Just got back from AUCs fantastic /dev/world/2008 conference. It was a tremendous success, some great sessions were run. Jon Manning, Andrew Bennett and myself attended as presented and had some great feedback from our sessions on AppleScript, OpenGL and Polishing Applications, respectively. I met some great people and learnt a few new things.

Also, the trivia night was absolutely awesome; kudos to the University of Tasmania/AUC’s Tony Gray for running that (with a little help from the Secret Lab team.)

If you want the slides, then head over to the Secret Lab site and grab them! The slides from my brief presentation on Circuit can be found here. Enjoy!

Anyone who wants further info on anything, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Hard at work on my Honours thesis. I have almost completed my introductory chapter. Hopefully it actually makes sense, I’m planning on giving it to my supervisor to read sometime next week.

I’ll be giving a presentation at AUC’s /dev/world 2008 conference in Melbourne entitled “Polishing Your Cocoa Application” - should be good! Jon Manning and I will also be running two workshops on REALBasic in Melbourne and Sydney in late November/early December - if you’re at a eligible AUC University and are interested - then please go and apply!

This previous Sunday Secret Lab was fortunate enough to appear in the Sunday Tasmanian! After being e-mailed by one of the editorial staff on Friday afternoon, I did a quick phone interview with them and we were rushed off to The Mercury building for a photo shoot.

Jon Manning, Andrew Bennett and myself appeared alongside Josh Deprez in a rather complimentary article entitled “Cyber students hunt big game”. Good press all around! Read our 5 minutes of fame here!

In other news, I was saddened to be present as Starbucks in Hobart closed its doors for the last time tonight. Secret Lab (and myself personally!) have effectively used it as an office since it opened in late 2006. No other coffee shop in Hobart provided a decent working space and didn’t mind us sitting there for hours upon hours (nor the strange noises we sometimes made!)

As Jon has noted, Culture is out on the iTunes App Store and as far as Secret Lab is concerned it’s a resounding success - 3 sales in the first 20 minutes of the App Store and then Apple’s stats page disappeared! But 3 sales! At the minimum! That’s a coffee-time! You can check it out on Secret Lab’s site right here or just go and look on the App Store here.

We’ll be updating Culture soon with some bug fixes and performance enhancements and releasing the OS X version (freeware!) sometime this next week or two.  Thanks to those who have/will be providing feedback lately!

Andrew has posted an interesting post on some of his thinking behind the art in Culture - you should all go and read that.

As Australia’s iPhone release looms ever closer, the decision of whether to go with Telstra, Optus or Vodafone is undoubtedly on the minds of the Apple faithful here.  I’ve already decided, I think, to go with the enemy - Telstra. Their offer of free access to their WiFi points (i.e. free wireless for my at coffee shops) has basically won me over.

On the matter of Secret Lab, we’ve almost finished Culture, our game for OS X - it will be available for free on our site this week! An iPhone version will be forthcoming when the App Store launches as well, although you’ll need to part with some of your trinkets for that.

I return to Uni in a week for the second semester of my Honours year. In a fun twist, I have my first semester exams at the end of the first week back; I need to remember what I’m actually enrolled in so I can study for it!

Greetings! I have returned to Australia after an uneventful series of flights and a 6-hours stopover and Sydney Airport. The trip was a resounding success, I met a whole stack of interesting and intelligent people and my contacts list has tripled in size. I learnt many things from WWDC itself and am really looking forward to next year. Also: Snow Leopard is going to be awesome.

I’ve definitely come back a much bigger fanboy than I was when I left; haven’t decided if this is a good thing or a bad thing. I also managed to acquire a few pieces of work from some of the various people I met. On consumer side, I bought far too much junk at the Apple Company Store as well as the regular Apple Store. I was also pleased to acquire the new Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition books.

I’ll be posting about some new projects I’ll be getting started on soon, but until then: the Barenaked Ladies are awesome and you should all go and listen to them. Immediately I say!

On an unrelated note, I now own far, far too many random t-shirts and anyone planning on going to WWDC in the future should definitely pack very few shirts - but pack far more of your own business cards than you ever think you’ll need!

PS. Noise cancelling headphones are the best thing ever for long flights.

Jon has written a post on Secret Lab’s blog about doing more with less using domain specific languages. It’s a really good read and I recommend everyone gets on it immediately!  So, go and read…

WWDC is going awesomely, made lots of great contacts and I’m having a great time. I’ll post significantly more soon but I’m currently at a Shark session.  There’s a lot I can’t talk about due to an event-wide NDA, but there’s still plenty of interesting stuff!

Just got out of the WWDC Steve Jobs keynote. Was a really great experience! Al Gore was there! Attached is a crappy iSight photo of the hall, proper photos up soon.

More blog soon, I am currently in a Student session.

I had my initial Honours presentation on Tuesday.  From my perspective it went really well, had quite a few questions, at least one interested academic and no significant glitches. Although the Honours co-ordinator who was watching it over a video-link didn’t appear to be able to figure out precisely what my topic was.  Ah well, I’ll find out in detail what she thought soon enough

Spending a large chunk of time at the moment getting the new Secret Lab site presentable for people to look at during WWDC. Hopefully it will go live sometime tomorrow.

I leave for WWDC along with my friends from UTas early on Saturday morning. I’ll be blogging as much as I can while I’m over there and in-transit so please visit often!