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:

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.

The tech world is again occupied by Apple news today. Not sure if you have watched the keynote yet. Apple has a dedicated podcast in iTunes for most of its keynotes. If you prefer podcast over streaming, subscribe the podcast there.

Check out Neonpunch for a glimpse of what’s happening to iPhone 4.0.

Thanks everyone for showing up!

Ada gave us a detail and thoughtful review on the topic “Adapting for the small screen”. Her company goes further by offering a free usability review of 2 screens of your iPhone app!!

I will definitely make use of the offer and ask for advices on my app. If you have an iPhone app, don’t wait. Please go ahead to contact them about the details of the offer.

If you have missed the event, we have put up the speech in blip. Slides of the speech are up as well.

Happy 2010! Hope you all had a great time during the holiday.

Time for a dose of Cocoa pill

This month’s focus is “Adapting for the small screen”. Facebook app, New York Times app and Engedget app are just a few of the thousands of popular apps which serve as the mobile complement of an larger application. How did they translate a full-blown application to the iPhone? What did they do right and what did they do wrong?

Ada Yuen from AddiThink – a Hong Kong based usability consultation company will answer that for us. They will talk about usability and interface design issues when you adapt an existing desktop application or web site for small screen devices, namely, iPhone.

Ada is a veteran in usability and interface design. Having serviced in company such BunnyFoot Asia and Global Sources, she has finally decided to go indie running her consultancy company -AddiThink specialized in usability, interface design and SEO services.

You can find out more about her in AddiThink site.

Details as follow:

Topic: Adapting for the small screen

Date and Time: 28 Jan 2010, Friday 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm, talk begins at 7:15 pm (iCal)

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

Registration: Facebook (this meetup is free of charge)

Event Contact: @billibala

Venue Sponsor:

The CocoaHeads Hong Kong bi-monthly meetup is back in October. It’s the meetup for Mac / iPhone developers, designers, advertisers, media buyers!!

The speaker this time… George Chen – Product Design Manager of Admob to share his experience with mobile advertising best practices and user experience.

AdMob is the world’s largest mobile advertising marketplace, offering solutions for discovery, branding and monetization on the mobile web. Mobile devices are a critical media platform and we are building the tools to let every business on earth leverage mobile.

Ad revenue is a major income source for free iPhone apps. Many developers just put an ad banner somewhere in the app interface. In many case, developers use ad network aggregators like AdWhirl and Tapjoy to deliver ads to the app hoping to maximize ad revenue.

This may not be the best option…

In George’s talk, he’ll discuss user experience and best practices in mobile advertising.

Want to know the best way to monetize your app? Looking for the best ad placement strategy? Don’t miss the coming CocoaHeads Hong Kong meetup.

Plus, you may notice, we are returning to the Ultimate PC & Mac Gallery in this meetup. There will be special offering to all event participants on software, accessories and hardware items. If you want to get the latest Mac gadgets, hold till 23rd! Get it from Ultimate shop!

Details as follow:

Topic: iPhone Mobile Advertising Best Practices / User Experience

Date and Time: 23 Oct 2009, Friday 6:45 pm – 8:30 pm, talk begins at 7:15 pm sharp (iCal event)

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

Registration: Facebook

Event Contact: @billibala

Last but not least, I want to thank George for making his time to share his experience in his personal trip to Hong Kong and Ultimate for providing the venue + special offer!

Stanford University should be the first few universities which offer iPhone programming course. (Well, not sure if any university in Hong Kong is providing such training…)

Anyway, you don’t have to enroll Stanford to study the course. This is the iTunes U link to the iPhone Application Programming course.

Enjoy!

ObjectiveFlickr is a Cocoa framework developed by my friend Lukhnos.

Lukhnos is the lead developer of the popular iPhone app TapExpense. You can find more about his company’s work in this web site. He and his team have recently announced the ObjectiveFlickr 2.0 – a complete rewrite of their Cocoa Flickr framework.

The CocoaHeads Hong Kong has invited him to talk to us about the features in the ObjectiveFlickr 2.0 framework with loads of example code.

Come over to LKF on 14 May to meet Lukhnos and other fellows!

Registration / RSVP: Facebook event page

Date: 14 May 2009 (Thursday) 7:30 pm (iCal event)

Fee: Free

Venue: the Alumni Lounge @ LKF – (HKUAA Club house)

The talk shall begin at around 7:45 pm. The talk will be done through iChat / Skype. 

ObjectiveFlickr is an open source project.  You can download the framework fromGithub.

It’s ready.  It’s finally ready!!