Mobile and Accessibility

Gian Wild, AccessibilityOz

Gian will be speaking about how to make your mobile sites accessible. WCAG2 was written before mobile devices were ubiquitous, and there are some accessibility issues unique to the mobile format, such as lack of keyboard, lack of mouse hover and reduced screen size. Gian will be talking about the most common problems and how you can avoid them!


Gian WildGian Wild is the Director of AccessibilityOz. She has worked in accessibility industry since 1998. Her major achievements include: the very first Australian accessible web site; the Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games; her six years active membership in the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group; accessibility reviews of public and private web sites; conference and seminar presentations; judging web awards and the development of accessibility toolkits.


 


The Quest for 60FPS: Graphics Optimisation on iOS

Tim Oliver, Lateral Pty Ltd

Creating a very responsive UI is one of the hallmarks of a great app. But with so many generations of iOS devices out there, keeping an app running at 60 frames-per-second across the board can become a real challenge!

This talk covers a range of techniques that can be used to help speed up the responsiveness of you apps, from optimising view layout and draw times in low-latency tactile elements such as scroll views to setting up complex animations in Core Animation. It also covers methods for measuring your apps’ performance in Instruments to locate and weed out bottlenecks. Anything less than 60FPS is unacceptable!


Tim OliverTim has had a burning passion for iOS development since he got his iPhone 3G in 2008.
Currently, he works as a full-time developer of mobile applications for corporate clients at Lateral Pty Ltd in Perth, after spending a year developing in-house iOS software for pixiv Inc in Japan.

In his free time, Tim is also currently working on a comic reader app for iOS called iComics, which was released during /dev/world/ 2012 and has since been downloaded over 50,000 times.


 


You had me at Install

Luke Goodman, Bilue

The first launch of a native app sees users interacting at a deeper level with your product than that of a first visit to the product website. Recognising that native applications operate at a more advanced stage of the product journey creates opportunity to craft experiences that are more efficient at meeting both the user and product goals. This session will cover the some of the easy wins app designers can use to leverage the trust users have in native applications.


Luke GoodmanLuke is a Sydney based interaction designer with a focus on designing cross-platform experiences that are engaging a fun for users. Having the opportunity to design a couple of the countries highest trafficked responsive sites, Luke brings a wealth of knowledge about becoming a invaluable part of a collaborative team.

He currently is a senior Interaction design consultant for Bilue, a mobile specialists agency in Sydney.


 


The App Store Doesn’t Owe You Anything

Peter Wells, Reckoner

Every few days a prominent blogger or developer bemoans the ‘race to the bottom’ in the App Store, and how increasingly rare it is for developers to make money. Well suck it up. The App Store doesn’t owe you a living anymore than iTunes owes indie musicians or podcasters a living. But there are things you can do to be noticed, to break through the App Store noise and get your App on the front page of devices.



Peter WellsThis presentation is from the other side of the App Store. I’m not a developer, I’m a reviewer and customer – I’ve spent over two grand on the damn store. I’ve been sent more App Store press releases than I care to admit, and can tell you then ones that work, and the ones that suck.

Over the last few years I’ve interviewed leading developers including Marco Arment, Loren Brichter, and Karl Von Randow, as well as industry commentators John Gruber and Horace Dediu. I’ve absorbed ideas from people much smarter than me. I was MC at the One More Thing Conference for three years, and chaired a panel on Making money in the App Store at Swipe Conference 2012. I was editor of MacTalk Australia, and currently edit and podcast Reckoner.com.au.


 


App Store Experiment To 2 Million Downloads

Stuart Hall, Bytesize

I will present my App Store Experiment where I built an app in a night and then grew it to 2 million downloads in just over a year.

The talk will cover getting marketing, localisation, the hacker news effect, app store search optimisation and much more.


Stuart HallStuart has been building apps since the early days of the App Store. He is the founder of Appbot, a service used by over 35,000 app developers to help track and get better reviews. Stuart was co-founder of the Discovr apps that achieved over 3.5 million downloads.

