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

Thank you so much to Jeffery from Conceptable for sharing his experience developing the Hong Kong Weather app with us in our September meetup. Thank you to you guys for coming to the event. We haven’t met since May. It’s good to see new and familiar faces in the meetup after this long spring+summer break. We all had a great time talking to Jeffery and checking out some early Hong Kong Weather app prototypes witnessing the evolution of the product.

Jeffery shares a lot of commons between many of us – craft a solution for a pain point. Many of us created (or in the progress of creating) services/contents/applications which, hopefully, solve people’s problem in return for monetary reward, recognition, publicity, etc.

Hope you are inspired by Jeffery’s philosophy in product design and development as much as I do.

Video of the interview is ready. It’s iPhone/iPad ready. Please go check it out.

Interview with Jeffery Wong from cocoahk on Vimeo.

Venue support:

Ultimate PC & Mac Gallery – visit their site and shops if you are purchasing Macs, accessories and iPods. They have great collection of speakers and earbuds as well.

What is the most installed iPhone app in Hong Kong?

Dare you say yours?

I would honestly suggest you to talk to our September guest speaker first before you make the bold statement.

Our guest speaker this month is Jeffery Wong, developer of Hong Kong Weather app.

Hong Kong Weather is arguably the most popular iPhone app in Hong Kong. Its local user base may even have passed Facebook! (We will try to find it out that evening from Jeffery) If you wanna hear the story behind developing and maintaining one of the most popular apps in Hong Kong, come to the meetup on 9 Sept!  We will have an interview with Jeffery.

Jeffery currently runs his company – Conceptable. His company distributes other titles in the App Store as well. You can find them all out here.

Topic: What is the weather today?

Date and time: Thur, Sept 9 2010, 7:00pm to 8:30pm (the interview 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

Venue Sponsor:

I am back from summer vacation! Hope you had a great one too.

I know we have skipped our bi-monthly meetup ritual. That mainly because I couldn’t find someone who were free to organize the July meetup. Anyways… We are back! Let’s meet!

Details of September meetup will be posted over this weekend. I will also send facebook invite when its ready.

Please join our facebook group to receive event notification.

WWDC 2010 session videos are available free to developers! In previous years, free access is only available to conference attendees. This time it’s free to all developers! Yeah~~

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.

Watch on Vimeo.

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.

Derek is one of our guests in the upcoming meetup on May 26. Besides being the owner of a Newton MessagePad 2100, Derek is also the chairman of MACitizen – an active local Mac user group and co-host the 大蘋果時代 podcast. You can find his column in some local computer magazines and newspaper as well.

The idea of this May Meetup is inspired by MACitizen April event where, in one segment, they did a side-by-side comparison of the iPad and Newton MessagePad. We should thank Derek for bringing along his Newton MessagePad, and, for inspiring us to do this Newton Not iPad event!

Let’s meet Derek in the event.

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:

The much anticipated announcement… In case you don’t know, Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference was announced yesterday. It’s from June 7th to June 11th.

Yup… just a little more than 1 month for you to make the travel arrangement.

Let me know if you are going or post in our Facebook forum to look for room mates.