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Speakers
We have an outstanding group of speakers for this year’s event! Details are being progressively listed below – skip ahead to the section(s) you’re interested in:
Development Track
Josh Deprez
Thundering Herds of iPhones
Does your app talk to the Internet or over a network? Do you want your app to be downloaded and installed a lot? Do you want to be popular, good-looking, rich, and have people shout you drinks? Yes?
Well good news – this talk is for you!
Things you will learn in this talk:
- How to make seemingly benign choices that lead to outages and disasters
- How to crush your servers and network links under excessive client-generated load
- Why you should fail to prepare for unexpected load, and what you shouldn’t do about it
- Things to forget when designing both sides of a client-server interaction
- How to lose friends, money, and user trust
Tim Oliver
Running an App on the App Store for 8 Years
On the first morning of /dev/world/2012, iComics v1.0, a DRM-free comic reader was released to the App Store.
8 years later, the app is still on the App Store, and continually ranks in the top paid Entertainment apps category on a weekly basis.
This talk is a reflection on the lessons learned on maintaining an app on the App Store for nearly a decade. This includes how the platforms and technology have evolved over the years, common pitfalls, and tips for upcoming developers looking to do the same.
Nicole Ronald and Ed Greenaway
Building the Next Generation of App Developers
This presentation describes how a 12-week university subject aimed at postgraduates was designed to introduce Swift, iOS frameworks and kits, XCode and GitHub tools. The unit has been running for around 8 years, starting out as an elective using Objective-C, and now as a core unit for certain students (some without their own Mac!) and using Swift.
A key aspect of the course has been to instil an interest in the communities for Swift in particular iOS, and to foster ongoing flexible learning practices. 
Practices and considerations such as target market needs and demographics, mobile solution challenges and opportunities, business testing, UI testing, performance testing, and data integration have been successfully addressed. Like app developers, we are also faced with the challenge of changes to the framework each year, and we will address how this is incorporated into our teaching materials and style.
The results have been gratifying with students pitching to designing and build their own apps, taking on all the designer, builder and leader roles needed on app development projects. Contributions to the Swift community being made on Medium, and also experimented with vlogs and podcasts. Some of our graduates now work as iOS developers, and some have discovered new software development practices and the importance of developer communities.
Jimmy Ti
Flutter Jumping from iOS to Android
Flutter is Google’s UI toolkit for building cross-platform native apps. It allows developers to build performant apps while using a declarative and reactive UI programming model, similar to Apple’s SwiftUI.
It is challenging for we iOS developers to create Android apps. Learning about Android’s system frameworks, understanding the system convention, creating UI layouts that works on all sorts of Android devices, the list goes on and on. Can Flutter help us to develop better Android apps? How do we transfer our iOS development skills to Android via Flutter? How can we leverage the similarity between SwiftUI’s and Flutter’s UI programming model to create beautiful and adaptive UIs on Android?
This session provides an introduction to the Flutter toolkit, tips and tricks based on the experience of porting an existing iOS app to Android, and demonstrations on some of the new development workflows made possible by various features of the Flutter toolkit.
Malin Sundberg
Living on the Edge: Bringing a SwiftUI macOS App to iOS
SwiftUI is an exciting new UI framework for all of Apple’s platforms. This talk is about the journey of building a macOS app, using primarily SwiftUI, and the experience of, and learnings from, bringing this macOS app to iOS and iPadOS.
This talk also runs through some ways of structuring an app and a codebase to make its SwiftUI components reusable for multiple Apple platforms, some pitfalls to be aware of, and some tips and tricks that can be handy when building an app using SwiftUI.
Louis Cremen
Dev Sec Oops
Join Louis (@proxyblue) on a journey into security, why it matters and how deep the rabbit hole really goes.
The gap between developers and security is beginning to close as frameworks, tools and automation help developers provide assurance from development teams to security teams. However, security’s reach into the organisation is becoming more structured and integrating into nearly all aspects of business – what is a developer’s role in this ever changing structure? How can we evolve and keep pace with the changes our organisation, or other organisations require?
James White
From Skeuo to Neuo: What Should our Apps Look Like Next?
Designers tend to get bored every five years or so. It happened in the early to mid 2010s, when they got tired of fiddling with shadows and textures in Photoshop, and made us start using the word “flat”. Skeuomorphism became a naughty word, and the metaphorical app recycling bin filled up with green felt, Corinthian leather, brushed metal, wood textures, and even some seemingly useful things, like button outlines.
