After three and half action-packed years of my second stint at Sports Interactive (which makes it about six and a half in total by my reckoning), I’ve decided that the time is right to take the plunge and go it alone.

So from June 2010 onwards, I will officially be an independent Mac and iPhone/iPad developer!

No doubt I’ll blog more about my plans as the time approaches, but for now I’ll simply say that I’m really excited about the prospect of returning full time to Mac/iPhone development, and working on my own applications.

I’ll also be up for a bit of collaboration and/or consulting from time to time, so by all means get in touch if that appeals.

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.