Author: aucadmin

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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Adam Debono, University of Wollongong

Open source software is more popular than you may think. Many major software companies either use and/or contribute to OSS, including the likes of Apple, Microsoft and Google. Using open source components or software is a great way to save time and money across development when it’s done right, and contributing enables hundreds and thousands of developers to collaborate on a single, amazing project (take Linux for example).

This talk covers the what, how and why of open source software. It includes topics including using OSS, creating your own, licensing and contributing. The talk will encompass the use of OSS in multiple environments and languages, not just iOS (but it’s not required to know them all).

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Adam is an iOS and web developer with roughly 4 years of software development experience beginning in high school. He has worked on many projects for companies including iQMultimedia and Joindup, and currently works for Cast-Control, all located in Wollongong, NSW. Adam has 2 of his own apps on the App Store, and various open source utilities hosted on Github. He will finish his bachelor of Computer Science at the University of Wollongong in 2014.

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Thomas Verbeek, University of Otago & Sideline Junkies Limited

How much value does the AUC really provide its attendees? Enough value for a partnership with New Zealand All Blacks Ma’a Nonu, Tamati Ellison and Kees Meeuws, apparently. Past AUC Student Developer Scholarship recipient and presenter Thomas Verbeek talks about co-founding Sideline Junkies Limited, a NZ sports company that’s changing the way you keep up with local sport. This talk demonstrates what AUC delegates can achieve with the exposure and skills acquired from AUC events. Thomas discusses his involvement with the AUC, starting a company with All Blacks, the iOS technology involved to make their flagship app “Waterboy”, and the exciting road ahead.

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Thomas is a Masters Student in Computer Science at the University of Otago, specialising in computer graphics. He is the recipient of the AUC Student Developer Scholarship of 2010-11. He’s previously worked for Areo, a photorealistic computer graphics company in Dunedin, New Zealand. He’s currently cofounder and lead app developer of Sideline Junkies Limited, a New Zealand and US based sports company.

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Christopher Neugebauer

The conventional wisdom on producing applications that run on both iOS and Android says that to make the best possible experience for both platforms, you’ll need to write a completely separate application for each platform.

The conventional wisdom, of course, thinks that the only important task in mobile applications is to make a pretty UI. This ignores all the hard work that goes into writing application logic. With a bit of up-front design work, it’s possible to get your important application logic running on multiple operating systems.

This talk looks at separating application logic and UI from two separate angles. First, it re-introduces the concepts of Web APIs from the point of view of separation of concerns. Then we’ll look at approaches to building portable core code that runs on multiple systems, and ways to design your apps to take advantage of this — we’ll look at approaches using compiled code (probably using C++) and interpreted & embedded code (probably using Python).

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Christopher is a Python programmer from Hobart, Tasmania. He’s a Computer Science Honours graduate of the University of Tasmania, and he now works as an Android developer at Asdeq Labs. Working with Android means that his day job involves more Java than he’d like. He has a strong interest in the development of the Australian Python Community — he is an immediate past convenor of PyCon Australia 2012 and 2013 in Hobart, and is a newly-minted member of the Python Software Foundation.

In his spare time, Christopher enjoys presenting on Mobile development at Open Source conferences, and presenting on Open Source development at Mobile conferences.

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