Apple Phone Show Episode 10
iPhone Devcamp
Run Time: 20:37

Host:
Scott Bourne: Podcastgearguy.com, OnlineMediaTips.com and iLifeZone.com

APIs? We don’t need no stinkin’ APIs! Anyway, here’s our coverage of the iPhone Devcamp at Adobe’s corporate headquarters in sunny San Francisco.


Our first guest is Raven Zachary, one of the organizers of the event. Roughly 400 developers registered and showed up for the conference. Raven explains that the iPhone Devcamp was set up to design people to come together and work on web apps for the iPhone for free. It’s similar to Barcamp and Podcamp (ie: an unconference). Adobe gave a home to the conference and sponsors included Adobe, and even the Apple Phone Show :-) . In the end, the hope is that you’ll end up with a bunch of apps produced. Unlike regular conferences, there’s actual production and such going on. No sitting around and listening to other people talking.

Our second guest is Dominic Sagolla of Adobe. Dominic explains that Twitter got Chris Messina and the others together to start up iPhone Devcamp. He explains that Adobe was a natural fit as one of the sponsors and as the venue for the event because of Adobe’s prominent presence in web development with apps such as Dreamweaver. Dominic explains that Adobe has applications shipping that are already iPhone app design ready, including Spry and some iPhone-specific widgets for the Spry framework. Spry is an AJAX framework. Dominic is a quality engineer at Adobe, and even though he’s not a high level executive, he was still able to secure a great facility for iPhone Devcamp. That says a lot for the corporate culture at Adobe. Their San Francisco headquarters are in the Baker-Hamilton building.

Our third guest is Damien Stolarz who’s doing the iPhone Hacks book for O’Reilly. The book is focused on real hacks of the iPhone, not just standard experimenting and UI stuff. Mainly innovative software and actual hardware hacks including accessories that were never meant to work with an iPod that will work with an iPhone. Basically it’s a guide of how to make stuff work for the iPhone that may not have ever been designed to. Damien’s been an inventor and technologist for a long time, and he loves making computers talk to each other when they weren’t designed to. His last book was Car PC Hacks, so that’ll give you some perspective. When the iPhone was announced it struck a chord with him because he was also designing touch-screen interfaces. He thinks the iPhone is innovative because of what it brings to the mobile phone including a full web browser. After a week, he wasn’t surprised by much when he finally got his. He was a little surprised that Flash wasn’t installed out of the box. His book is coming “real soon now.”

Our fourth guest is Kevin Warnock, the man behind gOFFICE, the first office suite for the iPhone. Scott tested it and it appears to work. When Kevin saw there wasn’t going to be a developer API for the iPhone, the first thought was porting gOFFICE over. In the end, they rewrote the entire codebase specifically for the iPhone. It’s all written in VB.NET. There are two options for getting a finished document out of gOFFICE. The first is e-mail. The second, and I swear we’re not kidding you, is snail mail. Kevin explains that they charge $3.00 to send a document anywhere in the world. If you check a box, they’ll throw a love stamp on (awwwwwwwwwwwwwwww) and for another dollar, they’ll print it all on high-end paper for you. For another dollar, they’ll handwrite the envelope. Kevin says that if the demand gets too big, they can outsource the mailing if need be. gOFFICE has some built-in templates to reduce your need to type. They’re not the best now according to Kevin, but gOFFICE is working on revamping the templating system. gOFFICE does produce real Word documents with page numbers, etc. Fonts are embedded so they go with the document including a signature type font for letter closings, etc.

That’s all for now… If you have any questions, comments, concerns, tips, etc., let us know at applephoneshow@gmail.com.

Thanks to Apple Phone Show producer Vincent Ferrari for the shownotes!

New Apple Phone Show theme performed and arranged by Scott Bourne.