CocoaConf Columbus 2014

iOS development / August 10, 2014 / web development

Zach and Bruce are back from CocoaConf and ready to put their knowledge to work for you. First off, what a conference! The good people at CocoaConf put on a a great conference every time, and we are grateful for their efforts. This year, especially after all the announcements at WWDC, there was a lot to cover. There is a new XCode and a new language, Swift, for us to to dig our teeth into. Swift is different from Objective C, the language that we've always used to develop for iOS. It is designed from the ground up by Apple to provide developers with a powerful tool with important safety features and flexibility built in. This was our first real taste of Swift and to say that we like it would be an understatement. Swift is still evolving of course and isn't quite ready for serious development until Apple finalizes the initial spec but.... what we've seen and what we've used looks pretty great!

Other topics we covered were: NSURLSessions which provide a lot of functionality for connecting to and uploading and downloading data from the web; the Accelerate framework which optimizes your app for high-performance computation; app extensions which provide custom functionality within the context of select user tasks like photo editing and sharing; CoreMotion which gives us access to a lot of metrics of a user's physical activity; encryption and data security, both on iOS devices and on remote servers; and UIManagedDocument... a neat way to manage your CoreData stack along with all of the general topics and networking that you would expect from a top notch conference like this one.

Nearly as valuable as the technical information from the presentations is talking to other iOS developers about what they're doing and how they're using the new technologies that Apple has made available. CocoaConf has brought a lot of information from Cuppertino to Columbus, Ellanet is bringing that information and iOS programming expertise back home to Cincinnati, Ohio. Please let us know how we can use it to help you! Back to blog news...

Zach back from CocoaConf Columbus 2014