Now it’s 2020 and, presumably bored from being stuck at home, designers are starting to rummage through that same bin, pull out some of those things, and try them on for size. Someone even coined the term “neumorphism” to describe these new trends towards flat depth, or deep flatness, or something.
In this session, James White, designeloper amd long-time /dev/world attendee, will take a brisk walk through recent mobile design trends and attempt to dodge the question, “what should our apps look like next?”
Device Management Track
Katie English, Jamf
Jamf Pro: Feature Review & Feature Requests
A highlight reel of the new things we’ve brought to Jamf Pro in the past year, and some hints about how to tell us about the things you’d like to see next.
Andrina Kelly, Jamf
2020: The Year of Data
We’ve all spent a lot of time taking a look at a wide variety of charts and graphs this year, trying to understand what the data means to us, how does it impact us, and what should we be doing based on what we’ve learnt from that data. We’ll take a look at data, what makes it useful, and how we can make data work for us in a way that gives us insights.
Matthias Wollnik, Jamf
The Evolution of Endpoint Security on Macs
Matthias has been spent more than 15 years in product organizations dedicated to Security of users, devices, and data. He came to Jamf from a product roles at Code42 and CrowdStrike. Prior to that, Matthias drove a variety of security and storage technologies at Microsoft in their Windows and Windows Server divisions. At Jamf he continues to champion security professionals and the challenges they face as part of the Product Management team.
Paul Bowden
Deploying Office vNext on Apple Silicon
Paul will talk about the very latest advances and best practices for deploying and managing Microsoft Office for Mac. We’ll see a lot of changes over the next 12 months including Big Sur, Apple Silicon, and a new generation of Office licenses. Get on the inside track by understanding how Microsoft engineering prepares for these changes, and what knowledge IT admins need to hit the ground running.
Bart Reardon
JamJar – An Adventure in Patch Management
Jamf. Patch. Management.
There are many ways to skin a cat. Seasoned Mac admins that grew up on a diet of munki might be bewildered with the apparent complexity that Jamf’s native patch management provides and yearn for the simplicity of just uploading a new application package and have it be installed on systems that need it.
Well you can have your cake and eat it too with JamJar.
In this presentation I’ll go over my own implementation, the decisions made, the setup, the pro’ and cons and if there’s enough time a cautionary tale.
Tony Williams
“I’ll Die Without Admin Rights”
“I’ll die without admin rights” – handling developers in a highly secure environment.
This presentation will cover aspects of how to manage the expectations and requirements of users with a habit of reaching for ‘sudo’ to solve every problem when security requires a “no”.
Richard Gynes
10 Mistakes to avoid in Apple Business/School Manager
10 common errors or misunderstandings and their mitigations will be explained, two of which could loose your organisation’s ability to use your Apple School Manager or Apple Business Manager (AxM).
AxM is a necessity in Apple device management. If you are bulk purchasing apps, supervising Macs or managing Activation lock on Macs, iPadOS & iOS then AxM is required. Many management options are only available to devices enrolled in Apple School Manager.
Mat X
Inspired by DevOps
We are IT, we are in silos, we are all imposters. Liberate your minds! DevOps is a cultural revolution that will set you free. How can DevOps transform your IT life? By building better teams, by emphasizing communication, and by allowing us to empathise with developers. Let’s break the cycle where devs write code and then just hand it to IT to look after. Get involved and build better teams where we all work together on shared goals. I will walk you through the basics of DevOps and share the love of finding a better saner way to do IT, happy people building better things.
Inspired by the book “DevOps for Dummies” by Emily Freeman. “In a perfect DevOps culture, [IT] engineers will embrace what they can teach and openly receive what they need to learn.”
Damian Cavanagh
The iPadmin
Is it possible to be an effective Apple Admin from an iPad?
Damian will present his experiences managing both Macs and iPads in a K-12 educational environment, including:
- Initial configuration of Jamf School *entirely* on an iPad Pro
- iPadOS’s impact on iPad’s usability for admins generally, and in particular the suitability of Safari for accessing admin-related web services/consoles
- The increasing utility of Shortcuts designed for users and admins alike
- Apps, tools and other resources used
Stu McDonald
Hackuum your Vacuum
Having a robot vacuum your home sounds great, but what if the device is reporting your SSID & credentials, router MAC address and RSS value every 30 minutes? And the Lidar maps of your house. That’s… less great. Also, the app from the vendor sucks. Let’s fix both issues by hacking this linux-based vacuum! I’ll talk through the process of obtaining a key from the iOS app, wirelessly rooting the robot vacuum and loading custom firmware so it can integrate with a smart home, automate cleaning, and stop snitching on you.
