iMade - recap and what is next

[offwhite]

I had a great time with iMade yesterday. The presentations and labs
went really well and we had about 30 people in attendance. I hope
everyone learned a lot. I did capture a good deal of video which I
will review for quality and make available online. I want to thank
everyone who helped make the event a success, especially Ed, Curt and
Justin did a great job presenting.

Next we will be working to complete enough features for a 1.0 release
which will go to the App Store. The remaining features include:

1) group search (search by location and tag)
2) group management on the web service (stores your list of groups)
3) basic group submission feature on the web site

In later versions we will want to make use of Facebook Connect,
Twitter OAuth and Google Data API/Calendar to engage with some social
media. When you choose to save an event to your calendar we will be
able to save it to your Google Calendar and post a tweet as well as
post a message on your Facebook wall to tell others about the event
and remind you of the upcoming event.

Want to help with some of these feautres? Please let me know. It seems
working at AJ Bombers is the way to go, so we can meet up there.

What's next for iMade?

We have talked about repeating the event in other locations like
Madison and Chicago. Since we are getting into the holiday season the
scheduling may be a bit tough. What Ed and I discussed after iMade was
setting up a series of coding challenges. Each of us would tackle a
problem independently and present our work and compare. This will be a
good way to continue working with each other. We also talked about
building another app over a weekend as a challenge with the Madison
Cocoaheads. We could shack up at a hotel between Milwaukee and Madison
and work out the concept for the app on a Saturday and then work
towards a 4pm deadline the following day while working at the hotel.
It could be a lot of fun to build the same app with a tight deadline
and then share our work.

For the first monthly meeting of the Milwaukee iPhone Users Group I am
tossing around topics. I think a very useful topic to cover is the
rules you must follow in order for your app to be accepted into the
App Store. Ed explained the rules are detailed in Apple documentation.
We could walk through an application which does not meet the
requirements and work to fix it.

I am looking to put together other topics and determine the interest
level in each of them. Please respond to this message with any
suggestions.

[ritapr...@att.net]

You mentioned that we could contribute graphics and icons for your
project.
When are you looking for these to be done and do you have a list of
what you need?