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

Guess most of us use command line or Xcode for daily git workflow.

There are actually a bunch of popular Git GUI apps for Mac which is worth taking a look at.

Danny Siu, guest speaker of April, will go through a few popular Git clients – SourceTree, Git Tower, Gitbox, maybe, gitk?

Danny is a new face to us. But he’s no bozo. Educated in Berkeley and Stanford, he spent his young years working as Computer Scientist for Adobe in the Valley. Since 2004, he moved to Beijing working, co-founding a bunch of companies. Recently, he moved back to his home land, Hong Kong. While he moved all over the globe, one thing never changed, he is a coder.

You can follow him on Twitter @dsiu.

Join us on this coming Wednesday at Beansbox office. Danny will show us his favorite features in various Git clients and how well they fit into his daily work flow. You should show us your special Git sauce too!!

Date and Time: 25 April 2012, 7:00 pm – 9:30 pm (iCal)

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

RSVP: Facebook

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

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.

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:

Talos Tsui – Iconfactory’s designer/co-founder will be in Hong Kong. You can meet him in the December iPhanatics event.

Iconfactory is one of the most respected icon, interface and UX design company in the industry. They develop Mac and iPhone apps too – Twitterific, Astronut, CandyBar and more. Craig Hockenberry, one of the other co-founders, is one of the star Mac indie and my personal hero. I can’t wait to meet Talos in person and hear the stories of build all these great apps!

Don’t wait! Sign up for the event at Neonpunch – An Evening with Talos Tsui of The Iconfactory

If you have party or dinner engagement, ditch it. There’s little reason that a Xmas party or dinner party takes priority of meeting the designer behind one of the best indie Mac companies on the planet!

Thanks everyone for coming over to CocoaHeads HK x iPhanatics November meetup! It’s great fun! We showed our guests the spirit of Hong Kong iPhone community. Did you hear what they say? “If Denver’s community has such show up, it will be wonderful”

They simply love us!

Thanks to Casey and iPhanatics for co-organizing this event. Hope you enjoy the tips given by Gene and other folk (em… too drunk to recall ).

Ben will share us his video recording of the panel discussion. I’ll post them once I’ve got the files. Thanks Ben!

CocoaHeads Hong Kong x iPhanatics is having a big party to celebrate the fall on 18 November.

Three of the Macworld Mobile speakers will spend their personal time coming to our meetup. 2 indie developers and 1 designer!! They are…

• Dave Wiskus @dwiskus, Double Encore
• Kendall Gelner @kendalldevdiary, KiGiSoftware
• Kyle Richter @kylerichter, Dragon Forged Software
• Update Nathan Eror @neror, Free Time Studio is joining the panel too!

We will discuss usability, design, iOS and indie stories. Plus, a lot of time for you to connect with the speakers.

Date/Time: Thur, Nov 18 2010, 7:00pm to 9:30 pm (interview begins at 7:30pm) iCal

Venue: Vertigo Ultralounge – 26/F, QRE Plaza, 202 Queen’s Road East, Wan Chai (Google Map)

RSVP: Facebook

Event Contact: @billibala @hypercasey

Our guests are speaking in Macworld Mobile conference too! Register for the conference to enjoy the Macworld experience and show support to the first Macworld event in Hong Kong!

You can find discount code here