Tonight we held the first meeting of CocoaSIG.

What does it say about a group when even its speaker doesn’t show up? There were only two of us there: myself and one coworker (who I’ll call Ramez, since that’s his name). I thought a few more people would show up, but nobody did.

I brought the pizza; Ramez brought the soda. Neither of us remembered plates or napkins. And needless to say, I not only broke my diet, I annihilated it. I had more pizza tonight than in the last five months combined.

We ended up watching a couple of video podcasts. We watched one of the Stanford videos, followed along with the project, then experimented a bit on our own.

We learned quite a bit about Cocoa. That’s the important thing. And, crazy though it may seem, we’re not giving up. We’re gonna meet again, and I’ll keep everyone posted.

I’m an iPhone user. So are a few of my coworkers, and many of the people we interact with in the .NET development world. I also use Macs as my primary computers.

The success of David Hayden’s Tampa Bay MVC SIG, devoted to learning ASP.NET MVC, has inspired quite a few people on the Twittersphere to discuss starting an Objective-C/Cocoa developer’s group, with an iPhone focus, in a similar vein. One of my coworkers, who I will refer to as “RS”, pointed out that we either need to fish or cut bait, and suggested we start the group ourselves. So we did.

We’re still arranging things. I’m something of a de facto PR person for the group (as I’m the Twitter veteran). Our meeting location is as yet undetermined; we’re in touch with USF Polytechnic regarding the use of their space. We also have no sponsors: this is strictly out-of-pocket for now.

I can’t promise great things yet, but we’re trying to get the ball rolling.

For more information, contact me at benjamingeiger (at) lakeland.cocoasig.org or @benjamingeiger on Twitter.