Andrew has been living by his wits for 21 years as a solo developer, and has some great stories to tell. He’ll also be demonstrating a few items for us on stage, starting at 10am.

Next up is the “Poster Child of iPhone Development” Steve Demeter (creator of Trism). Steve says, “I really owe it to Raven for encouraging me to quit my day job and go full time by myself at last year’s iPhoneDevCamp.”

Starting at 10:30am, Steve will be debuting his speech “Doing It Yourself”, in which he tells the tale of going live with the initial launch of the iTunes App Store. The lessons learned, as well as the experience of riding the coat-tail of Apple’s marketing machine, should make for an inspiring presentation.

If you haven’t already, please Register at Eventbrite. This is just the first in a series of announcements guaranteed to sell out the venue at Yahoo!

Three weeks from today on Friday, July 31st, hundreds of iPhone developers, designers, and entrepreneurs will descend upon the Yahoo! Headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, for 2 1/2 days of coding, sharing, learning, and having fun. iPhoneDevCamp, in its third year, is the second largest gathering of iPhone developers in the world - second only to Apple’s own Worldwide Developers Conference.

In the past two years, we’ve been able to rely solely upon sponsors for all of the costs to run the event. And boy, there are costs - from food to drinks to banners to badges to t-shirts to everything else that is needed to produce a conference. It’s not cheap, but we also don’t spend lavishly, either.

And here’s the thing… Do you know how much money ends up in the pockets of the organizers and volunteers? Zero. Everyone involved in the production of this event is 100% volunteer. All time, all resources, all effort put forth by the organizers and the volunteers is free. In fact, last year, some of the organizers ended up spending money out of pocket for certain expenses and never asked for reimbursement. We do this because we are passionate believers in the iPhone platform, our community, and this emerging (and exciting) new economy that is blossoming around Apple truly exceptional innovation with the iPhone.

So, as you contemplate the $50 registration fee this year, know that all of it, every single penny, is going to make the event a better event, and not into the pockets of any individuals involved in the production. And, should we by some fluke end up with money leftover from the event at the end - we’re going to ask the iPhoneDevCamp attendees to vote on where that money will go - be it a non-profit cause, micro-loans, or maybe even sponsoring students to attend WWDC next year. Who knows!

Think about the state of our economy in 2007 and 2008 and compare that to the state of the economy this year. Relying upon sponsors to cover 100% of the cost was a safe assumption the past two years, but not this year. We are attracting sponsors this year, and I expect a healthy number of them, but we simply cannot expect sponsors to cover all of the event costs in 2009. So, we made the decision to distribute the costs of running the event this year to roughly 50/50. Based on our estimated event costs and our desire for no more than 500 attendees, $50 was a nice, round number in that cost range. If we end up with more sponsors than expected, that means more amenities, more giveaways, and more prizes for the Hackathon than we has planned for.

The event is three weeks from today and we still have just over 300 tickets available. We had hoped that three weeks out (today), we’d have less than 200 remaining tickets. The primary purpose of this post is a call to action for all of you out there to help us fill this event in three weeks, and serve the needs of 500 members of our iPhone community.

What are you getting for that $50?

* All of your meals and drinks from Friday night until Sunday late afternoon. For most people, that’s more than $50.
* An iPhoneDevCamp badge.
* An iPhoneDevCamp t-shirt.
* Giveaways and prizes for the Hackathon.
* Knowing that your money helped to cover shared costs at the event, such as banners, equipment rental, etc.
* Whatever else we can afford based on attendance.

We hope to see you there. This is going to be a great event. Just think about all of the progress the iPhone platform has made since iPhoneDevCamp 2 last year. 60,000+ apps, iPhone OS 3.0, new powerful hardware. Imagine the possibilities at iPhoneDevCamp 3.

Register now.

We are thrilled to announce that Yahoo! will sponsor and host this year’s iPhoneDevCamp! Formed just a week after the launch of the original iPhone device, this independent group meets every year to promote the work of developers and designers for iPhone and iPod touch. The event will feature a large gathering on Yahoo!’s Sunnyvale campus, along with simultaneous Satellite events to connect developers around the world.

Yahoo! Inc. Sunnyvale, CA
July 31 - August 2nd, 2009
Cover Charge: $50

All fees will go toward the production of the event. iPhoneDevCamp is a not-for-profit organization, and Yahoo! is contributing the space, and event support throughout the weekend. We’ve been working behind the scenes with Yahoo! for weeks, to make sure there is enough space, power, and networking for approximately 500 participants. Although there will be no actual “camping,” (i.e. no tents on the Yahoo! lawn), participants are welcome all weekend, starting at 5pm on Friday and ending at 6pm on Sunday.

This is going to be a blast!  Check out some pictures of the space.

Registration via Eventbrite is now open.  (Please review travel information before registration.) See also additional Sponsorship opportunities, or contact Dom for Volunteer opportunities.

See us also on Upcoming.org.

Can’t wait!

We are pleased to announce iPhoneDevCamp 3, coming August 2009 and broadcasting from the San Francisco Bay Area.

The event is inspired by BarCamp, SuperHappyDevHouse, and MacHack, to develop Cocoa Touch and Web-based applications for iPhone and iPod touch. This follows the previous iPhoneDevCamp events held at Adobe Systems in San Francisco, July 2007 and August 2008. Out-of-town guests are welcome.

