Beyond Build and Run

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.


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!



Let’s Make A Game Right This Second

Jonathon Manning, University of Tasmania

Ok. Here’s the thing. You and I? We’re going to make an entire game in an hour. Let’s do it.

iOS makes it CRAZY EASY to make awesome stuff, and we’re going to talk about some of the especially cool technologies and features that are especially useful in cranking out Truly Sweet Video Games. We’re talking OpenGL, AVFoundation, and more.

Along the way, you’re going to hear about how to rapidly prototype a concept, get it running and playable, and how to craft a game that you can build upon and make even more fun.

This is going to be so rad, you guys.


Jon is the co-founder of Secret Lab, which makes iPhone and iPad games. He’s also the author of iPhone and iPad Game Development for Dummies (Wiley), Learning Cocoa with Objective-C (O’Reilly), and the upcoming iOS Game Development Cookbook (O’Reilly).



Designing for iOS 7

Paris Buttfield-Addison, University of Tasmania

This session will take a whirlwind tour of the new visual design of iOS 7, discussing how, why, and where developers and designers should update their apps (and build new apps). The session will cover everything you need to get started designing and building for iOS 7 from a design and user experience perspective.

Attendees will:

  • come away with an understanding of what’s changed, and why it changed
  • explore the design language and iconography of iOS 7
  • learn and re-learn he components of iOS (7)
  • learn how to bring their iOS 6 (and earlier) apps to iOS 7 from a design perspective

This session will be entirely programming-free.


Paris is co-founder of Secret Lab Pty. Ltd., leading production and design efforts in the mobile game and app development space. A frequent speaker at conferences, workshops and training sessions, Paris enjoys discussing engineering, product development, design and other facets of the mobile and game development worlds.

Recent conferences include Apple Australia’s /dev/world/2012 in Melbourne (and 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011), a keynote at CreateWorld Brisbane 2010 (and a speaker in 2009, 2011, and 2012), IxDA’s Interaction 11 in Boulder (March 2011), XMediaLab Location-Based Services in Malmo, Sweden (January 2011), tutorials and sessions at OSCON 2011, OSCON 2012, OSCON 2013, and presentations at linux.conf.au, and many others.

Paris is the co-author of the books ‘iPhone and iPad Game Development For Dummies’ and ‘Unity Mobile Game Development For Dummies’. The books cover game development on mobile platforms such as the iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad and Android devices in languages/frameworks such as Objective-C, CocoaTouch, Open GL ES, Unity, C# and JavaScript. They also cover game design techniques, principles and patterns. Recently, Paris released ‘Learning Cocoa with Objective-C Third Edition’ for O’Reilly, covering iPhone and Mac development. Paris is currently working on the ‘iOS Game Development Cookbook’ with O’Reilly.

Paris is a highly experienced software developer, product and project manager. Key experiences include Objective-C/Cocoa on the Macintosh and iPhone/iPod Touch and iPad platforms, Java on Blackberry and Google Android and C# on Windows Mobile. Open GL ES and Unity are also favourites.

Paris recently spent 2 years leading Meebo Inc.’s mobile strategy; Meebo was one of the world’s fastest growing consumer internet companies and was acquired by Google in 2012. Paris is currently working on his next book, also with O’Reilly, whilst working towards the completion of his PhD in Human-Computer Interaction, focusing on the iPad (at the University of Tasmania)..



Oculus: A “Handy” Little App for Visualizing and Exploring Graphs

Mustafa Youldash, La Trobe University

This session delivers:

  • A brief overview to the project and its long-goal objectives.
  • An understanding of graphs, and show how their inner-workings (Nodes, Edges, …) form the building blocks of the project.
  • An introduction to both the Open Graphics Library for Embedded Systems (OpenGL ES) and GLKit frameworks, and how such powerful Application Programming Interferes (APIs) are used to draw graph elements with ease.
  • A quick commentary on CHCSVParser, and how it is leveraged for parsing (importing and exporting) graph data in CSV format (comma separated values).
  • Future plans and current challenges facing Oculus.
  • Qs and As.

This session assumes:

  • You have at least a descent understanding of basic iOS development principles.
  • You know a thing or two about the OpenGL API in general. If you have no previous experience with it, don’t worry!
  • You still remember your maths from high school. Examples + code snippets for basic vector and matrix manipulation will be covered.

Mustafa is with the Department of Computer Science and Computer Engineering, School of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences, La Trobe University, Bundoora (Melbourne). He is pursuing his candidature for a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the department, and has also worked as a supervisor for 3rd Year Industry Projects, in addition to running iOS developer labs for Advanced System Design, and Twitter Bootstrap hands-on labs for Internet Client Engineering.

Mustafa joined the Department of Computer Science, College of Computer and Information Systems, Umm Al-Qura University, Mecca, Saudi Arabia, in 2004 as a lecturer to a number of subjects such as Computer Organization and the Assembly Language, Data Structures and Algorithms, Computing Applications, Introduction to Computer Science, and other Foundation Study subjects.

Mustafa worked as a volunteer technology officer for the Saudi Student Association of Melbourne (2009 – 2012), and recently published the Association’s official iPhone app. At present, he is working alongside the Saudi Arabian Cultural Mission in Canberra to develop their official app for both iOS and Android.


