Michael Moncada's blog

Intro to the Mobile Development Series...
First off - welcome to the weird world of mobile development! Developing natively on mobile devices is not for the faint of heart - and I must congratulate you for making the first steps to doing so! You are now on your way to becoming iPhone development savvy. Much like kung-fu the path to mastering development on the iPhone will be long and hard, but with a bit of elbow grease, a pitcher of European triple-brewed espresso beverages (I am not talking lattes here) and some determination you will be able to join the ranks of the elite iPhone Developers in no time. Just remember me if you create an App that's worth millions!

As I am currently doing research in a similar Genre for my Masters I happened to come across Project Natal. To be honest when I first saw this it blew my socks off. Basically it is an attachment to XBOX 360 (and later editions to come) which allows for controller support without the controller. This hardware has facial, body gesture and speech recognition which can be used in games (though it is important to note that this technology is rudimentary at this point). The website can be found here. Technology is catching up with what used to be only found in science fiction. Minority report here we come!

Seneca has been doing a lot of work with the open source community which has been brought into the spotlight recently by Metronews. Seneca (see: http://zenit.senecac.on.ca/wiki/index.php/Main_Page), in my opinion, is providing an excellent example of an educational organization that has chosen to officially embrace the open source initiative in Canada, potentially offering some insight into how we could preemptively model our own initiatives from - if that is a path we choose to take. An example of their Seneca's work is illustrated in this article (this is not a rickroll by the way - thanks Mike! ;)) which depicts how Seneca is promoting their students to participate in the Mozilla project.

There are a lot of good potential projects being brainstormed on this site - many of which carry the open source tone - should we should start up a team here to foster underground projects? The mic is yours...

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to poll the population here at U of T to see how many people would be interested in a lecture series for developing Mobile Apps for the iPhone (with some possible talks on other platforms such as Android if there is enough interest there). If there is enough interest to drive this I would like to propose the creation of an evening lecture series for those interested (through the TechKnowfile Venue), where we could potentially record it and post it up for everyone. I have been hearing questions about iPhone development from various sources around U of T and I see this as an opportunity to potentially promote some learning and information on the subject. Let me know what you think!