CocoaHeads Hong Kong~ for Cocoa, Mac, iPhone developers

Franky is a veteran in software industry. He worked in Apple’s Newton before and, currently, running CDE Game – a local iPhone game company with products featured by Apple in the App Store 1 year anniversary promotion.

We have a chance to interview him in our last event – Newton Not iPad. It’s a great experience sharing piece. The video is available here in this post. Hope you like it!

If you are more interested in the veteran’s view on iPad, please jump to the 2nd half of the video.

Special thanks to our venue sponsor of this meetup: Ultimate PC & Mac Gallery

Thank you everyone for coming to the May meetup. Hope you have a great time! What do you think about the Newton MessagePad 2100?

If you didn’t get the chance to play around with the it, don’t worry. You can always check out MACitizen event and request if you can take a look at it.

We have to thank Derek, host of Macitizen, to show us his working Newton MessagePad. This is really nice and generous!

In this meetup, we interviewed Franky – an ex-Apple Engineer who worked in the Newton team in the 90s. Franky is now running a game company in Hong Kong – CDE Game. You can check out their games in the App Store.

In the first half of the interview, Franky shared his story back in the Newton era. When asked about how his work day is like, he told us engineers in the project literally started the day from 12 pm till 6 am the other day for months and months. Great product really didn’t come easy…

Special thanks to our venue sponsor of this meetup: Ultimate PC & Mac Gallery

The HKU ECom-ICom Experts Address Series has got Professor Norman Sadeh, Director, Mobile Commerce Lab, Carnegie Mellon University to speak on the topic: Mobile Commerce: What Will the App Store of the Future Look Like?

The seminar is on 27 May (the day after CocoaHeads May Meetup) at 7 pm in United Center, Admiralty.

You can register from the link above.

iPad, iPad, iPad… From gadget blog to mainstream media, everyone is talking about the iPad. But the discussion in tech and media world focus mainly on sales, pricing and politics around the app store kingdom.

In this meetup, we try to do our discussion reverse. We do it in the !iPad (not iPad) way. We will study Apple’s not iPad device – the Newton Message Pad.

(Photo by yggg under CC)

“The MessagePad 2000 takes advantage of the Newton operating system to deliver the features you need in a mobile computer. Why bother with a heavy laptop machine when the lightweight MessagePad 2000 offers the core business applications and functionality you depend on? – Functionality such as: word processing, e-mail, browsing the world wide web, accessing your corporate intranet, wireless paging, taking notes at a meeting and more.” Apple’s Newton website from archive.org.

How does it compare with the ”magical and revolutionary product at an unbelievable price”? Does it as great as today’s iPad back at its time?

We will study it from software, user interface and user experience perspectives. And, we will study it with a real working Netwon MessagePad 2100.

The owner of this Netwon – Derek Ngai will be our guest. We will interview him. In the interview, we will demo the device and compare it with the iPad in similar usage scenarios.

Details as follow:

Topic: Newton Not iPad

Guest: Derek Ngai – Chairman of MACitizen. MACitizen is an active local Mac user group. They gather monthly (usually first Monday of the month) in Wan Chai eTECH Centre. Please feel free to contact Derek if you wanna run promotion campaign, recruit beta testers or, simply, reach out to pro Mac user in Hong Kong!

Date and Time: 26 May 2010, Wed 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm, talk begins at 7:15 pm (iCal). Come early if you wanna play around with the MessagePad!

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

Sign up: Facebook (this meetup is free of charge)

Event Contact: @billibala

Venue Sponsor:

Evernote is a cross platform note keeping application. This is Steve’s recommended Mac app in our March 2010 meetup – What’s on your dock?.

Pixelmator is an image editing software for people who needs a simple and lightweight tool for image editing. This is Casey’s recommended Mac app in our March 2010 meetup – What’s on your dock?.

MercuryMover is a window management application. This is William’s recommended Mac app in our March 2010 meetup – What’s on your dock?.

LittleSnapper is a screen and web page capturing application. This is Leon’s recommended Mac app in our March 2010 meetup – What’s on your dock?.

Thanks everyone for coming to our March 2010 Meetup! Special thanks to the speakers – Leon, Steve, William and Casey.

So what’s on the speaker’s dock? Here’s the bunch of Mac apps that the speakers had featured in their presentation:

Leon – LittleSnapper

Steve – Evernote

William – MercuryMover

Casey – Pixelmator

Hope you had a great time and got some inspiration on your next app idea! We will post the videos of each presentation soon!

One more thing… don’t forget to try out the latest Darkroom app by Leon! If you are interested in iPhone user meetup, you can go to iphanatics.com for details. More about Steve can be found from his blog – hongkietown.com. William is on the JadeTower.

Jadason Technology Ltd and the Cyberport IncuTrain Centre are organizing the iPhone Game Engine Workshop. It’s an Unity3D based training from 26 March to 28 March. (This workshop is not free)

For details, please check IncuTrain Centre blog.