  137.9 MB

 

 


Leveraging Web Developer Experience for iOS Development

Richard Deveraux, Charles Darwin University

This talk delves deeper into some of the concepts covered in the 2012 CreateWorld talk Web Development for Programming ‘Dummies’ including new workflows and technologies that I have been exploring with a focus on how it can be used to make apps through Phonegap. It will detail the process from compiling, to testing and publishing to the App Store. Using the Bootstrap framework as a base, attendees will also learn how to make reusable UI components using a combination of JavaScript (jQuery) and CSS3/less for use in responsive web applications that require little to no effort to implement. It is recommended that attendees have some experience developing for the web to get the most from this talk.


Richard has been coding since high school with multiple programming languages at his disposal including Flash/Actionscript 3, Java, PHP, HTML/CSS and Javascript. He currently works as a professional web developer & designer while working towards publishing his own games on multiple platforms including iOS and Android.



Saving the World with Giant Robots and CoreMotion

Josh Deprez, University of Tasmania

Exoskeleton, Inc. is threatening to end the world with a space rocket, a giant crab robot, an international conspiracy, and a shipment of Androids. You, on the other hand, have an iPhone or iPad, the island of Tanegashima, a team of JAXA engineers, and plans for a giant robot of your own. How do you rescue the world from the bone-crunching jaws of certain doom? This talk will be about using the Core Motion Framework, part of the iOS SDK. I will describe the available interfaces to Core Motion, and then get hands-on with the code of an app using the inbuilt accelerometer, magnetometer, gyroscope and combined device-motion data to control a “giant robot” (*robot may be virtual)


Josh is an A-grade nutcase studying a PhD in mathematics iat UTas – it’s this close (holds up hands) to submission, yet he insists on submitting a talk to /dev/world. He has interned at Google, programmed iOS apps with Secret Lab, and knows too much about enterprise application integration from his time with Federal Group.



App in a week with Flask and JSONKit

William Russell, University of Adelaide

This presentation covers the implementation of both a native iOS/OS X app and a Python Flask API that can be rapidly deployed with minimal development time whilst maintaining the ability to horizontally scale.

The final application utilises the JSONKit, SVHTTPRequest and MGBox libraries on the iOS layer, a custom-built JSON API with Flask (Python) and the subsequent deployment via Gunicorn/Nginx that has the ability to scale to thousands of requests per second.


Will has been an iOS/OS X programmer and web application developer (Python, Go, PHP) at Whois® for the last four years. He has worked on projects that have been able to scale to hundreds of thousands of requests a day on commodity hardware.



Ten Attributes of Great Technologies Designers Need to Consider

Les Posen, PresentationMagic

What makes for a great technology? How is that some technologies make it and others don’t, while still others become co-opted for uses other than the original intent of the designer/innovator?

Les Posen is a clinical psychologist who has been using Apple technologies since 1988 to improve his work, that of his patients’ lives, and that of his colleagues to help them better manage their digital workflows. He’s the President of an Apple MUG in Melbourne, and blogs regularly about presentation skills using Apple’s Keynote.

His ideas on what makes for great technologies has been published by the Australian Psychological Society and the American Psychological Society.

This talk will move fast, so seatbelts are advised!



Dual Screen Apps in iOS

Judit Klein, Auckland University of Technology

If you’ve used apps such as Keynote, Real Racing II, Ducati Challenge HD or Zombie Gunship, you’ll notice that they take advantage of a secondary display to show secondary content. Utilising a secondary display in combination with the inbuilt hardware of the iPhone or iPad can create an immersive and engaging experience for your users in gaming, media and education contexts.

However, you’ll find that there is opportunity here where there is a lack of apps which utilise this capability. The default behaviour of any app when connected to a secondary display, either through AirPlay or wired connection, is to mirror exactly what’s on the screen.

This session covers how to build apps which externalise content beyond the device; by understanding Windows and Screens in iOS, learn how to detect if a secondary display is connected and how to handle where to show content.

The session also highlights the bigger picture around how this can be effectively implemented within different contexts, thinking differently about the interaction such an app would enable, creating an interplay between devices, content, screens and spaces.


Judit is a student at AUT University, integrating iOS development as a core component of her research for the Master of Creative Technologies degree.

She also works at the Centre for Learning and Teaching at AUT as a Learning and Teaching Technology Enabler (or, LATTE), assisting in the professional development of staff with specific focus on technical literacy and iPads in teaching, research and education.


 


Flushing crAPI libs

Tim Nugent, University of Tasmania

A large number of iOS apps are designed to be a nice interface to a large and complex backend and the means to creating theses apps is the API. Unfortunately it seems that most people can’t make a good API if their lives depends on it, and as the developer you are left in a nightmarish marsh of poorly structured data and confusing method calls.

To make matters worse the built in iOS tools for handling APIs only make the situation worse.

This talk covers using third party libraries AFNetworking, GCDAsyncSocket and RaptureXML to make easily getting the data you need into your app so you can focus on making it great.


Tim has been working on his PhD on mobile awareness at University of Tasmania for way too long and in his spare time writes iOS apps to pay the bills. He likes to pretend he is a giant eel in human form and wastes way too much time designing games no one will ever get to play.