CocoaHeads Hong Kong~ for Cocoa, Mac, iPhone, iPad, iOS developers

It’s great seeing everyone of you. Great audience in good size. 15-ish of us were in the meet up. That’s the exact right size for some meaningful, in-depth discussion on Lion.

First of all, we need to thank Talos for coming over and spend time with us. This is his personal trip and he scarified time with family to join us. We appreciate his presence a lot!

We had a great discussion. I still remember several key issues you guys raised:

• Problem with no “Save as…”. In Lion, “Version” replaced “save as”. This also brings in complication. E.g. instead of “Save as”, we have to use “duplicate”. When you “duplicate”, the file that is duplicated is not saved yet. You still need to use “save” to save the file.
• On leather interface, we mentioned about design conflict where, on one hand, Lion’s interface is toned down. On the other hand, we have this skeuomorphic leather background. None of us in the audience can find a reason to justify this design decision.

Check the video recording. We went through a lot more than above.

Additional discussion on iOS-ification:

• The Conversation #36: iOSification
• How to De-iOS-ify Mac OS X Lion
• Matias Duarte on Ice cream sandwich design philosophy

Talos is super nice to us. He handed me badges, pins and a few sketch books as souvenir. Come ask good questions on 14 Dec (RSVP). You will get to take some of these home!

Hey everyone, please meet Talos from the Iconfactory.

The Iconfactory - an indie Mac/iOS design and software company known for designing beautiful icons and interfaces for clients. In parallel with client work, they also produce a portfolio of super popular apps – Flare, Twitterific, xScope, Astronut and more.

Talos spoke last year in an interview at iPhanatic. He’s back again this year and want more with us. This time, we focus our discussion on iOS-ification.

Lion – king of the jungle is used as the code name of Mac OS 10.7.

Apple showcased this current OS in the “Back to the Mac” event in Oct 2010. The pitch, in general sense, is Apple has learnt a lot over the past several years working on iOS and it’s time to bring to great stuff “back to the Mac”.

Here comes in Lion, the list from Steve:

• Multitouch
• App Store
• App Home screens
• Full screen apps
• Auto save
• Apps resume when launched

The list goes on… “natural” scrolling, the toned down interface, iOS-style zooming in Safari, leather-like interface in iCal and Address Book…

Are these your favorite new features in Lion?

Let’s hear what Talos thinks on this current Apple interface design trend. How does he translate a Mac interface to mobile and vice versa? What are the tips to make interface scale across all screen sizes – iPad, Macbook Air and iMac? How much Mac OS X should be like iOS?

Date and Time: 14 Dec 2011, 7:00 pm – 9:30 pm

Venue: Beansbox Studio, 48 Tung Street, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong (Google Map)

RSVP: Facebook

This is how much development resources you need to create the Zino app in 6 weeks!

Ada, usability consultant from AddiThink, is organizing a seminar on April 7.

Title: Dollars & Sense – Selling Orange Juice as an analogy for growing your Online Business

Date/Time: April 7, 7:15pm – 8:45pm

Venue: Classroom 4, InnoCentre, 72, Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon Tong

Language: The talk is in Cantonese with English slides

RSVP: Facebook

Please check the official event page for more detail.

Previously, Ada did a talk for us on the topic “Adapting for the small screen“. It’s a great piece of discussion about how we should build usability to a small screen device. In the talk, she picked an iOS transportation app as a case study analyzing use case scenarios with us. You can watch the video here.

This is a be lated follow-up post on our March meetup.

Thank you everyone for coming and thank you to Nicholas for his sharing on game mechanics. It is very hard to introduce key concepts of game mechanics in 20 minutes or so. But Nicholas nailed it!

Please check the talk if you have missed the last meetup. It’s a great talk where Nicholas highlights how he discovered game mechanics from no voice to expert.

While we anticipate the meetup on this coming Thur (March 3), I wanna share with you some existing resources Nicolas shared on the Internet.

Nicolas has been researching in the area of game mechanics for quite some time and applying them continuously in GoAnimate.com. He shared some of his early experience in apply techniques in game mechanics in an IxDA HK meetup back in October.

He quoted examples how apps and sites build game elements and psychology into their products. One example is Gild (gild.com) – a site which turns job hunting into a social game.

You can find out more about the previous talk in the slides below. And, on Thursday, March 3, Nicolas will be sharing with his with fresh, new, horned insights on the topic of Game Mechanics.

Game Mechanics in Design

This could be the worst naming convention for new products in the social web. Anyways…

We are switching from our current Facebook old group to Facebook new group. The new CocoaHeads Hong Kong group page is here: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_198347553525130. Our Facebook alias facebook.cocoahk.com is pointing to our new destination as well.

Our old group will be removed some time in the coming months. If you still wanna get event messages and discuss with other fellow developers, please join the new group now!

New group is a product launched by Facebook back in October 2010. It serves pretty much like the old group except that it’s more social.

That sounds lame, but we still transit to the new group because…

1. You can check new group’s activities through the official Facebook iPhone app.
2. Facebook will not add new features to old group

The new group comes with draw back too. It is my personal experience that Facebook keeps sending notification about what’s happening in a group to me through email. To avoid getting unnecessary notification by email, you can change the notification setting from the group page.

I urge you to make good use of the new group’s more social aspect. Share interesting links, post topics you wanna discuss and plug your new app there!

If you are sensitive to spammy email notification, please spend a moment to check the group setting highlighted above. Hope you enjoy our new Facebook destination.

We are ready for the first meet up in 2011. Please mark your calendar. On 3rd March, we will meet at our headquarters – Ultimate Mac Shop.

2010 was the year of Angry birds, Four Square, farming, Facebook and more. The success of all these social gaming, social networking applications in the mobile space is arguably sensational. They are part of every iPhone user’s life – sharing photos on instagram, updating status on facebook, tweeting with friends… The game elements behind them is one of the major reason to drive their success.

Our speaker Nicolas will decode the keys behind these products. What make them sticky and engaging? What is the psychology behind? How to make your app be part of the user’s daily routine?

Topic: Game Mechanics: A Glimpse of the Meat Behind the Buzz

Speaker: Nicolas Lassus, Product Manger, GoAnimate Ltd

Date/Time: Thur, March 3 2011, 7:00 pm to 8:30 pm (the talk begins at 7:15pm) iCal

Venue: Ultimate PC & Mac Gallery, Central Shop Two – G/F, 99 Des Voeux Road Central, Central (Google map)

RSVP: Facebook (this meetup is free of charge)

Event Contact: @billibala

About Nicolas:

Nicolas is a user experience and interactive design expert. He is also an active member of the IxDA Hong Kong. He works in GoAnimate – a web-based cartoons/animations creation tool as product manager. He is also in charge of the user experience of the site since.

Check his blog to know more about Nicolas.

Venue support:

Mac pundits discussing future of the Mac in Macworld Expo 2011 – John Gruber, Jason Snell and others. There’s some heated discussion about Mac App Store, what’s good or bad when Mac OS X and iOS become more alike…

You may also wanna check John Gruber’s Macworld Update in his talk show in 5by5 network.