That is no longer the case! It is now a static page with some basic information and a calendar!. Baby steps.

So, if you were subscribed here for NSManchester announcements then the best place to look now is our Twitter feed which will always get a post when I post the announcement or the web site itself which will always have the latest event listed.

Introduction to WebObjects, Alan Zebchuck
Alan will be giving an introduction to WebObjects, Apple’s somewhat forgotten Java-based web frameworks and will be demonstrating why they are still used by large and small organizations around the world.

Reverse Engineering Cocoa Apps, Ciarán Walsh
Ciarán will be talking about techniques for inspecting and reverse-engineering Cocoa applications and frameworks, including class-dump, otool and F-Script. He will talk about what can be learned from doing this, and also demo the making of a simple SIMBL hack using the information revealed.

The meeting will be held at 6:30pm (talks start at 7pm) on Monday 8th March at MadLab (map). If you would like to attend, please register for a free ticket!

Nokia and the Ovi Store, Nokia Finland.
8th February 2010
This is a fantastic opportunity to get to talk personally with Nokia staff who are flying in from Finland especially for this event. Come along and get an insight into doing business on the Nokia platform.

• Discover the growing business opportunity with the rapidly growing Ovi Store from Nokia. Now the most international of all the apps stores, putting your apps in front of more consumers on more devices in more territories than any other.
• Find out how we support you through Forum Nokia at a local and Global level to maximise your opportunity.
• Learn about the building blocks to Nokia Ovi Store success such as Qt and WRT.

The meeting will be held at 6:30pm (talks start at 7pm) on Monday 8th February at MadLab (map). If you would like to attend, please register for a free ticket!

Our January meeting is now not going to be the Nokia meeting that we originally had planned but weather permitting we are still going ahead with the meeting, just with different content!

So, we will still be meeting at our new location of MadLab (map) on the 11th January at 6:30pm. What will we be talking about? Let’s see!

New Year’s Resolutions for Freelancers and Cocoa Developers, Matt West
Matt will be sharing his thoughts about what he is going to try to do more of, or less of this year! He will cover learning in general, having to make difficult business decisions, and observations on using social media for promotion!

Launching Balloons!, Dave Verwer
Dave will be talking about the steps leading up to the release of Balloons! and Balloons! Lite. Covering the steps that he took to prepare for the release, the successes and the lessons learned. He will also be talking about the plan to continue the marketing and PR for the app now that it is released.

The meeting will be held at 6:30pm (talks start at 7pm) on Monday 11th January at MadLab (map). If you would like to attend, please sign up!

If you had previously signed up for this meeting, you do not need to sign up again. If you no longer wish to attend, drop me a line and I will remove you from the list. The Nokia meeting is now going to happen on February 8th but will be announced separately with a much more detailed description!

So, what do we have planned? Two awesome talks! That’s what!

Recent Advances in WebKit, Andy Shearer
Andy will be talking about how WebKit has advanced in the past few years.  Notably with mobile, HTML5 and 3D (CSS and WebGL).  I’ll demo a few of the more exciting features, and explain why such developments could radically change what we think is possible with web technologies.

Augmented Reality on the iPhone, Sam Easterby-Smith
Sam will tell the story of how he ended up creating an OpenGL based augmented reality solution for the iPhone. The inspiration, the intense weekend of remembering how to do trigonometry, the silly hacks to make it work (and how 3.1 did and didn’t help). He will be soliciting input on how the toolkit can potentially be taken forward (and possibly open-sourced) as well as how it compares with other offerings. Furthermore this will be a chance to discuss AR technologies, their use and potential impact on mobile applications in general.

The meeting will be held at 7pm on Monday 7th December at BBC Manchester, Oxford Road. If you would like to attend, please sign up!

If you would like to attend the meeting, it is important to sign up so that we can let the venue know who is coming. The BBC building is not a public building so if you don’t sign up you won’t be able to get in!

