The second annual iPhoneDevCamp has just started here at the Adobe offices in San Franciso. There's about 300 people and I think most of them are planning to build an app or at least hack a little bit. The even runs from Friday night until Sunday night. The highlight of the even is certainly going to be the Hackathon where developers and designers will be splitting off into teams and trying to build an iPhone by Sunday afternoon for the grand demo. This year's event has 60 sponsors as well!
I'm down here with Rob and Brock from Nitobi to see what we can pull off in 48hrs or so. I'll plan is to build a general purpose native iPhone App that has an icon on the desktop and launches Safari and passes some information to a web app via a POST. We're not sure how much information we can pass in in yet but our goal is to be able pass in login credentials, GPS location data and possibly an image file from the camera. We'll see how far we get. Our first barrier may be just getting certificate from Apple so that we can just install the damn thing!
I attended part of iPhoneDevCamp last year and I can easily say that it was the most productive camp style event I'd ever seen. The number of impressive demos was well over 20 and that was just with JavaScript app running in Safari. Now that we can build legit iPhone on the 2.0 platform I'm sure the number of impressive demos is going to through the roof. It's a good thing Apple just released the ability to run Apps in the background, which allows push type features to be introduced into Apps.
I was doing a quick review of the state of iPhone app development, distributions and the businesses being built around this shiny new device. Currently there's about 5-6 million iPhones in the market, a couple apps (Facebook and Tap Tap Revenge) have past the 1 million download mark and hundreds of millions of dollars have been ear marked in various funds for iPhone and mobile development. So it's safe to say that this a very attractive space for web and app developers to get into.
I'll be blogging here, twittering, posting photos on Flickr and recording some video here at iPhoneDevCamp so ping me if you want to do a quick interview and show me what you're working on. I'll be putting together a best of video clip at the end of the conference.