i burned a few vacation days and flew into denver for the iphone developer conference that took place this week. overall, i left disappointed. i think my biggest complaint is that programmers aren't typically good public speakers. i hate to generalize and there are always exceptions but most of the sessions i sat in on were just painful (too many "um....", "uhhh...")
one shining beacon in an otherwise dull trip was listening to david whatley (geodefense). he had a standing room only session where he went over his thoughts on what makes a great game, examples of games he liked and discussed some specific sales numbers with his games. an interesting point i took away was that he said thought geodefense would have been 'an obscurity' if hadn't been for the PR firm he partnered with.
the harbor master guy [kid? looked pretty young :) ] was there as well and it was said he pulled down $11k as a high point in one day from the game.
matt drance's keynote was also good. he spoke a lot on doing whatever you can to make connections / relationships inside apple and getting your company/products known to the people there. of course he didn't mention *how* to do that exactly :)
during the keynote someone had mentioned the app store just hit 2 billion downloads / 85k apps.
i was just bummed that a few of the sessions i wanted to attend (opengl,etc) were cancelled due to speakers not showing for whatever reason. the facility was nice, the food was decent, people were cool, but the quality itself seemed pretty hit or miss.
i was unable to attend the cocos2d session and i very much wanted to attend. i'm hoping someone here went and can fill me in on how it went?