Author: aucadmin

Tim Raphael, University of Western Australia

The whole idea of having mobile devices is to keep people connected when ever, where ever they happen to be. Apple provides some fantastic frameworks for getting your app talking to other devices and other people. In this session, I’ll show you how you can add this exciting element to your app to allow people to communicate like never before.

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Tim is a Masters student at UWA currently completing a Masters of Software Engineering. He has a great passion for iOS development and more specifically how mobile devices can aid communication.

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Justin Marrington, University of Queensland

Meteor is a pretty fantastic modern JavaScript framework, but we can have a little slice of Meteor and make much more dynamic web-data driven UIs in our iOS apps by taking advantage of the Distributed Data Protocol that drives Meteor.

DDP is a reactive alternative to traditional REST-based web services that binds web data to your user interface elements via Pub/Sub messaging. This session introduces DDP as a REST-alternative, and walks through using ObjectiveDDP, the iOS implementation of the protocol, to build a simple app with a fully reactive UI.

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Justin studied and worked as an RA in the University of Queensland’s small but fanatic Interaction Design program. He loves iOS and the open web, and is always looking for ways to finally being these two worlds closer together. Justin is currently building high tech law enforcement software, but most of his spare time is spent on his one true love: making iOS apps and complaining about bugs in the developer betas.

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Sebastian Beswick, Art Processors

Memory management is a crucial part of app development. Apple moved a large part of this burden from the developer to the compiler with the introduction of ARC (automatic reference counting), but a solid understanding of memory management is still a key tool in every developers belt. This talk looks at using Instruments to diagnose memory issues in apps, common gotchas to be avoided, and how ARC simplifies many of these problems.

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Sebastian is an iOS developer at Art Processors. He graduated with honours in computing at the University of Tasmania in 2012, researching ways of using artificial intelligence techniques to vastly improve the availability of sound synthesisers for musicians. Sebastian spoke on computer audio, sound synthesis, and computer music at /dev/world/2012 and Create World 2012 after receiving AUC and Apple scholarships to attend WWDC 2012.

Art Processors are a Melbourne based startup that provide innovative mobile content delivery solutions for museums and tourist sites. Their groundbreaking location aware tour guide app “The O” has allowed over 900,000 visitors to the MONA museum in Hobart access to a plethora of historical and interpretive information about nearby works, while allowing artists and curators the freedom to display their works without constraint.

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Tim Wray, University of Wollongong

A Place for Art is an iPad app that allows users to explore and create pathways through the University of Wollongong’s Art Collection. As both an experimental interface and a companion piece to the print publication of the same name, the app demonstrates a rich and unique user experience with one goal in mind: to empower discovery, exploration and serendipity within collections of fine art.

This talk covers the context, rationale and philosophy of the app’s unique interaction design. By taking full advantage of the iPad’s gesture-based affordances, I describe some of the approaches and challenges we faced in its implementation. I also present an overview of the some of the other projects that showcase ideas of serendipity, discovery and play within cultural data using exploratory interaction design and data visualisation approaches.

This talk is aimed at those who seek inspiration in new ways of presenting data-driven or apps, discuss ideas on how we can craft amazing user experiences for presenting rich content, or perhaps see the beauty and amazing experiences that can be created from (re)-mixing data and presenting it in new ways.

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Tim Wray is a PhD candidate at the University of Wollongong that looks at how computational methods and new interaction design approaches can be used to create beautiful, engaging experiences for museum collections.

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Nic Wittison

Users are terrible at using apps. They make mistakes, press the wrong buttons and touch everything in the wrong order. The interesting challenge for developers is making sure users don’t notice how terrible they are by crafting resilient, intuitive and non-offensive app experiences.

This talk gives you a run down of why User Experience Design should matter to your project and why it’s important to think about it BEFORE you open Xcode.

It covers the basics of User Centred Design and User Testing as well as highlights some of the common usability traps people fall in to when developing apps. By the end of the talk you should have an understanding on how to approach the creation of new interfaces and how to iterate and design Hyooman proof apps.

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Nic has an Honours Degree from UTAS in Human Computer Interaction and has been developing iOS apps for the last three and a half years. He has several qualifications including but not limited to: emails, sending emails, receiving emails, deleting emails, the web, using mice, clicking, double clicking, the computer screen of course, keyboard and the bit that goes on the floor.

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Helen McManus, University of Southern Queensland

On a daily basis we all hit cmd-R to compile and run our latest creation. For such a frequently performed action, we rarely give any thought as to what is going on behind the scenes and how we can influence it to our advantage; especially when attempting to debug problems.

The purpose of this talk is to provide an introduction to features present in the preprocessor and Xcode itself that allow us to manipulate how the compiler is called and the options passed to it. This in turn can be used to affect the output provided by our programmes once running.

See how preprocessor macros, Xcode’s schemas and other techniques can be used to provide you with a richer environment in which to work.

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Helen has been programming since before she could even spell ‘polymorphism’. She was first introduced to Objective-C while studying through an AUC workshop.

Since those giddy days of university, she has moved to the Netherlands and now works as (but not limited to) an iOS programmer!

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