Creative Track
Adam Saltsman
Creative Production for Remote Studios
We all make assumptions to fill in gaps in our knowledge, but those assumptions can sometimes lead to serious misunderstandings. Working remotely tends to introduce more gaps, and thus more assumptions. Operating as a remote studio for the last 14 years has given us many opportunities to make mistakes, to adapt, and to develop new approaches to the way we communicate as a group to help mitigate these gaps and assumptions.
In this talk I will share how we use mockups and a pros-and-cons discussion to help make abstract (lots of gaps) design conversations into something concrete (fewer gaps). I will also talk about a magic phrase we use to ensure that individuals responsible for the labor of any given task get to present their progress without being inadvertently put in a position where they first have to defend their progress, present our process for presenting half-done plans, review what tools we use (and more importantly, why we use them), and talk a little bit about weekly check-ins, peer check-ins, studio-level feedback, and other anti-gap measures.
Brodan Goepel
Portable VR Systems Changing the Interior Design Industry
Brodan will talk about utilising the Oculus Quest virtual reality headset to make changes in real time to interior environments, as well as the benefits a portable system brings to the interior design industry through the design process.
Peter Wells
Podcasting in 2020
Years ago I created a podcast live on stage (including creating the RSS feed, recording an episode) for CreateWorld. A lot has changed since then – and I’ve spent the last few months testing the best way to podcast on a Mac.
Nick Moore
Journey Onward: the Apple ][ and Me
In the mid 80s, Dad brought home an Apple ][. This wasn’t the *first* computer in the house, but it was the first computer which came with *software*, in the form of a dusty shoebox full of floppy disks.
This is the story of how that machine, and its extraordinary design, came to steer my career into software (from which I’ve never fully escaped) and how it still informs my understanding and attitudes towards technology to this day.
A light-hearted talk with lots of examples from Apple ][ games, but also talking about how some of these lessons still apply to hardware and software development.
Iain Anderson
The Past, Present and Future of Learning
Is there a future for university learning now that everyone just googles for answers and finds them on YouTube? How can people attend training or conferences safely, and what are we missing by not being there? Can schools actually learn to deliver remote content well? Will augmented reality help? And are books truly dead?
This talk explores how technology and circumstance are changing in-person teaching, classroom teaching, books, online classes and other forms of learning. It’s all about education: how it was, how it is, and how it could be. Some musing, and and some tips and tricks from the trenches.
Damian Cavanagh
DIY AR on iPad
Create simple, shareable Augmented Reality experiences with your iPad using free apps and zero coding.
Using Apple’s Reality Composer, Keynote and Shortcuts apps, learn how to create your own AR scenes for a variety of purposes – virtual signage, interactive photos, device-based scavenger hunts and more.
This presentation is intended for educators looking to apply AR in the classroom, or anyone interested in exploring AR before it really hits the big time!
Andrew Brown
Making Interactive Audio on your Mobile Device
In times of isolation many people have turned to creative hobbies to occupy their time and stimulate their mind. Such activities include playing the guitar or learning to code. In this presentation we look at how to combine music and coding to produce simple but fun interactive audio apps on your mobile devices, such as the iPhone or iPad, using free development tools.
Mobile computing devices lend themselves to interactive audio, they already contain, microphones, speakers, and motion sensors. The Mobile Music Platform app (MobMuPlat) enables anyone to turn their device into an interactive instrument by connecting the device hardware to bespoke audio software. That software can be coded in the visual programming environment Pure Data which enables sound synthesis, playback and manipulation or recorded audio, and sequencing and timing of audio events. All this along with a graphical user interface toolkit for control and interaction.
The presentation will provide an overview of the creative process to get from scratch to musical instrument using these tools and show examples of the presenter’s creative uses of the platform for applications ranging from novelty tasks to professional music performance.
