Tonite was the first edition of iPhoneDevCamp, organized by Sylvain Carle from Praized Media and hosted at Station C.

For a first edition I didn’t expect that many people. We were about 40 and for the most, iPhone developers having done real projects. An high quality audience.

The camp was divided in two parts; a session of talks and a session of open discussions around various topics.

Vincent Verville from TEKiTO Software gave a talk about the challenges of creating an iPhone apps and managing the project, especially for a client work.

Really interesting talk. He insisted on the up-front design of the app with the client, recommended to assume nothing on the technology and to test your app on all devices (e.g., the whole serie of iPhone, iPod Touch and various firmwares).

Martin Dufort from WhereCloud gave a quick report of the iPhone Tech Talk he attented in Toronto last december. It seems it was an awesome place to be, lots of evangelists and experts from Apple were there.

Apple truly recommend you spend 40% of your development time on the design aspects of your app and that the UI and graphic design should be done at the same time. Generally, we often see this phase at the end of the development.

Martin told us the Apple team there was really great and helpful. They encourage developers to share their experience and are open to all kind of comments.

Very few people know but Apple propose a service to developers for helping to tune your app. When you’re ready to release it, you can take an appointment with an UI expert for a free iChat session. It’s really cool and I’ve never seen that with any other mobile company.

Later on, Sylvain Carle talked about their experience of outsourcing the development of their soon-to-be-release iPhone app with Martin Gagnon from Mirego.

Martin talked about a little iPhone app for “nano-bloggers” called LiveSnap — you take a picture, write a word and share it with the other LiveSnappers. The folks at Mirego did it on their spare time but in the end became so addicted to the app, they decided to release it soon on the App Store.

The last talk was about business. Can a developer make a living by selling iPhone apps. Jean-Pierre Martineau, an independent developer and one of the first of having access to the App Store, released a couple of successful apps.

Even if his apps do make some revenues, it’s more a second stream. But now, Jean-Pierre makes a living by developing iPhone apps for clients. He believes however it is possible to live from your apps even tough he hasn’t found yet the right way to do it.

After these talks, like all camps, we went through an session of open discussions. By the number of people tonite, lots of developers (even not in the mobile industry before) are jumping on the iPhone bandwagon but also a lot of businesses who wants to add an iPhone app to their portfolio. It’s a lot of opportunities.

However, the message was clear: designing and building an iPhone app is not easy as it sounds and has a lot of challenge, especially when you’re not used to write native embedded applications. Doing fixed-layout design, Objective-C, memory management, debugging and long release cycles requires a lot of expertise to execute properly.

That said, iPhoneDevCamp Montreal was really a success. The ambiance and the people were great. It was good to see everybody. Thank you again for the event, it was a lot of fun.

As Sylvain said, will the next one be a MobileDevCamp, also talking about other platforms? I don’t know, but from what I heard tonite, developers wants the iPhone. Period.