Next CocoaHeads/Pittsburgh Dec 11

[Mark Dalrymple]

Hello Everyone!

Eep!  It's second week of December *ALREADY*. How did that happen?

We're going to have our regular CocoaHeads this thursday at the Eat N Park in Robinson.  I don't know if I can make a presentation before then.  If not, it'll be open Q&A - got Swift Questions?  Got performance problems?  Got a bug that's refusing to budge?  We can put 'em up on the Big Screen and apply the mighty CocoaHeads brain trust.

We'll also talk about next year.  I was thinking of doing another "Work through an intro book as a group" like we did a couple of years ago.  The idea is to use @invalidname and @redqueencoder's iOS8 SDK / Swift book : https://pragprog.com/book/adios2/ios-8-sdk-development .  Starting with the beta book, then upgrading to the real (e)book once it ships.

The idea is someone (usually me) will talk about the next 2 or 3 chapters, maybe outline what's hard or weird.  Then everyone works on it in their own time. Then the next CocoaHeads, review the material and hear about what's coming up.  That way, there's some motivation to keep going, and by not overdoing things (I'll work through this in one weekend!) can sustain interest all the way to the end.

Also, some of us old-timers will be available for "Office Hours" - basically, if you see us on AIM or IRC, feel free to ask questions.  "what do they mean by this?"  "What are all these exclamation points for?"  Also feel free to email or post to the google group.  The idea is that sometimes a simple but non-obvious error can derail you, leading to frustration and the urge to just chuck it all and find an APL compiler.  Before doing that, ping us!  Show us the code and tell us the error, and we can probably tell you exactly what's wrong and why, having made that mistake a thousdand times on our own.  I think 5 minutes my time to save you an hour of your life banging your head against a compiler or Xcode bug is a good trade-off.

I was thinking of starting this at our January meeting.  Questions / Comments?  Come to EatNPark on thursday and we can chat about it :-)

Cheers,

++md