At last weeks Sydney CocoaHeads, barely 24 hours after WatchKit was released, I thought it would be a good idea to demo a little app I wrote to control a wifi-controlled light globe from LIFX. It went surprisingly ok! Hope you enjoy it.

For those wondering about the NDA, we tend to agree with Ray Wenderlich and Craig Hockenberry, that “Since the Apple Watch SDK docs are open to the public and we haven’t heard anything to the contrary, we are assuming it is OK to talk about WatchKit at this point. If anyone hears an official word on the matter, please let us know!” — Greg Heo on raywenderlich.com

The demo code shown is on GitHub: https://github.com/aufflick/LIFX-Watch-Remote

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As always, Sydney CocoaHeads brought to you by The High Technology Bureau and sponsored by Atlassian. Thanks to Craig Stanford for supplying and manning the video camera this month.

© 2014 Mark Aufflick (@markaufflick), The High Technology Bureau.

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At the 2014 August CocoaHeads meetup in Sydney we were verty fortunate to have Manuel Chakravarty give us a talk titled “Swift—Adopting functional programming”. Manuel is an internationally renowned expert on functional programming based here in Sydney. Manuel is this year’s program chair of ICFP (The International Conference on Functional Programming), but he took time to talk to just a few days before flying out.

Apple’s new language Swift supports functional programming while being tightly integrated with Objective-C and Cocoa. This has sent the developer community on an adventure to explore how ideas from functional programming might help writing great apps for iOS and OS X. In this talk, I will concentrate on two of these ideas: types and immutable data structures. How do they benefit development, and how do they affect code architecture?

In addition to the video (which includes the slides) you can find just Manuel’s slides on SpeakerDeck.

As a reminder, you can subscribe to all our video content via iTunes or any other rss reader with this url: RSS Video feed

As always, Sydney CocoaHeads brought to you by The High Technology Bureau and sponsored by Atlassian. Thanks to Craig Stanford for supplying and manning the video camera this month.

CocoaHeads new injection Lawrence Lomax not only has the third best name after Max Power and Scott Speed, he gave a great talk titled “Super! Awesome! Functional! Reactive! with ReactiveCocoa!”. Apparently it’s something to do with cats.

Craig Stanford walks us through the basics of layer masking – using a monochromatic CALayer as as content mask for another CALayer.

Music: What’s that Sound, by 20 Riverside from the Podsafe Music Network.

Introduction to Instruments by AnthonyEgerton.

Introduction to Instruments Presentation, recorded at Cocoaheads Sydney 13th September 2012.

At the March Sydney CocoaHeads Cameron Barrie (@whalec) gave a great talk on his approach to custom UIKit interface development. Forgive us for the poor quality audio and video – our technology for that month was a Logitech webcam.