Sam Jarman, Carnival MobilePart of DW15

In New Zealand, students are encouraged to use a text based programming language in their final two years of high school to complete their units of work. The popular choices are Python and JavaScript. This session looks at Swift as a possible option and evaluates it as an introductory programming language.

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Sam has been writing iOS apps since he was 17. By 18, he had over 10 apps on the store. While at University, he discovered a passion for education. He has completed research, published papers and produced books and guides on the topics of teaching computer science and programming. He is the maintainer of CS Unplugged and a contributor to the Computer Science Field Guide.

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James White, Curtin UniversityPart of DW15

iOS was once a single screen size platform, brought to you by the magic numbers 320 and 480 – it was easy to create a pixel perfect UI. Over the years the platform has evolved to support multiple screen resolutions, requiring image assets at myriad different sizes. Our designers are working their beautiful fingers to the bone, and our bundles have never been so big. PaintCode takes your artwork and turns it into resolution­-independent CoreGraphics code, which you can drop straight into your apps. You get crisp graphics on any screen, and the ability to do things that would otherwise require many static files.

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James is an iOS developer and designer, with the correct order of those terms a matter of debate. He makes apps primarily of a healthy nature, including as part of his PhD examining social apps in health promotion. He recently received his second student scholarship to attend Apple’s WWDC.

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Matthew TonkinPart of DW15

This talk covers my experiences, and the experiences of those I know, in launching (and not launching) software titles on Macintosh & iOS – a mixture of anecdotes, funny stories, tales of stuff that didn’t work (but should have), stuff that did work (but shouldn’t have), and riding the Silicon Valley roller coaster.

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Matt has been making software for OS X since Xcode 1.0 in 2003, was the principal engineer for Skitch and is currently an OS X engineer for Evernote. In 2014 he returned to Australia after a 6 year stint in Silicon Valley where he worked for startups in both engineering and product management roles.

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Part of /dev/world/2015

Zac Fitz­Walter, Eat More Pixels

It’s one thing to make a usable App, but with so many on the Store, how do you make yours stand out and keep users engaged? This session takes you on a journey from usability to user experience (UX), presents techniques that can help improve the UX of your apps, and shares inspiring examples.

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Zac recently completed a PhD on UX and gamification design for mobile apps, presented on the topic at a number of academic and industry venues and will soon be teaching a masters subject at QUT entitled “Gamification and Persuasive Design”. He runs gamificationweekly.com and is a cofounder of Empathy Studio and Eat More Pixels, both of which will be releasing gamified apps later this year.

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Mark Aufflick, The High Technology BureauPart of DW15

Your code deals with asynchronous events all the time: UI, network, BLE, background processing, and more. State machines can help you reason with reality while making your code less fragile. In this session Mark looks at two types of state machines – Finite State Machines and Petri Nets – that help you write less code that is more self­-documenting and ready for change.

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Mark is founder of The High Technology Bureau, a software development and process consultancy in Sydney. His consulting work spans finance, healthcare, real estate, social media and geological research. Mark is heavily involved in the iOS and Mac development community – he’s organiser of Sydney CocoaHeads, co-­chair of the YOW! Connected Program Committee, and co­-organised Swipe Conference.

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Ashton Williams, OdeceePart of DW15

Ashton will be demonstrating new techniques in Interface Builder – Designable and Inspectable Views. He’ll explain the practical uses, and point out problems and solutions, things to avoid, and work through a few examples making use of Designables and Inspectables.

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Ashton is a Mobile Developer at Odecee, he has been doing professional mobile development since 2012. He is a CocoaPods Core Contributor, as well as other open source projects. At Odecee he runs an internal monthly Mobile meetup.

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Tim NugentPart of DW15

This talk covers the use of physics and similar real world effects in your applications to make them, well more physical. Despite Apple’s push towards ugly design, your users still like their apps to work the way the real world works and I think deep down inside Apple knows this. There is a slew of great APIs which are rarely used to make your App a lot more real feeling. This session talks about these APIs and other options you have from both a design and developer perspective.

*User love is not guaranteed.

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Tim Nugent pretends to be a mobile app developer, game designer, PhD student and now he even pretends to be an author (he co-wrote the latest update to “Learning Cocoa with Objective-C” for O’Reilly). When he isn’t busy avoiding being found out as a fraud, he spends most of his time designing and creating little apps and games he won’t let anyone see. Tim spent a disproportionately long time writing this tiny little bio, most of which was trying to stick a witty sci-fi reference in, before he simply gave up.

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Josh Deprez, Google AustraliaPart of DW15

This talk introduces making iOS apps with Go, an experimental feature of Go 1.5. iOS apps are generally supposed to be made in Xcode with Objective-C or Swift, as God intended, but there’s more than one way to skin an idiom. Go is a simple language invented at Google originally intended to replace C and 
C++, but has grown to the point where it can be suitable away from the world of server software. For the first time, in version 1.5, Go includes packages aimed at mobile development. This talk will introduce Go, how to get setup with gomobile on Mac for iOS dev, and how to use gomobile to produce both standalone apps and framework bundles usable inside Xcode projects.

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Josh is a software engineer at Google Australia. He has a PhD in mathematics from the University of Tasmania. He likes cats, but is unfortunately allergic.

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Stephanie Sharp, OdeceePart of DW15

App design is more than just static screens. Interaction and animation are important (and often overlooked) parts of the design process. We can use tools like Keynote to communicate and collaborate with both designers and clients. If you think Keynote is only for slides, this talk is for you too. We cover tips and best practices for adding animation to your apps. We’ll explore how Keynote can be used to design custom animations and communicate user interaction by building a weather app prototype from scratch. You’ll see how easy it can be to iterate on ideas and learn when and how to use animation to create a better user experience.

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Steph is a mobile engineer at Odecee in Melbourne. She spends most of her time making iOS apps, talking about UX and trying to convince people of the awesomeness of prototyping. In her spare time, Steph is also interested in e-commerce and model trains.

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Richard Deveraux, Mojo CollectivePart of DW15

Did you know that you could render 3D objects (and animate them) on a HTML5 Canvas? This topic will look at Three.js, a Javascript 3D Library that leverages on WebGL to render and animate 3D on a HTML5 canvas. It will also look at supported and custom 3D data structures and touch lightly on how to roll your own GLSL shaders to create custom visuals.

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Richard has been coding since high school with multiple languages 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.

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