Papers
Pamela See
Comparing Rapid Tooling Applications for Desktop 3D Printing in Cast Metal Sculpture
Rapid tooling is an application of 3D printing that has been adopted in fine art foundries for investment casting in countries like Australia, China and the United States of America (US). This increased distribution has grown largely unobserved by the museum and gallery sector. This reflects the aesthetic results of the digital intervention being difficult to distinguish from its analog counterpart. This paper was designed to address the growing ubiquity of the technology and the disproportionate number of visual arts practitioners developing the expertise to use it. Through a series of tests undertaken at the Queensland College of Art (QCA), Griffith University, a variety of methods of rapid tooling using desktop 3D printers were examined including: fuse deposition modelling (FDM) wax filament, FDM polylactic acid (PLA), stereolithography (SLA) castable wax resin, and SLA tough resin. They were compared in relation to detail, time use and material cost.
David Chechelashvili
In Defense of Isolation: An Account of Solitary Creative Practice
The purpose of this paper is to propose an alternative perspective on the meaning of isolation and solitude in the context of creative endeavour. This perspective emerges from my own creative practice as a musician primarily engaged with a modular synthesizer. While much has been written on the negative implications of loneliness and isolation, discussions about its positive aspects are not as plentiful in the literature. Creative collaboration is commonplace in modern music-making, but working alone is also valued by many of its practitioners who hold creative autonomy in high regard. Furthermore, the efforts to contain the current global coronavirus pandemic have forced many creative practitioners into forced isolation which makes this discussion timely. My aim is to demonstrate ways in which isolation can be beneficial to creativity and the way in which it re-articulates authorial integrity.
Ben Rayment, Reza Ryan
A Soccer Game Simulation using Reinforcement Learning Algorithms
In recent years, video games have become the most popular forms of entertainment around the world. This popularity increase comes with a demand from consumers for reliable and high-quality learning algorithms. One of the applications of this algorithms is a soccer simulation game. This research focuses on investigating how Reinforcement Learning algorithms can apply on soccer game simulation to improve the efficiency. Furthermore, this research comparing efficiency of three algorithms including PPO, SAC and Self Play. Also, this research is looking at increasing the number of players in the game to evaluate the performance. The result confirm that Self Play out performed the other algorithm with the striker, mid-fielder, defender, and goalie.
Riley Sheehan, Samuel Canning, Dale Patterson
Wheelchair Design And Social Experiences of Wheelchair Users: A Thematic Review of Literature
It was the purpose of this thematic review to review the academic literature from the last 10 years surrounding the design and functionality of wheelchairs and the social experience of wheelchair users across both manual and electric wheelchairs. Within this review, the findings of 45 journal articles categorised into two categories are reported and discussed across six subcategories: wheelchairs and social experiences; wheelchairs and social participation; wheelchairs and accessibility; wheelchairs and social perception; wheelchair design; and wheelchair accessories. Three recommendations for future research directions are provided. The first recommendation is implementing recommended improvements to the social experiences of wheelchair users present within the selected articles. The second recommendation is documenting the social impacts of new design of wheelchairs and accessories on wheelchair users. The third and final recommendation is wheelchair customisation should be investigated further to determine how customisation could be used to improve the social experience of wheelchair users.
Daniel Della-Bosca, Paul Bardini
Augmented and Virtual Reality for Spatial Reasoning
The utilisation of mixed reality technologies in the classroom is proving to be of great pedagogical benefit. It is not just the tools, devices and techniques of Augmented virtual and mixed reality that have an impact on student learning it is the ontological shift in learners that is afforded by these technologies. This paper outlines the procedures of implementing AR and VR in a tertiary course for the express purpose of contributing to an accelerated understanding and application of spatial reasoning. The paper discusses the outcomes of two years of teaching a particular second year University course in 3D modelling.
Damian Hills
Online Tuition with Web Tools for WebXR
The paper details experiences in online tuition with web tools associated with the WebXR API, the new standard for 3D rendering of VR/AR immersion through the browser. Web tools and techniques associated with WebXR standard are discussed. These include AFRAME, a framework for building XR experiences with declarative HTML markup; Reveal.js, a framework for HTML based presentation; Mozilla Hubs, an open sourced VR chat room and finally glitch.com, a project management tool that simplifies setup and online delivery. These tools, techniques and standards together simplify the organisation of delivering coursework materials remotely.
Christopher Ranie, Reza Ryan
AI Assisted Coaching in eSports
This Research Paper outlines a CS:GO skills analysis and training program using Machine Learning algorithms. Data collected on the technical performance of a player is t analyzed by these algorithms and compared to data collected after two weeks of prescribed training against customised bots. For amateur teams who are unable to have a human coach, this could provide valuable information to help climb the ranks and allow existing coaches access to more information with which to guide their players.