You can read Stuart’s blog on mobile development and marketing at http://stuartkhall.com.


 


Mastering Auto Layout

Adam Shaw, Kabuki Vision

With an ever increasing number of device screen sizes and orientations, using Auto Layout in your apps in more important than ever. While the basics are easy to learn, things can get complicated rather quickly in real world use. This session is designed to go beyond the basics, and bring you to the “next level” of practical understanding of Auto Layout.

Topics we’ll cover include:

• The layout process
• Best strategies for defining constraints
• Common pitfalls and how to resolve them
• Using Interface Builder vs code
• Advanced scenarios (animation, scroll views, multi-line labels, etc).



Adam ShawAdam is a veteran developer who has been making apps since the launch of the App Store in 2008. An Apple nerd through and through, he believes that building great iOS apps is pretty much the most awesome job in the world, and he strives to pass this enthusiasm on to others. His company Kabuki Vision has released a number of noteworthy apps over the years such as NoteMaster and Dressed.


 


Quick and Dirty – Prototyping with PhoneGap

Tim Raphael, University of Western Australia

PhoneGap, formerly Apache Cordova, is a framework that combines the agility of web languages such as Javascript and CSS with the power of native mobile device frameworks to enable developers to quickly bring together the elements of an app across many platforms.

In this talk, I will show you how you can leverage jQuery Mobile and CSS to quickly bring together the interface of a web-app and then enhance it with powerful features from native platform frameworks. PhoneGap can be used not only on iOS but can be built and deployed to Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and even Firefox OS!


Tim RaphaelTim is a second year Masters of Software Engineering student at The University of Western Australia. He has a passion for new ideas, clever and innovative technologies and just loves having a hack round with code.


 


The Forgotten Art of Core Animation

Benjamin Taylor, Shiny Things

The proliferation of the iOS platform has brought a flurry of new developers to Cocoa and while Cocoa Touch does a great job of hiding many of its graphical implementation details, digging under the surface can reveal some stunning gems. Core Animation is a graphics rendering and animation infrastructure used by all UIViews that can cater for complex 3D animations, 2D vector graphics and other interesting GPU rendered effects. This talk introduces fundamental concepts of Core Animation in Cocoa Touch and then steps through a series of demonstrations showing ways that it can be used in your apps today.


Ben TaylorBen Taylor is a mobile software developer at Shiny Things, a company making intuitive educational apps and games for kids.


 


Performance as UX

Justin Howlett, Fairfax Media

Performance as UX covers the true cost of a slow app on your users and business. This talk will expose common mistakes and misconceptions by develops of all levels. Justin will also introduce you to the concept of perceptual performance and how you can trick your users into thinking your app is faster than the rest.


Justin HowlettJustin is currently the Mobile lead at Domain.com.au after moving to Australia from Canada to become a surfer in his spare time. Justin has been an iOS developer for 4 years working on apps for top domestic and international brands such as NBC, FOX, Univision, and many others.


 


Improve Your Apps With the Power of SCIENCE!

James White, Curtin University of Technology

Is my game too hard? Does my app have the right defaults? Do I have too much onboarding? What are the best in-app purchases? Should that button be on the left or right?

SCIENCE can help you answer these questions and more. Find out how to:

  • set up a quick and easy backend and custom analytics system to collect exactly the data and feedback you need to answer your burning questions
  • recruit volunteers to test your app and use SNEAKINESS to change the things you’d like to test
  • use the power of SCIENCE to explore how people use your app, and how your development and design decisions can change the way your app is experienced by users

In today’s cut-throat marketplace, your app or game needs every advantage it can get. This session, presented by a man who’s half developer, half designer, and half scientist (yes, that’s right) might just give your app the winning edge.


James WhiteJames is a designeloper from Perth (although, secretly, he’s a kiwi). Four years ago, after fifteen years of graphic design, he Googled “How do you make an app?”, started attending AUC events, and the rest is history.

James is currently completing a PhD in which he is developing and evaluating a nutrition-focussed app. This year he received an Apple student scholarship to attend WWDC.