Speaking to various folks at NSConference, I realised that there are quite a few regular developer meetings around the country, in addition to the one that I used to organise in London (which still exists but has mutated into the NSCoder london night).

I figured that it would be handy to list them all in one place, for anyone who might find themselves in a strange town for a while in need of geek-based social contact…

I’ve updated my uk-mac-dev-meeting page accordingly, so that it now lists all of the ones I’ve heard about.

If you know of one I’ve missed, please let me know.

Day two started with an illuminating session by Jeff LaMarche about the Objective-C runtime, and some of the nice dynamic and introspective things you can do with it, such as iterating through your own properties, methods, etc. A couple of days ago in Drew’s concurrency workshop I was thinking about the need for some good Objective-C wrappers for OpenCL, as there’s a lot of boiler plate setup code that you have to do. It’s there for flexibility, but probably you do the same thing for most apps, so why not wrap it in some simpler objects. Some wrappers probably already exist somewhere, but it struck me that one of the techniques Jeff was describing would be perfect for supporting OpenCL kernel parameters.

Day 1 of the conference was excellent, though I spent the second half of it feeling absolutely shattered, having had less sleep over the last week than I would have liked through a combination of illness, early morning starts, and perhaps a tad more beer than was wise. Which is why I’m writing this now in my room, when by rights I should be in the bar.

We started in a refreshingly human manner, with talks by Scotty and then Mike Lee, focussing on the big picture rather than the nitty gritty details. Of course the details are our meat and drink, and we’ll get plenty of them this week, but it’s good to have our eyes dragged off the floor and onto the horizon every now and then.