevCamp account. This agreement in effect makes you a “contractor” so that we can both operate under the terms of the Apple’s iPhone SDK Agreement, and I will pay you US$1.00 for the work.
If you are interested, please contact me at ChristopherA@iPhoneDevCamp.org or see me during iPhoneDevCamp this weekend.
If I get any submissions this weekend during iPhoneDevCamp 2, I will send them the following week to the iTunes App Store as soon as I code review them.
iPhoneDevCamp is a not-for-profit organization that gathers regularly to develop applications for iPhone and iPod touch using both the native SDK and web standards. The event format is "unconference" or Barcamp-style, featuring content from the participants themselves. Read more about the history of iPhoneDevCamp at Barcamp.org.
