Day Out

Spent yesterday out of the office at Birmingham University for the first Birmingham School of Computer Science Apple Day. Essentially a bunch of Phd students there have decided to evangelise the Mac platform within their primarily Lintel/Wintel environment, and they'd persuaded the manager and a few geniuses (and no, the plural in this sense is not genii) from the Apple Store Bullring to come along, answer questions, and support the day. Turnout wasn't too bad considering the zero-publicity levels, and there was a fair bit of interesting debate. Best part of the day by far was Robert Goldsmith's Xcode session where he stripped an 80-line currency converter program down to about 25 lines while adding significant functionality. I've seen Apple presentations on using things like Shark, but this was the best intro to object coding models and the practical use of Xcode I've ever seen. Robert's definitely a guy to watch.