Tim Raphael, University of Western Australia

PhoneGap, formerly Apache Cordova, is a framework that combines the agility of web languages such as Javascript and CSS with the power of native mobile device frameworks to enable developers to quickly bring together the elements of an app across many platforms.

In this talk, I will show you how you can leverage jQuery Mobile and CSS to quickly bring together the interface of a web-app and then enhance it with powerful features from native platform frameworks. PhoneGap can be used not only on iOS but can be built and deployed to Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and even Firefox OS!

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Tim is a second year Masters of Software Engineering student at The University of Western Australia. He has a passion for new ideas, clever and innovative technologies and just loves having a hack round with code.

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Benjamin Taylor, Shiny Things

The proliferation of the iOS platform has brought a flurry of new developers to Cocoa and while Cocoa Touch does a great job of hiding many of its graphical implementation details, digging under the surface can reveal some stunning gems. Core Animation is a graphics rendering and animation infrastructure used by all UIViews that can cater for complex 3D animations, 2D vector graphics and other interesting GPU rendered effects. This talk introduces fundamental concepts of Core Animation in Cocoa Touch and then steps through a series of demonstrations showing ways that it can be used in your apps today.

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Ben Taylor is a mobile software developer at Shiny Things, a company making intuitive educational apps and games for kids.

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Justin Howlett, Fairfax Media

Performance as UX covers the true cost of a slow app on your users and business. This talk will expose common mistakes and misconceptions by develops of all levels. Justin will also introduce you to the concept of perceptual performance and how you can trick your users into thinking your app is faster than the rest.

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Justin is currently the Mobile lead at Domain.com.au after moving to Australia from Canada to become a surfer in his spare time. Justin has been an iOS developer for 4 years working on apps for top domestic and international brands such as NBC, FOX, Univision, and many others.

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James White, Curtin University of Technology

Is my game too hard? Does my app have the right defaults? Do I have too much onboarding? What are the best in-app purchases? Should that button be on the left or right?

SCIENCE can help you answer these questions and more. Find out how to:

• set up a quick and easy backend and custom analytics system to collect exactly the data and feedback you need to answer your burning questions
• recruit volunteers to test your app and use SNEAKINESS to change the things you’d like to test
• use the power of SCIENCE to explore how people use your app, and how your development and design decisions can change the way your app is experienced by users

In today’s cut-throat marketplace, your app or game needs every advantage it can get. This session, presented by a man who’s half developer, half designer, and half scientist (yes, that’s right) might just give your app the winning edge.

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James is a designeloper from Perth (although, secretly, he’s a kiwi). Four years ago, after fifteen years of graphic design, he Googled “How do you make an app?”, started attending AUC events, and the rest is history.

James is currently completing a PhD in which he is developing and evaluating a nutrition-focussed app. This year he received an Apple student scholarship to attend WWDC.

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Tim Nugent, University of Tasmania

This talk focuses on the framework for multipeer connectivity, MultipeerConnectivity, a system designed to allow for easy and rapid network connectivity without needing to worry about how and what networking technology is used.

In this talk we’ll go from a blank iOS application to having a fully fledged, albeit dull, multiplayer game, featuring, peer identification, peer connection, server functionality and finally the transmission of game data back and forth.

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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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Matt Gray, Australian National University

“Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use
hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.” – www.arduino.cc

This session assumes you know nothing about Arduino, but want to learn more. I’ll show how to get your Mac set up with an Arduino IDE, compare some of the Arduino devices that you might want to purchase, and look at some example projects that are fun to implement.

I’ll also do a quick comparison between Arduino and some other similar platforms, such as the Raspberry Pi.

We will round things off with a look at the new Apple HomeKit API, and what it means for controlling all sorts of devices around your home via iOS 8.

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Matt is a programmer in the Marketing Office at the Australian National University. He has experience in web, iOS, Android and Mac programming, and is currently having fun playing with Arduino devices in his spare time. His house now has 12 temperature sensors logging data every 1 minute…because it’s important to know the temperature in your roof to 4 decimal places.

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Dan Nolan, Proxima Pty Ltd

This talk covers a series of tips and tricks throughout the full iOS and OS X stack that you can use to speed up your development, build better quality code and ship better products.

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Dan’s been an iOS developer since the original jailbreak toolchain was released. He’s worked with some of Australia’s biggest and best known companies to develop iOS applications. He’s the co-founder and engineering lead at Proxima, a company that is using the technologies available in iOS to help Enterprise build better experiences that their employees will love.

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Josh Deprez, Google

Swift, iOS, OS X, all the frameworks, the LLVM compiler, Xcode, and everything else is, or tries very much to be, magic. Light, easy-to-use magic is generally the best kind, but underneath the shiny new magic of Swift or the new frameworks is often dark and frightening magic, such as LLVM, CoreFoundation, the Mach kernel, BSD, all kinds of nasty libraries, and the x86 or ARM CPU itself.

This talk is about peeling back the curtain on some of the darker magic. I aim to cover some lighthearted debugging and profiling with Xcode and Instruments, some CoreFoundation cave-diving, the structure and binary interface of compiled programs, and what happens to a running system when the swap file mysteriously disappears.*

*Due to time constraints, this last item might not be demonstrated.

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Josh graduated with his PhD in Mathematics from the University of Tasmania in August, and has been working at Google in Sydney since the start of the year. He’s given talks at /dev/world for several years, and has programmed a few successful iOS apps.

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Adam Debono, University of Wollongong/AffinityLive

These days, everyone only seems to care about ‘Mobile First’, like it’s the only way to do things. The discussion behind it is mostly justified, but what if you’ve already got a desktop application?

This session goes beyond the ‘shrink and squeeze’ mantra adopted in many places, and looks for ways to create a great overall experience, including some best practices and pitfalls. It will take an in-depth look at how this was achieved for AffinityLive, and look at some other real-world examples.

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Adam is an iOS and web developer from Wollongong. His passion lies in using software to create great user experiences using intuitive interaction. While not finishing off his Bachelors of Computer Science, he develops for AffinityLive – an SaaS business management tool.

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Richard Deveraux, Charles Darwin University

After seeing Jonathon Manning make a working platform game in less than a hour last year at /dev/world, I was really intrigued to try out SpriteKit for myself and finally make a game idea I’ve had in mind since my first /dev/world 2 years ago. It’s not finished, but it was my first real native iOS app that was built using a framework, which was so new at the time that there was hardly any guides or tutorials for it other than Apple’s bare-bones documentation. At the end of the day I wanted to be able to fire an arrow to cut a rope and release a key, all governed by the physics engine built into SpriteKit and hopefully to be able to toss a few bombs around too…

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Richard has been coding since high school with multiple programming languages at his disposal 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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