Melanie Tarr and David McMeekin

David McMeekin and Melanie Tarr began an iOS development course at a high school in 2012. The course has grown in strength since then and just published its first app on the app store.

The first part of this talk outlines the pitfalls and advantages in coordinating a high school iOS program, including guidelines for other developers considering this, and where the program should ideally fit within a tertiary/secondary environment.

The second half of the presentation is about coordinating a mentor development team, the challenges and success the mentors faced, and how to overcome those hurdles, followed by a brief outline of the app development process for the first app published.

David McMeekin is a software engineer who is currently a research fellow and lecturer at Curtin Uni. David is still unsure as to what he wants to be when he grows up but currently is enjoying research in the area of semantic web and search for the real time delivery of spatially enabled data.

Melanie Tarr began working at ECU too long ago to mention now, and supported the engineering department as the Mac support engineer for four years. She then moved to Macintosh technical support for WAAPA, managing all of its IT support for two years before having her first child. She is now a PhD student (ECU), and believes digital literacy includes coding and has seen that high school children are capable of this.

Matthew D’Orazio

Every now and then it’s nice to do something different¹. For some, this means writing code. And for that special group, it sometimes means writing ‘things’, that work on ‘that Apple laptop, you know, for that guy who works out in the field’.

This talk will examine the new Swift language from the perspective of one who sparingly uses Objective-C. What does an outsider really think of the Apple eco-system? For those coming in from the ‘cold’, what are the pitfalls and gotcha’s? What amazing things are there to be discovered? And, how can we make the transition easier?

So, come join me on that old, familiar, horrifying journey—learning just enough of a new language to write something awful! But hey, at least it gets the job done!

¹Half hour later…‘WHY DID I AGREE TO DO THIS?’.

Matthew spends his days, slaving away in a metaphorical basement, trying to fix scary databases (no, a phone number is NOT a primary key!), maintaining terrible websites, despairing at the fourth drive failure of the day, and generally being pulled from project to project.

When he’s not working on technical tasks, he’s off writing papers, organising conferences and streams (e.g. PyCon AU, OzCHI24), and designing his doomsday bunker that must by necessity be completely cut off from the Internet, ‘The Cloud is trying to kill us all!’.

Jimmy Ti, Queensland University of Technology

Most of us architect our iOS and Mac applications using the MVC paradigm. MVC serves us well but it has some problems, namely “Massive View Controller”, awkward placement for network logic, and poor view testability.

This talk aims to introduce the MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) paradigm, advantages of this paradigm, and how to adopt MVVM for iOS development.

Jimmy is a Ph.D student at QUT, his research investigates how to apply mobile services to enhance social interactions in public urban environments such as public transport.

Being a passionate iOS developer, Jimmy strives to instil thoughtful design and great user experience into every application he develops.

Learning and growing through AUC’s nurture, Jimmy, together with Zac and Tony, founded Eat More Pixels – a company that focuses on creating useful, beautiful and playful apps that make our lives easier and fun.

Matthew Heinsen Egan & Chris McDonald, University of Western Australia

This presentation provides an overview of the design and implementation of SeeC, our new approach assisting programming novices at university to develop, understand, and debug, their first programs. Unlike professional-strength tools, such as XCode and Eclipse, SeeC is not a full IDE. Instead, SeeC focuses on explaining programs’ static meaning and runtime behaviour to novice programmers, and promotes an inquiry-based view of debugging.

By modifying the popular Clang/LLVM compiler suite employed on OS-X, the execution of programs compiled with SeeC results in a recording of the program’s complete execution trace. This enables students’ programs to be reviewed, and their bugs to be located and explained, by replaying the trace and identifying conditions leading to bugs. All memory references made by SeeC-compiled programs may be automatically visualised, providing novices with the opportunity to view and debug programs’ execution, particularly those with errant dynamic data-structures. SeeC is fully aware of language and library standards, and can report bugs in different natural languages, with reference to these standards.

SeeC employs a number of contemporary technologies, including a modified version of the Clang/LLVM compiler suite, wxWidgets for its graphical interface and interactions, graphviz for runtime visualisation, and ICU for natural language support.

In combination, the features enable students to better collaborate by asynchronously sharing their traces and understanding, and for educators to develop seminal introductory examples and challenging exercises. This presentation focuses on our selection and use of powerful software and tools on Apple’s OS-X.

Matthew Heinsen Egan is a PhD student in Computer Science, at The University of Western Australia, and Chris McDonald is his PhD supervisor. Both have strong interests in the application of modern software technologies to Computer Science Education, particularly to better assist novice programmers, and in the exposition of contemporary computer systems.