The developers of North Carolina have spoken, and we’ve listened. By popular demand, CocoaConf will be coming to downtown Raleigh, NC, in early December.

The conference is December 2-3.

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I was thinking recently that it would be useful to have a month to focus on doing an app from start to finish. I’ve dabbled with development for ages, without knuckling down and getting something done. I’ve decided to do it in December. Take 31 days and use my spare time to do an iPhone app that I want for myself. I floated the idea on Twitter and a few people seemed interested in doing something themselves. Of course I’m doing an iPhone app, but there is no reason that any other sort of app couldn’t be done. A Macintosh app, a Windows Phone 7 app, an Android app, a web app, or an app for whatever platform you like.

Great idea.

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If you’re a Mac gamer and you’d like to play some new titles for free, get yourself over to uDevGames and check out this year’s contest.

uDevGames is an annual event in which Mac developers compete for fun and prizes, developing new games in a three month period. You get to download and play them. Past events have resulted in more than 150 games produced by independent Mac game developers around the world. The source code for each entry is

Unity Technologies – maker of the Unity game development platform for iOS, Android, consoles and the Web – has announced details for Unite 11, this year’s gathering of Unity developers. The event is scheduled for September 28 – 30, 2011 at the Masonic Center in San Francisco, Calif.

MacTech Conference 2011 happens in November in Los Angeles, and the event’s early bird registration, which saves attendees $200 on the cost of attending, will end on August 8th.

Tigerbears on Tuesday released a new application called Objectify that is targeted to Apple developers.

According to the company, Objectify saves Cocoa developers time and effort by automatically building customizable model classes from JSON content. These classes can be exported as Objective-C source code files, ready to be used in the developer’s development environment of choice.

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Chair Entertainment’s hit game Infinity Blade stands apart from other offerings on the App Store: it’s the first iOS game built using Epic Games’ Unreal Development Kit (UDK) for iOS. The UDK has been used extensively in PC and console game development, but iOS is the first mobile platform to get the UDK treatment. The software’s creators are hoping this will lead to a new generation of more intense, console-quality entertainment for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.

GameSalad Inc. has announced a new “Free to Make” model for its “Basic” membership plan, enabling anyone to make their own iOS game without having to pay a fee.

One of my favorite applications on the Mac, BBEdit, was updated on Wednesday, fixing a number of issues.

Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) takes place in San Francisco from June 7-11, but it’s not the only conference in the area during that time. eBay is also holding its developer conference and they are offering WWDC devs discounted entry.

Is there really a better application on the Mac than BBEdit? It’s an app that I’ve been using everyday for the better part of 15 years and on Tuesday it received a major update with the release of version 9.5.

Apple on Thursday relaunched its Mac Developer Program and modelled it after the successful iPhone Developer Program the company has had in place for the past couple of years.