I’m currently in Pittsburgh at the Art&Code Mobile event.
We arrived last night and came straight from the airport to attend the Rossum’s meetup. The group is an Art and Robotics collective that meet regularly to host speakers, collaborate on projects, and promote their work.
This morning, I particpated in the OpenFrameworks and iPhone workshop taught by memo akten and Zach Gage
The project we were working on was, essentially, pong for the iPhone. It was a great starter project for those that needed an intro to OF because it exposed the basic structure of an OF program (memo and zach did a great, patient job of going through the IDE and the file placement idiosyncrasies of OF). The class proved that OF can be quite cross-platform right out of the box. There are some obvious exceptions (ex. multitouch isn’t available on all platforms). These unique features are handled as addons to the basic OF project.
As expected, the most difficult part of getting an iPhone OF project to work is the whole provisioning / signing process. Luckily, I’ve done quite a bit of iPhone work before, so this was somewhat smooth for me (once I made sure that the correct SDK was selected in XCode — that messed me up a bit).
I didn’t realize that iPhone OF creates ‘legitimate’ iPhone apps that are acceptable for app store submission (and sale). What’s especially exciting about working with something like OF for iPhone is that the platform encourages building art / toy / pretty apps… so the scope of interestingly designed applications that can be offered is small enough that you could iterate through many experiments with ease. That being said, in my experience, since OF can also be essentially use any library that compiles (c++ or objective-c on OS X), you can use it as a framework for more complex applications.
Tonight, I’m spending evening at HackPGH – very cool do-oriented space. somebody’s soldering near me, somebody’s crocheting. I’ll be trying to build an iPhone toy using OF.
Special thanks to Matt Mets for letting me couch surf at his apartment this weekend.
Good times.
It’s not really on the way to or from anything, but FYI: Manchester, NH airport has free, public wireless (not open – one nag/term page to click through).
About 6 weeks ago, I found that I could grab wireless from Cincinnati airport, but alas, this was locked up under some Bell ISP. I did see a computer-to-computer connection named, suspiciously, “Free Public Wireless!” (the exclamation point pushes it over the edge of seediness). Decided to stay offline, instead.
I’ll be at Maker Faire from Wednesday until Monday of next week… I’ll try to post some behind-the-scenes stories and event photos / wrap-ups at the hotel nightly (Hilton Garden Inn – complimentary Internet! yay.)
I realize how spoiled I am in Austin with all the wireless available in just about every part of town in such different varieties of venues (coffee shops, libraries, movie theaters, outdoor parks, etc).
Both in San Francisco and here, not only was it hard to find WiFi, but it was even harder to find WiFi that was open and didn’t cost 4.95 a minute to use.
After trying a coffee bar with no seats and even McDonald’s (pay service and no electrical outlets… turns out they don’t actually want you camping out in there), I finally discovered the library.
I had to sign up for a library card in Sebastopol to access the web (and I’m convinced they’re blocking everything but port 80), but now, at least, I can do a few last-minute tasks.
Oh, yes, I’m in Sebastopol, a few hours away from Foo Camp 2006.
I’m definitely humbled by being asked to come, as I expect to have my mind blown by a collection of incredibly smart people – some are rock stars that everyone in my industry knows, some are rock stars to me – robot builders and hackers I’ve followed for a while. Still others are brand new names working on art+tech+community future media projects. All are potentially lucrative, interesting, and like-minded future collaborators.
The format of the event is the Unconference. Among other things, this implies that there is no set agenda or schedule before the event participants show up. In fact it IS the participants that determine what happens at the event and propose sessions and workshops. Based on pre-chatter, it seems that there will be a mix of web 2.0-ish talk, hardware hacking, and general goofiness.
I must admit that I’m a little nervous about that angle. I’m the kind of guy that likes to spen some time researching and planning out my general “conference strategy” of must-see talks and stuff I can do without. Wandering and engaging for the sake of wandering will be a useful exercise.
This gathering, because of its realitively small size, but more so because of its format and tone, heavily emphasizes the person-to-person connectivity I talked about in my sxsw guides. So my relentless friendliness strikes again.
After I finish a few things here, I’ll be taking in some of Patrick Amiot’s urban folk art on the way in to the O’Reilly campus. I’ll try to blog as much as I can as frequently as possible, but I can’t promise a full-on live-blogging effort (I’m there to participate and experience, not document). <!– technorati tags start –>
Technorati Tags: sebastopol, foocamp, travel, wifi
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