Most of the time our little flock is heads down, creating new apps and software solutions. On occasion, though, we do find the time to pursue other activities of interest. One common extracurricular theme of late has been continuing education.

UW – IPhone and Cocoa Development

Last year I was fortunate to be given the opportunity to teach Cocoa programming through the University of Washington’s Professional and Continuing Education department. With help of an all-star advisory board, we managed to create a very unique three-course program. Students with solid prior programming experience were taught the ins and outs of MacOS and iOS development and earned a handsome certificate after 30 weeks of study across 3 quarters.

We have had a fantastic response to the program. In our first year we filled two separate sections to capacity. Students completing the program have been overwhelmingly positive in their assessment. Several already have apps in the store or have started career changes based on the knowledge they gained. It has also been a great experience for the instructors to grow our own skills and be able to pass some wisdom on to a new breed of Cocoa developers.

Our certificate program is going for another round again this year. Both Hal and myself are returning to teach the MacOS and Advanced courses respectively. We are also adding two new faces to the instructor team for the iOS-focused class. Luke Adamson is a veteran Cocoa developer, having worked for The Omni Group and his own Cocoa consulting company for years. Luke will be joined by Paul Goracke, who has been programming Apple frameworks since back in the CodeWarrior days. The program is going to be even better this year and I can’t wait to see the student response.

If you are in the Seattle area and want to start your mastery of the Cocoa platforms I recommend you give our program a look. Our downtown Seattle session is now wait-listed, but the Bellevue session that starts in Winter still has spots. You can apply here. Hope I see you in class this Spring!

HTML5 Mobile Web Development

In addition to all this Cocoa learn’n, our very own Jake Carter is teaching a course of his own. HTML5 is the new hotness and Jake is your Jedi Master, ready to guide you in the ways of CSS3 on mobile platforms. I’ve seen some of the cool demos Jake has worked up and I’m sure this class is going to be great. If you are interested in mobile web development you can’t afford not to dive in and attend this FREE course!

Jake’s class is a live, 10-session, online offering through O’Reilly that starts in October. If you can’t make the online sessions, you can purchase a video edition after. Find out all the details and sign up here. Did I mention, it is FREE?

for the RogueSheep Army.

Things are really starting to cook around here lately. We have a variety of new clients discussing fresh projects and long-term partners coming back with some exciting plans for the remainder of this year. We are also fully engaged in work on our own technology platform that is centered around automated publishing. It has been a busy year and I think I can still see January back there not too far down the timeline.

Those of you that know me, know that I hate saying no. Having to turn down excellent opportunities and slowing down work on our internal projects one to many times has finally tipped the balance. We are ready to shepherd in a new engineer in the Seattle office in the very near future. The full details and job application form are available online.

Send us your résumé if you are interested or pass the word on to anyone you know that might be a good fit. I’m really looking forward to seeing a few fresh muzzles around here.

My favorite application for creating web layout and sites has quickly become Panic’s excellent web-editing swiss army knife, Coda. Before Coda I used to really dread any website duties that fell on my shoulders. Now I sail through those tasks with ease and even, dare I say, enjoyment.

Steven Frank, Panic co-founder and Mac programming sage, has recently posted several screencasts for web developers seeking an introduction to Coda. If you haven’t tried Coda yet, these short tutorials will surely excite you into downloading the trial. If you are already tinkering around in the application, you will probably find a few goodies you may not have discovered yet in your personal explorations.