2011 was a great year for Sydney’s iOS and Mac developer community.

• We visited three great supporters of CocoaHeads through the year – KeyOptions, NineMSN, Roamz and Atlassian

• We farewelled our longest reliable member (and did I mention Acadamy Award winning developer), Alan Rogers, losing him to the cold and unyielding climate of Melbourne

• In unrelated events saw our regular attendance hover around 30

• Some of us were lucky enough to have tickets to go to WWDC and see the last Stevenote (not to mention queuing from midnight and a chair odyssey that ended in dumpster diving for cardboard and bubble wrap)

• We had a sombre night remembering Steve Jobs, meeting the evening of the day we all heard the news

• Many of us got to take part in Swipe Conference down in Melbourne – Australia’s biggest and best iOS and Mac developers conference ;)

• And of course we finished the year with a bang (and a Mariachi hat) with Mike Lee, the world’s toughest programmer, at Sydney’s biggest ever CocoaHeads that sold out at 200 people (and yet mysteriously more than 200 turned up – including some ring ins from the SharePoint users group!) with huge thanks again to the YOW! conference for letting us have one of their speakers for free

We had loads of great presentations. I’m sure no one will forget Manuel’s talk on physical computing involving poking electrodes into a stunned cockroach, nor Tom’s epic series on SQLite, UITableView, and the Core Data sledging that ensued.

Based on the number of recruiters prowling around and the uptick in startup funding, 2012 promises to be a bumper year for both iOS and MacOS in Sydney. The sheer volume of people with a year or so iOS experience is also a lot higher than, well, a year or so ago. So I have great hopes for an expanded and more lively CocoaHeads in 2012.

To that end, this Thursday we’re going to kick off with a slightly different approach. Firstly Craig Stanford is going to give a short (and possibly unscripted) talk about his experiences developing hybrid native/webview apps at NineMSN. Following that I’m going to give a talk on how I prepare ideas and content for talks. And finally I’ll bring up the talk idea spreadsheet and we’ll do some brainstorming, voting and volunteering.

**Where: **Our location is again the very friendly guys at Roamz: 23 Foster Street, Surry Hills NSW http://g.co/maps/6p6ds

**When: **Thursday February 2nd, 6:30 PM - 9:00 PM

See you there! Don’t forget to let me know if you want any of the books I have to give away. The ones left are:

• Learning the iOS 4 SDK for JavaScript Programmers (O’Reilly)

• iPhone Application Development for iOS 4 (Visual Quick Start Guide)

• Programming iOS 4 (O’Reilly)

• Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X (Second Edition - a little old) by Aaron Hillegass

• Head First iPhone Development (O’Reilly, although not the usual O’Reilly standard to be honest)