Last night I made back to one of my favorite Meetups – Triangle Cocoaheads. The format of the meetup is that there are a few speakers and then people can stand up a showcase an app they are working on. Josh Johnson and Jay Thrash gave two great presentations – Josh showed off how to build a AVFoundation playlist application and Jay showed off Square’s PonyDebugger.
Being a podcaster and video editor, I felt that Josh’s explanation of AVFoundation was great. I had the aha moment that most this framework is just like doing a multitrack editing experience. You build up a composition, which contains tracks, and within tracks you have the actual audio pieces. You can apply mixers to the track, which is an array of params which apply attributes which manipulate the sound. We focused strictly on volume controls, because the demo application was about creating a cross fade between songs. Josh then showed the application he is currently working on where utilized all he showed us. As soon as the video is posted I will link to it. Great job!
Jay then took the group thru PonyDebugger. This allows you to do realtime analysis of your app, either on the simulator or on device. Everything you want to know about it can be found at GitHub. I’ve been looking for a tool like this, as it provides three basic features: Network traffic debugger, Core Data Browser, and View Hierarchy Debugger. The way this is achieved is by adding about 7 lines of code. Amazing!
The session then turned into a discussion on CocoaPods. Now I’ve not used this before, so it was interesting to learn about this, but when the discussion went to CocoaPods vs. GitSubTrees, and GitSubModules it went over my head. Mainly because I am writing my code from scratch with no real third party libraries. Also, I’ve not been working with others, so needing to keep multiple people on the same level of code across machines and libraries is not relevant. But a pretty good discussion ensued and while the group didn’t come to any consensus of which is best, I think this was a great new add to the Meetup.
I am looking forward to getting back into this meetup.