UPDATE: There was a mix up with room dates and the meeting is now on Monday 12th October, not the 14th.

I am happy to announce that we will be having another meeting of NSManchester on Monday 12th October at the BBC building in Manchester.

This month we are going to slightly change the format and have 2 shorter talks (15-20 minutes) rather than one long talk. The talks will be followed by the chance to start a discussion on any subject related to iPhone or Mac development or if you want to show something off, we would love to see it! I have no idea how this will work but given the chatty group we have, I am sure we will not be sitting in silence!

So, what do we have planned?

Mac and iPhone Accessibility, Martin Pilkington
Making your application accessible should be as important as making it not crash. This talk will give a brief over view of VoiceOver, the Accessibility Tools and some tips on how to make your Mac or iPhone application much more accessible with just 15 minutes work.

Making a Simple Core Animation Component, Dave Verwer
Learn how to build a simple Core Animation based component in 15 minutes. Dip into some of the techniques that were needed to build a simple dial style score board component using CALayer objects.

We also have two copies of Acorn and VoodooPad to give away at this meeting thanks to the generosity and general awesomeness of Gus over at Flying Meat Software. Thanks very much Gus!

The meeting will be held at 7pm on Monday 12th October and again the BBC are kindly hosting us at BBC Manchester, Oxford Road. If you would like to attend, please sign up!

If you would like to attend the meeting, it is important to sign up so that we can let the venue know who is coming. The BBC building is not a public building so if you don’t sign up you won’t be able to get in!

We are always interested in getting new people involved in speaking about the interesting things they are doing around Mac or iPhone development so if you would like to propose a talk or show something interesting that you created at a future NSManchester meeting, please get in touch.

Cocos 2D, Ed Hartley.

Ed will be talking about the Cocos2d open source games framework for the iPhone which he’s used as the basis for a couple of pieces of development. One of these relies on the  sprite animation and particle modelling capabilities of the framework.

Key features of the Cocos2d iPhone framework are its provision of a hierarchical set of containers orientated around game entities including scenes, layers, sprites and tile maps. These can be used alongside UI-Kit and other iPhone frameworks components. The framework has been used to create several well known games on the App store.

The meeting will be held at 7pm on the 3rd September and again the BBC are kindly hosting us at BBC Manchester, Oxford Road. If you would like to attend, please sign up!

If you would like to attend the meeting, it is important to sign up so that we can let the venue know who is coming. It is not a public building so if you don’t sign up you won’t be able to get in to the building!

UPDATE: This was originally posted with an incorrect date, the meeting is on the 6th August, not the 3rd.

So after a really successful mini-relaunch of NSManchester last month I am really pleased to say we are going to fill our venue for at least the next two months as we have secured speakers for both August and September!

On the 6th August, Ciarán Walsh will be talking about KVO and bindings.

KVO and Bindings, Ciarán Walsh.

Key-Value Observing is an integral part of Cocoa development, and understanding how it works is fundamental to using many of the APIs provided by Apple.

We’ll talk about how (and why) to write KVC and KVO-compliant classes (compatible with both iPhone and Mac), how to work with compliant APIs such as NSOperation, and finally how to go one step further with the Mac platform and use Cocoa bindings to eliminate the need to write glue code between our models and controllers.

If you would like to attend, please sign up!

Then in September, Ed Hartley will be talking about Cocos 2D but you will have to wait for more details on that when we get closer to the meeting.

Also, Apress have kindly provided a copy of the new “Beginning iPhone 3 Development” by Dave Mark and Jeff LaMarche. Updated for SDK 3.0, I can only assume that this will be even better than the first edition, which was an excellent book. Thanks so much to Apress for allowing us to give this away, if you don’t win the copy please go and buy it anyway!

If you would like to attend the August meeting, it is important to sign up so that we can let the venue know who is coming. It is not a public building so if you don’t sign up you won’t be coming in!