Attendees will include Cocoa Touch developers, web developers, UI designers, and testers, all working together over the weekend. Development projects will include both solo and team efforts. While some attendees will wish to work solo during the event, we encourage attendees to team up, based on expertise, to work in ad-hoc project development teams. All attendees should be prepared to work on a development project during the event.

Attendees will be able to:

• Create new applications for iPhone and iPod touch.
• Migrate Mac OS X applications to iPhone and iPod touch.
• Test and optimize applications for iPhone and iPod touch.

The event will feature:

• Simultaneous Events Worldwide
• Meetup Time on Friday with Refreshments
• Catered Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner on Saturday and Sunday
• Saturday Keynote (now accepting nominations)
• Open Mic for Questions
• Ad Hoc Sessions by Participants
• Late Saturday Gaming
• Sunday Keynote (now accepting nominations)
• Hackathon Contest
• Everyone Leaves with Something

Last year was an incredible success: the winners went on to do righteous things, and the sponsors saw tremendous growth. We doubled the previous year’s attendance:

We expect this year to more than double the size and scope of the event. In order to cover the additional overhead, we may need to charge a small fee (up to $50) for folks to book a spot at the event.

We are committed to staying not-for-profit; all charges will go toward the production of iPhoneDevCamp, and the founders don’t make a cent. The founders are Raven Zachary (who had the original idea), Dom Sagolla, Christopher Allen, William Hurley, and Blake Burris, with the honorable Chris Messina presiding. We are currently seeking:

• Venue
• Sponsors
• Keynote Speakers
• Donations

Note: Until we have a venue and a date, we will not be accepting attendee registrations, but all sponsors are guaranteed at least one spot.

To get involved with the above, please email Raven and Dom: info@iphonedevcamp.org.

We can’t wait to see what awaits us this year! For now, we’ll leave you with That Phone Guy:

iPhone in Action Cover

A number of teams used the sample Interface Builder chapter from my book iPhone in Action: Introduction to Web & SDK Development at the last iPhoneDevCamp. I’m pleased to announce that the print version of the book is now available and should be shipping from Manning, Amazon, Borders, Barnes & Noble, etc.

I will be at MacWorld this week and raffling off copies of the book at Raven’s iPhone Intelligence Party on Tuesday night.

My co-author Shannon Appelcline and I have also started a blog where we’ll be posting links and updates to the book—add it to your favorite feed reader!

If you have already purchased the eBook, or used the Interface Builder sample chapter at iPhoneDevCamp and found it useful, I could really use your help in letting others know about the book. In particular, if you can post a brief review at Amazon of you experience with the book, it would be much appreciated. If you have an iPhone Developer blog, I can also send you a review copy of the book.

See you at MacWorld!

• Czech Republic
• Ireland
• Montreal

Looking to get started with your own community?  Take a peek at our Satellites page, or read the latest article on iPhoneDevCamp in Mac|Life magazine.

Now that the iPhone SDK license agreement NDA has been lifted, communities worldwide can teach, learn, write, and publish with greater freedom.  If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area next month, you can hear all about this at the O’Reilly iPhoneLive conference that Raven and I are helping to produce.

Harp App has shipped! The video above has a charming demonstration of the winner for Best Educational App at iPhoneDevCamp 2, showing off the multitouch features of Apple’s platform for only $1.99.

• Raven Zachary (Project Director) *
• Jason Grigsby (Project Manager)
• John Keith (Server Development)
• Lyza Gardner (Server Development, Design)
• Aileen Jeffries (Design)
• Jonathan Wight (Lead iPhone Development) *
• Dom Sagolla (QA, Community Development) *
• Mike Lee (iPhone Development, UI) *
• Louie Mantia (Design) *
• Tristan O’Tierney (iPhone Development) *

I think we may have achieved a record for the launch of such a complex app in such a short period, and many excellent features were dropped for lack of time. It was really fun to develop, knowing the power of features like Call Friends (which sorts your address book by key battleground states) and Get Involved (which uses CoreLocation to direct you to the nearest Obama Headquarters).  The app was designed as a means to donate your time in discreet segments — we call it ‘micro-volunteering’.

A huge portion of the code was taken from Jonathan Wight’s superb TouchCode repository, which won “Best Open Source” at iPhoneDevCamp 2 this summer.

We use Basecamp for bootstrapping, Subversion for revisions, Lighthouse for bug tracking (thanks entp!), Google Groups for our (stellar) Beta list, and Campfire for our engineering chat.  Check out our Facebook Group as well.

Special thanks to John Geleynse and Erik Lammerding at Apple for their attention and encouragement.

Help us make the app better by sending email to iphone@barackobama.com.  Use it to call your friends!  The election is little more than a month away, and your action can make the difference.

Fri, Oct. 3 - Sat, Oct 4, 2008
7pm Fri through Sat pm
Danish Technical University

The team has both a blog and a wiki all set up, with their first sponsor and looking for more.

Update: At capacity! Signups are now closed, but:

If you really want to come, and just got to know us too late, there still may be an opportunity to attend. You can put your name on the waiting list, and if someone removes their name from the list, we will fit you in. We can’t promise anything, though it is worth a try.