Back From C4

Well, yesterday I came from C4. C4 was the first developers conference I have attended, and it was well worth going. I met lots of cool people: some who already have some apps out, some who havent released anything – yet.

The Funny

There is, at least for me, two pretty funny & memorable moments of C4.

Before Brian W. Fitzpatrick gave his talk on the future of subversion he said “All information in this talk is under the NDA.” I immediately got really excited, I’ve never heard NDA information before, and this was about subversion, software I actually use! He follows that up with “Yeah, it is ‘Not Decided Apon’.” That gave me a good laugh 🙂

Aaron Hillegass was the guest speaker at C4. If you know who he is, you know he is the guy to learn cocoa from. He’s made the super popular Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X and runs the Big Nerd Ranch camps (you pay a couple thousand dollars to learn Cocoa). So throughout his talk he was shamelessly promoting his Big Nerd Ranch camps and encouraging people to sign up. At one point he said something to the effect of “If you cocoa you should know…”, somone from the audience sarcastically said “Where could we learn cocoa?” I really hope someone got that on tape, it was hilarious.

The Interesting

The most interesting talk was John Gruber’s. I’m not going to summarize what has already been summarized but the basic idea that I extracted from the talk was that ‘The HIG is dead. Just make cool apps that people can figure out how to use and look cool at the same time’. Perfect examples of this are AppZapper, Quicksilver, Shiira, Mail.app, NewsFire, etc, etc.

The Cool

The coolest part about C4 was seeing people who I’ve only read about, and meeting people whose apps I seen/used/read about. Of course all the popular mac devs like Gus Mueller and Brent Simmons were there, but there was also a bunch of less popular devs who attended. I was fortunate enough to meet up with Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software (creator of FlexTime), Jon Crosby of Kaboomerang (maker of Actiontastic), and Geoff Pado of Elgebar Studios (creator of Pencils Down) as well as a bunch of other people whose web-site I can’t seem to find.

Overall it was an awesome time, I’m definitely attending next year if it’s put on again.