The Mac Developer Network with Steve Scott(Scotty) and Tim Isted are hosting a great conference, called NSConference, in UK this week. I wish I could be there as well, but it is a bit of a hike for me to be there in person. It would be great if they can make some of the materials available online after the show.
The quality of the listed session topics are very high, and those are definitely not the same sort of information you can find in the upcoming WWDC 2009. Amongst them, the below 2 sessions sounded especially interesting to me: (along with my humble suggestions for additional content)
Designing and Developing Custom Cocoa Controls (Matt Gemmell): There is surprisingly very little information in the form of guidelines, best practices on this topic for both Cocoa and Cocoa Touch programming. Matt Gemmell has quite a few open source controls, so I am sure it would be great to hear about his experience. Even though it is not mentioned in his abstract, I hope that he can also touch a little bit on building Interface Builder plugins for those custom controls. But if not, the Apple docs on IBPlugin are comprehensive as well.
Foundations of Objective-C (Andre Pang): The best way to really master a language/framework is to go deep into its inner workings. Especially meta-programming is a very powerful tool, once you understand the underlying object model and runtime of that language. Frameworks like Core Data are built on top of the meta-programming principles. It would also be great to also briefly compare it to either Ruby or Python. There is also a pretty interesting screencast from PeepCode titled Objective C for Rubyists that approaches Objective C from the perspective of Ruby.
at 11:39 am