So the first conference we organised is over. It took place in Prague, June 19—20 2010 and was limited to 80 visitors. What was it all about?

At least here in the CZ/SK region, iPhone development is still at it’s very beginning. You could probably count the number of well established teams on the fingers of one hand. Maybe two. And that’s something we in Tapmates would like to change by contributing to the evangelization. There are plenty of cool people around, who just don’t know how to start, or have bad experience because of some major or minor fails they have done during development of their apps. We have tried to prepare the agenda of this conference aiming exactly on these people. To give them an intensive walkthrough, touching all the aspects of creating and selling an app. The idea was to visit also darker corners in order to make it a bit hardcore.

The big demand for an event like this was confirmed by selling most of the tickets within the first week.

Not to get our intentions wrong – we definatelly don’t think we are the only ones who know how to do it, or how to do it well – there’s probably only one guy here around who does – RNDr. Ondřej Čada – a legendary czech mac developer, author of many tutorials and publications, a true geek and a wonderfull person. We were glad he accepted our invitation, accompanied by other interesting people such as Robert Vojta from [:Izy:] Apps Development Group, Michal Šrajer from Inmite or Tomáš Mrkvička from Tapitu. These people joined our team with the goal to give our visitors some handy tips, introduce tools that might help and also share their experience from the world of frequent fails, marketing or sales.

Participants did get some nice examples of code connected to single presentations, including the iDevcamp prepared by our team, which is one of the very few complex opensource applications based on Three20, placed on Github (more about it later).

It was the first conference of such a type here, so we did not manage to prepare everything perfect. Designers probably got a bit bored while watching hi-tech presentation about advanced programming methods in Obj-C by above mentioned Ondřej Čada, developers on the other hand were probably playing tic-tac-toe during the design workshop. For the next season we will definatelly look for a better place allowing multiple parallel workshops, so that people could pick the topics they are really interested in.

We have collected a lot of feedback, mostly very positive—thanks to all for that. We will try to base on your responses and make the next season even better. There is definatelly lot to look for. Thanks once again to everybody who came, to all the presenters and hope to see you all next year. Or maybe earlier?