We had a good turnout at the inaugural CocoaHeads meeting in Madison, WI last night (Maurice Cheeks snapped a photo of the event). The general theme was about getting started with Cocoa development on the iPhone. I mentioned some resources for this during the talk, and by request I'd like to list those here.

Once again, I'll be exhibiting SonoPlot's microscale fluid printing systems at an upcoming conference. This time, I'll be at LabAutomation 2009 in Palm Springs, CA. We actually won our exhibit space in the Innovation AveNEW area of the show because we were seen as having interesting new technology. If you're at the show (from January 25 - 27), stop by booth #593A and say hi.

I've been doing a lot of work with Core Animation lately during development of my next iPhone application, and I came across an interesting way to optimize OpenGL ES rendering that I thought I'd share. This small improvement yielded a 14-25% increase in the triangles per second I was able to push in Molecules.

Now that I'm back from the holidays, all immediate issues are taken care of here at work, and iTunes Connect is back up, I've submitted version 1.3.1 of Molecules for review (and updated the source code. This is a bugfix version, addressing the recent crashes when trying to search the Protein Data Bank. The PDB servers stopped responding to one half of the search query I was sending, which was a condition I had not anticipated, and Molecules would crash as a result. Unfortunately, until they fix the server response, the search results will no longer list the titles of molecules.