For our April meeting, Isaac Schmidt gave a nice introduction to Parse.com, which is a web service plus an iOS framework that lets you quickly and easily set up web-backed object storage for your app. They also have Android support and a REST interface but no desktop Cocoa API. I wonder if it'd be worth writing a lightweight wrapper around the REST interface using RestKit.

Parse is really simple and it's free up to 1GB of disk storage and 1,000,000 server requests. If nothing else, I can imagine using it for quick prototyping or lightweight custom applications. As someone who has yet to dive into iOS development, I like that this will make it easy to get something working that's a real web-backed app.

Isaac demoed an example app called Instazam. (If that sounds like the name of a company that recently sold for a billion dollars, that's no coincidence.) Here's a zip file containing Isaac's Keynote slides and the Instazam code. You can also see his slides embedded below.

We had two speakers at the March meeting.

Samuel talked about refactoring. You can click this link for a PDF of his slides, or you can view them embedded below:

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Related links:

• Objc_dep, a tool that generates a diagram of class dependencies.
• AppCode, which Samuel mentioned his company uses to help with refactoring.
• SOLID, a set of basic principles for object-oriented programming.

Bob talked about quirky edge cases in ARC, the kind of subtle stuff that could drive you crazy, especially if you've written a book about Objective-C. You can click this link for a PDF of Bob's slides, or you can view them embedded below:

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[UPDATE: Uploaded Bob's slides to SpeakerDeck so you can view them embedded like Samuel's. I'd never heard of SpeakerDeck until Samuel posted his link to the mailing list. Pretty cool.]