Author: Judit Klein

Betty SargeantPart of DW15

Storybook apps can contain visuals, text and audio; audio narration commonly ‘reads’ the written text aloud. As a consequence, adults are not required to read storybook apps to children. Yet when adults do read books alongside children it can lead to deeper understandings of narrative content and to positive social bonding. In this talk Betty discusses how she designed her award winning children’s storybook app How Far is Up. She describes the research behind her work and ways in which apps can be designed in order to foster social interaction to occur over shared mobile devices.

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Betty writes, illustrates and designs children’s digital content. Her book app How Far is Up received a 2015 AIMIA finalist award, it was a finalist in the Victorian Premier’s Design Awards (2014), and is under consideration for a Consensus Innovation Award (2015). As an independent developer, Betty is an invited member of the international industry organisations, KidsSafe and Know What’s Inside.

Betty’s app designs have received international recognition for the ways in which they foster adults and children to socially interact over a shared mobile device. She has a number of peer­-reviewed publications as a result of her research in this area. She is a member of the RMIT Centre for Games Research. In her PhD, Betty investigated the design and the social ramifications of children’s storybook apps. She also has a Bachelor of Education and a Bachelor of Arts (Hons. First class).

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Katie McLaughlinPart of DW15

More people contribute to open source software development than we currently know about. Let’s get their work noticed.

We have many ways of reporting and recognising our code contributions in open source projects, but often it is the work we do outside of code commits themselves that get forgotten and unattributed. Hours of code review, documentation, testing; organising of meetups, volunteering at conferences; even just brainstorming and talking about things – how many of these have you done without accreditation?

During this session, we will discuss what it means to contribute to open source projects, what constitutes a non-code contribution, steps we can take to recognise the work of our peers, and how projects can better encourage non-code participation through recognition and acknowledgement.

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Katie is a senior systems engineer, working to automate all the things. She has a history of enterprise software development and Windows system administration, but has been successfully converted to the ways of the penguin in recent years. When she’s not changing the world, she enjoys making tapestries, cooking and yelling at JavaScript and it’s attempts at global variables.

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Sam Ritchie, codesplicePart of DW15

Functional Programming – hipster fad or software saviour? This session will introduce some core functional techniques and show that adopting them in your Swift code is simple, natural, and easy to understand. You’ll also see examples of how applying a more functional approach can solve common problems and annoyances, and result in a smaller and more maintainable codebase.

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Sam has been a software developer for 15 years and an Apple fanboy for nearly 30. He runs his own software consultancy specialising in cloud & mobile development, and organises the Perth iOS Developers meet-up group.

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Tim Oliver – Realm, IncPart of DW15

When it comes to developing apps on iOS, saving data locally to the device is deceptively trickier than it should be. Core Data has a very steep learning curve, and SQLite requires a lot of boilerplate code to become usable. Realm is a new database framework supporting both Objective-­C and Swift, designed to serve as a much easier alternative to Core Data and SQLite. This talk serves as introduction to using Realm – topics include defining object schema, persisting objects to disc, and concurrent access.

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Tim has been an avid fan of iOS since the time of the iPhone 3G, and has been working as a full-­time mobile developer since 2013. Presently, he works remotely for Realm out of Perth, and spends his free time working on iComics, his own personal app project.

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Giovanni Lodi, mokacodingPart of DW15

One of the biggest differences between Swift and Objective­-C is the presence of Optionals. Optionals can help you keep your make your code safer, but they need some house keeping. In this talk we will explore techniques to work with Optionals in a simpler way, leveraging other Swift’s features. We are then going to see how these techniques are actually functional programming concepts, demystifying them.

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Gio is a freelance iOS developer, and blogs about testing and automation at http://mokacoding.com. Before moving to Australia he worked in the London start-up scene. He is always looking for something new to learn, from functional programming, to cosmology and solving the Rubik’s cube. He also is a big Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fan.

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Luke Toop, SportsbetPart of DW15

This talk covers the challenges faced when your app is used by hundreds of thousands of users millions of times per week to broker financial transactions worth around $1 billion dollars per year, and will outline some of the approaches Sportsbet has taken to make, update and maintain an award- winning, 4.5 star-rated application despite what sometimes seem like impossible odds!

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Luke is a passionate software engineer who has been in love with Objective C for 10 years, co-founding a startup which used OS X before the launch of the iPhone. He now works as the iOS Development Resource Manager at Sportsbet, creating fun, fast and productive environments for teams of developers.

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Andrew Dekker, University of QueenslandPart of DW15

This talk presents the setup and architecting process that we follow to create iOS applications. With this process, we can develop the code structure, interaction, navigation and process to get code on-device as quickly as possible. We discusses many aspects of getting this setup, including storyboards, git, API structure and popular libraries. The talk will focus on Swift, and how to move from Objective­-C in your next project. The goal is to create discussion around different approaches to architecting iOS Apps.

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Andrew is a PhD student at the University of Queensland in Computer Science/Interaction Design. Andrew also works as the senior developer for UQx, UQ’s collaboration with edX. Andrew is an interdisciplinary hacker, with degrees in IT, Multimedia Design and Interaction Design.

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Thomas Karpiniec, Asdeq LabsPart of DW15

Whenever you use your phone there are various organisations vying for information—criminals, the government, foreign governments, and companies. In this talk we discuss what it means to have privacy when you carry a tracking device in your pocket, what the threats to that privacy are, and the steps that app and platform developers can take to make a meaningful impact on their users’ security.

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Tom is a developer at Asdeq Labs in Hobart where he spends most of his time in Xcode. He chaired the Policy & Research Committee at Electronic Frontiers Australia last year and co­-organised the first CryptoParty in Hobart. He has two cats and still likes Objective­-C.

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Adam Shaw, Kabuki VisionPart of DW15

Things used to be simple… you had an Xcode project, it contained a target, which built an app. But with the introduction of App Extensions in iOS 8, things have become a lot more complicated with multiple extensions, targets, app IDs, and frameworks. This session covers everything you need to help unravel the complexities of this new world of app architecture.

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Adam 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 strives to pass this on to others. His company Kabuki Vision has released a number of noteworthy apps over the years such as NoteMaster and Dressed. His latest obsession is pushing WatchKit to it’s limits.

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Jeames Bone, Outware MobilePart of DW15

“Functional Reactive Programming (FRP)”. This is the story of a programmer’s journey from being utterly terrified of those three words to riding along side them into daily battle with Xcode and the beast that is Cocoa. FRP can be an amazing tool for creating code that is readable, re-usable and all around less spaghettified. It can be tricky to know where to start, and it’s difficult to fathom the true power of the paradigm even for the most seasoned of functonauts. I hope to show a glimpse of what is possible using ReactiveCocoa in Swift, and explore how FRP can be applied to common problems coding in Cocoa.

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Jeames is a software engineer working on awesome iOS apps at Outware Mobile in Melbourne. His passions are programming and singing, often at the same time.

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