You know how sometimes we make these prayers to God about what would seem to be little things for Him?  Well just this past Tuesday, classes started here at the local Community College.  I had my eye on this one class in particular that had been full for months before I ever even considered taking it.  The night before classes started (Monday), at about 8pm, I pulled up the class schedule online. Sure enough, every single teacher that taught that class at every time on every day was still full.  Nothing new, but something made me decide to send up a prayer, "God, it sure would be nice to take this class on the Tuesday/Thursday schedule. And it really would be ideal to take it at 8am. If it's your will, I ask that you open up a spot for me in this class." Inside I'm thinking to myself, "At 8pm the NIGHT BEFORE the class starts??"

Two hours later I check back and out of all the classes, days, and times on the schedule, there was ONE spot open for the EXACT class I wanted, on Tue/Thur., at 8am!! So needless to say, I snagged it! :-D The next morning about 10 people got kicked out who were trying to add. We should never forget these little things that God does for us.

On Thursday I made the trip down to San Jose for the day to participate in the Tech Talks 2009 seminars for iPhone Development. I learned a lot about some of the more advanced programming techniques, and I got many of my questions answered. On top of the breakout sessions, I really liked their decision to dedicate one room to questions and answers, and hands-on help from Apple employees all day! That was pretty cool. I met some pretty awesome and knowledgeable people, including the young man who is in charge of the Facebook for iPhone app now.

The biggest disappointment of the day for me was to find out that the Apple gurus there who were making the presentations (also known as "evangelists" which I find kinda humorous) didn't have anything substantial to say about the fact that the UIImagePicker control only returns a UIImage object and does not contain any extra information such as the date and time the photo was taken, or even more importantly, the location (latitude and longitude) of the photo. There are several apps out there on the app store that clearly tap into this functionality using private APIs, but nobody wants to talk about that lol. One "evangelist" was even very rude and cold with me about it when I asked him about it saying that he could not comment. After talking to two of the other "evangelists" I was finally able to find one of them who was cool enough with me to talk about it and said that it is embarrassing to him that Apple doesn't allow this basic ability and he hopes Apple will add it soon. Wishful thinking? I sure hope not! He did suggest to file a duplicate bug report about it. I plan to do that soon. I just see so much potential to be able to tap into this kind of functionality, and right now we have our hands tied. I say that Apple needs to get their act together soon about the limitations they enforce on their developers, because being treated like an untrustworthy child can only be tolerated for so long by the developer community. I hear Android is making some noise (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPYM-XTqcec) and will be for some time. :-)

Choosing which breakout seminars to attend was hard, and almost made me feel like I was at GYC again, lol. I chose to attended the following seminars:

• Effective iPhone App Development - Part 1
• Preparing and Delivering Video for iPhone
• Working with Core Data
• Finding Your Way with Location and Maps
• Implementing Push Notification

Several families from the Meadow Vista church invited me to go camping with them the other weekend. Along with great christian fellowship, we had an enjoyable time at the beach watching the waves crashing against the rocks. Thanks to Roy and Mr. Longo I got to try skim boarding for the first time too! It was a blast! By no means am I anywhere close to being good at it, but I was pleasantly surprised that it isn't as hard as I had expected!