David Harris
Online Implementation of Group Creative Ideation Exercises for Teaching Wearable Technology
Two activities designed for an undergraduate university course in wearable technology provided practical, context-sensitive experience in creative ideation. However, in 2020 these activities needed to be modified for online teaching with little notice.
The activities are 1) a card game that promoted generation of novel concepts using a combinatorial creativity framework to ideate and rapid prototype wearable technologies, and 2) an exploratory and transformational creativity task that encouraged group pursuit of “outlying” unusual ideas deriving from an initial concept.
Both activities were modified for online implementation with success. In both cases, the online form provided some advantages. The first activity was effective in allowing students to ideate in groups but was disconnected from an important physical experience. The second activity was found more effective online than in-person in essentially all ways. Ironically, it was only possible to conduct online due to the availability of new tools that have arisen due to social isolation, the same reason the course needed to be taught online.
Students found the process engaging and achieved unexpected outcomes. Final projects showed innovation and boldness beyond previous cohorts, with evidence for ideas generated in these activities influencing final projects.
Workshops
Tony Williams
Zsh basics and shell programming
The workshop will first cover a highly opinionated process for setting up zsh. This will be followed by coverage of the basics of shell programming with an eye to scripts that can run under both zsh and bash. Careful attention will be given to regular expressions in both ‘grep’ and ‘sed.
At the completion of the workshop participants will have an understanding of the zsh shell and shell programming.
No prior knowledge is assumed but some prior exposure to programming in any language would be preferred.
Workshop prerequisites: a Mac with a network connection running macOS 10.15 Catalina.
Anthony Reimer
Writing AutoPkg Recipes – A Workshop
You’ve been using AutoPkg(r) to fetch the latest installers for software you deploy and perhaps even do some post-processing. But there are still a few apps that are not covered by the existing AutoPkg recipes publicly available that you would like to automate.
This workshop is designed to help you fill that gap. We’ll cover the basics of how to read an existing recipe and some of the common ways to start building your own recipe. Then we will start building new recipes based on your suggestions. We will conclude with a brief discussion of next steps and how you can then share your creations with the world.
Workshop prerequisites: Attendees who wish to participate in the hands-on portions of the workshop will need a Mac with the current version of AutoPkg (2.2) and a plain text editor installed (e.g. Atom, BBEdit, Sublime Text, or VSCode). Terminal will be used as well. Optionally, the current version of AutoPkgr (1.5.5) can also be installed. It is assumed attendees are familiar with AutoPkg and have run some recipes. For those less experienced or those who have not used AutoPkg at the command line, we recommend watching Greg Neagle’s AutoPkg talk from MacSysAdmin 2019 prior to attending the workshop.
Alwyn Hunt
Adobe Aero
Alwyn Hunt from Adobe’s Immersive Division will explore the latest innovations in the AR and VR space. Adobe Aero is Adobe’s new, intuitive application for building and deploying content for Augmented Reality, Alwyn will demonstrate how Aero can combine and deploy assets created in Adobe apps as well as 3D modelling software. The Substance suite will also be showcased as a powerful set of texture painting and authoring tools that bridge the divide between Adobe and other modelling applications and game engines such as 3DS Max, Maya, Unity and Unreal engine.
Social Events
Cup of Tech Podcast Recording
This podcast is (usually) a casual conversation about tech, Apple, programming, and sometimes unrelated topics, and a good excuse to drink another cup of coffee.
Link to the show: http://cupof.tech
Cup of Tech on twitter: @cupof_tech
MacAdmins Podcast Recording
A Podcast for MacAdmins by members of the MacAdmin community.
Link to the show: http://podcast.macadmins.org
MacAdmins on twitter: @MacAdmPodcast
EveryWorld Dinner Quiz
Each year, /dev/world includes a now-infamous trivia quiz as part of the conference dinner. This year, we can bring you the quiz, but you’ll have to arrange your own dinner. Or breakfast, or lunch, or late-night snack, depending on your timezone!
Lightning Talks
Both /dev/world and X World have hosted lightning talks to wrap up the event, and EveryWorld should be no different. This is your time to shine! Keep an eye out during the event for instructions on how to sign up, and what’s involved.