You can just see my hand, all the way in the back left.
(Photo courtesy of Adam Tow)

For the second year running, the team at iPhoneDevCamp.org brought together a truly impressive group of individuals and companies -- developers, designers, entrepreneurs, and investors -- all interested in one thing: developing great applications and web apps for iPhone and iPod Touch.

This weekend I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to swing by iPhoneDevCamp 2, housed again at the Adobe Systems office in San Francisco, California. I was absolutely blown away by what I saw there.

The venue was not huge -- nothing like MacWorld or WWDC -- but, then again, it was not a conference or an exposition. It was a Dev Camp: part presentation, part hackathon, part seminar, part all-night-party. An item on the official agenda (to say nothing of the ad-hoc presentation agenda) read simply "Begin freeform collaboration." In short it was a vigorous and fertile hub of the iPhone development community.

Attendees came (and tuned in via webcast) from all around the country and even internationally. Many of them signed up, on the spot, to present half-hour sessions on their ideas and discoveries. There were sessions on everything from "The UDP Network Layer - Bonjour" and "JSON/XML" to "Gesture Vocabularies" and "Collaborative Live Mapping" to "Saving App State" and "Caching" (which was sub-titled "Don't Clog the Tubes!").

While these sessions formed the meat of the presentation portion of the DevCamp, the more hands-on, community-building portion of the event was definitely the Hackathon. And here was where that attitude of "freeform collaboration" seemed to absolutely blossom. Already present in every developer and team that I encountered, the spirit of "Contribution, Sharing, and Openness" was explicitly nurtured by the organizers of the DevCamp: they mingled with the various groups, each set up on lunchroom tables, awarding tickets every time they observed those kinds of exchanges.

Eating pizza and writing code.

While I was there, I observed all the things you might typically expect to see at a developers' convention: rows of people hunched over laptops or huddled around a demo, the occasional exhausted coder passed out on a lunch table, people taking a break to watch downloaded Family Guy episodes, and of course, the obligatory webcast technical difficulties.

But what I also saw was an incredible generosity of community: people freely asking questions and just as freely giving answers, developers sitting down with other teams to help solve problems, and everyone sharing ideas, suggestions, sympathies, and successes.

Before the deadline, each team submitted their app by registering it at iusethis.com to be eligible for judging and demoing to the group.

And the end result of something short of two full days' marathon coding? Really, very impressive.

Hackathon!

Some teams built entire applications, from scratch: some prototype proofs of concept, some nearly iTunes App Store ready. Others built development frameworks to solve general problems and support common functionality. There were teams who attended the DevCamp as a group, and there were strangers who had never met before forming ad-hoc teams.

One group of developers joined up after meeting at the DevCamp to build a simple but cute updated-for-iPhone version of a Tamagachi virtual pet, called Fwerps.

Another team I met, dsMediaLabs, flew out together from Florida and put together a very slick and beautiful remake of the well known Light Bike game (think Tron), which also connected back to the server-side to support persistent user profiles, high scores, etc.

Entertainingly, there were two entries that implemented the game of "Rock, Paper, Scissors," one of which allowed players to rochambeau over a network and against more than one opponent. (Would that make it an MMORPS?) ;-)

Aside from games, quite a few really impressive applications and concepts were demonstrated for the judging. Some highlights:

toxicsoftware presented TouchCode which provides higher level XML and JSON APIs than are available in the SDK.

A framework that I was particularly happy to see was Zack White's iPhone Copy/Paste, which gives developers the tools to implement that functionality in their own applications. (Finally!)

Heatmap is a mapping application that overlays "hotspots" of some or other, user defined, subjective rating (for example, how safe or crowded or fun). Users can both see the geotagged ratings as well as contribute their own.

An application that drew many ooo's and aaah's was iRa by Lextech Labs, which aggregates multiple surveillance video feeds to a single iPhone, allowing users to view and control the cameras while on the move.

And there were many more, each of which took advantage of the flexibility and utility of the iPhone platform.

After seeing all of the Hackathon applications demonstrated, I came away from iPhoneDevCamp having the idea reinforced for me that two of the greatest promises of the iPhone platform are its mobility and its connectivity. Applications that combine the two (game platforms like Light Bike, social platforms like Heatmap, and tools like iRa) are really fulfilling that promise.

But more than any single application, the thing that impressed me most of all was how openly I had been able to interact with such a lively, diverse, friendly, and amazingly generous community of developers. I've said more than once (on this site, even) that I'm merely a novice iPhone developer, but when I left that hall of coders, designers, and entrepreneurs, I felt that, by the merits of my interest alone, I had been welcomed and that I could be a part of that community. And if I can, so can you.