360|MacDev

Macstories had an awesome article about The Mac App Store turning 1 year old on the 7th. 

The first 360|MacDev in December of 2010, was just before the Mac App Store opened. There was a great deal of talk about what the future would hold for Mac Developers. Clearly the future was and is bright for developers.

The Mac App Store has brought Mac development back into the foreground. Exposing apps that had no marketing budget to the mainstream. Opening doors for iOS devs to port their wares to another store. 

It's been a huge year for the Mac Developer community. We're excited to be a part of it! 360|MacDeve 2012 will be a great event with some successful iOS developers talking about moving to the Mac and some long time Mac developers talking about their successes and how you too can get there. 

360|MacDev is a baby. It's the younger brother to 360|iDev, and after this event in February will be 2 years old. 

We're working on building the conference up as much as we can so it's a pillar of the Mac Community. I wanted to take a minute to thank our awesome sponsors for helping us get there. They help make the conference possible. Check out the sponsors page and make sure to thank and support those companies, they care about the Mac community.

We're happy to work with such awesome companies!!

Community is a big deal to us. 

We want the Mac Developer community to be as big and as strong as possible. Not just because that helps us, which it definitely does, but more importantly because it helps the community. Large communities are more able to help each other. Don't get us wrong, the Mac Community is large and thriving we're not inventing the wheel here, but we want the wheel to be bigger, maybe have a higher speed rating...

We've never seen the community as something we can leverage or use, sadly we think we're alone in that regard. There's no point in naming names or pointing fingers, but look at the conference landscape, there's a lot of events out there, how many just collect your money, do the event and never interact with or support the community, until of course it's time to buy the next years ticket. We're not saying those events suck, many don't. We do think the community should look at conferences less as a commodity to be exploited (wonder how those magazine company guys sleep at night) and more as a partner that wants to help them succeed and that they want to see succeed as well.

Part of our community support is that any Cocoaheads group that wishes, can email us and we'll give two free passes to the conference. No strings (except of course we hope you'll make some noise for us) attached. We don't dictate how the passes are used or distributed. Also each group is given a discount code to save 15% for all members. 

If you think about it, that's a lot of free passes. To us it's worth it. 360|MacDev isn't supposed to make us rich, it's supposed to help the community and provide a comfortable living for Us (John and Nicole). Both seem completely doable.

You can get more details here.

Despite how some behave, conferences aren't commodities. Treating conferences like interchangeable and replacement things diminishes their effectiveness. We're not saying only speak at 360|MacDev, but you don't do yourself or conferences any favors by speaking at an event a month.