iPhone Developer Camp 3

This past weekend I attended my first iPhone Developer Camp. This year was the third annual iPhone Developer Camp, IDC3, which was developers, UI designers, testers, and other that came to share ideas, collaborate, and make some pretty cool apps. The event encourages individuals at all levels to continue to stretch the development boundaries of the iPhone and iPod touch.

Held in Sunnyvale at Yahoo's main campus, the main focus of the event seemed to be the Hackathon competition. Saturday and Sunday were nothing but people with heads down on computers as the Hackathon is an exhibition of attendee and those joining via web projects and was a showcase of some of the best iPhone and iTouch innovators.

The event had great keynotes and even a musical guest BT who performed Friday night. He came back on Saturday to speak about his app called Sonifi. I have been playing with this $4.99 music mixing app and it is fun. It needs more songs as it only comes with one, but BT announced that more are coming soon. I had the chance to ask him some questions after his talk and concluded besides being a kick ass DJ, he knows his tech and can hang with the geekiest.


I saw apps for nurses to allow them to pass along medical charts at shift change, one that recognized sign language, and one from a friend that was there called BCard Express. I will share more about this app when it comes out. May the tech gods bless Christopher Peri for this app as it is extremely useful for those that hate dealing with business cards.

The winner of my award for most innovative and actual winner of the Hackathon event's "Best Open Source Project" was a group that developed an Augmented Reality Kit for the iPhone. I got the chance to chat with the team leader Chris Haseman and look forward to get deeper into this ARkit. It allows developers a chance to build on top of a library for augmented reality applications. This example (a little blurry) was taken at the IDC3 and looks very much like the Wikitude app I was playing with on the Google Android HTC phone. This really is the type of thing that excites me most as AR applications on mobile devices will really drive the mixed reality Metaverse to the mainstream.


There were also vendors at the event with some useful hardware accessories for iDevices. OWLE (Optical Widgets for Life Enhancement) is currently working on a mount that gives you a much more stable way to hold the iPhone, improves your recording quality by including a 37mm camcorder lens and includes a front facing microphone, which plugs into the iPhone’s headphone/mic jack. It also has spots for external lighting and a tripod. FastMac is a device that snaps on iPhone/iTouch that will triple the amount of battery life. It also has a flash-type light on it to solve the problem with in the dark iPhone pics.

Overall I was awed at the apps these die hards could create in a weekend. This was one of the best exhibits of collaboration for innovation I have seen. People of all ages were there. One of the Hackathon entries was made by a young lady around 12 yrs old that wrote the app with the help of her dad. To see true innovation with this revolutionary mobile Internet device, skip the WWDC and attend next years iPhone Developers Camp.

*I am putting together a video of the footage I got from the event so stay tuned.