Alex Cone, Founder, CodeFab LLC. Head trainer, iPhone Boot Camp

Alex Cone has been working with Cocoa and related technologies since their infancy - when it was still called NeXTstep. In 1991 he founded a company (Objective Technologies) that built NeXTstep developer tools and financial applications using NeXT technology. When NeXT was bought by Apple, he started a new company named CodeFab that built large web-based applications using the NeXT-Apple WebObjects toolkit and Mac desktop apps using Cocoa. Alex has done several years of direct consulting for Apple in Cupertino, coding and managing developers on the Apple Online Store.

When the iPhone SDK came out Alex brought all of CodeFab's developers in from around the country for an in-house "kitchen" on iPhone development. They spent most of a week around the big conference table building small apps until everyone was comfortable with the development tools. CodeFab has been focussed on doing iPhone and other mobile solution consulting ever since and has more than more than a dozen client and partner applications available in the App Store. Additionally, in 2008, Cone and CodeFab spent 6 months creating the software and internet infrastructure for Medialets, a mobile ad network specifically targeting the iPhone.

Since the end of 2008 Alex Cone has travelled widely doing lectures and training on iPhone application development, training over a hundred students for the iPhone Boot Camp. He is currently working on a book for new iPhone developers drawn from his teaching experience.

Presentation: "iPhone Application Architecture: Forget the examples, how to architect a complex iPhone application"

Track: iPhone Application Development

Time: Wednesday 13:30 - 14:30

Location: Lille Sal

Abstract: Apple's examples show a developer how to solve a wide variety of very specific programming issue, but completely fail to tell you how to architect a real world iPhone application. Alex Cone, who has developed over a dozen applications for the iPhone, discusses strategies for architecting a robust, efficient and high performance iPhone application that can grow over years with continuous rapid development cycles. He will discuss managing user experience, managing state, managing application data, and planning threading and web service calls. Also covered will be strategies for organizing project structure for clarity, team development and version control.