This talk outlines our experiences using Scala to build an Android app. We explore the benefits of using Scala instead of Java for Android development.

Attendees will learn the benefits & pitfalls of using Scala to develop an Android app, including guidance on toolchain selection, common libraries & traps to avoid.

You’ll learn about the journey of taking Smash, a wearable tech startup for tennis, from an early idea to being production ready. The talk will focus on the technical aspects of the hardware and software evolution, but some context of the startup business will be discussed to frame the conversation.

From a technical perspective, Smash began as a generic prototype used to gather data around tennis play. Countless hours of data gathering and analysis was done over a 12 month period. You’ll see a demonstration of how the prototype works, the raw data, and the pattern matching heuristics that evolved from the process. The details of the sensors inside the device and the technical trade-offs will be discussed.

Following the prototype stage, the device underwent a physical transformation through engagements with manufacturing and industrial design companies. You’ll see that evolution and the final design prototype.

With all of those pieces in place, there’s also the challenge of creating some useful software for consumers to provide genuine value. You’ll see the software design process, and hear the story about how that is progressing.

Smash ran a kickstarter campaign during June & July in an attempt to raise money for the first full manufacturing run and development of the software. You’ll hear about whether that was a success or not, and some thoughts on why it turned out the way it did.

A brief and whirlwind tour of the problem space of designing and implementing BLE communications between mobile apps and custom developed hardware/firmware where all your targets are moving! We will cover formally documenting the specification, why code-generation is good for you, and api and transport governance.

Connected devices that support ‘hackable’ software development are becoming increasingly common: the Lifx, the Holiday by MooresCloud, Philips Hue, and so on.

This talk will explore the development of a number of iOS apps built for the Holiday by MooresCloud, including a device discovery app and a musical visualiser. The talk will summarise the best practices for developing IoT-related apps for iOS, how to talk to such devices in a reliable and network-friendly way, and best practices for UX and interaction with IoT devices.

We’ll showcase our past work, demonstrate what we’re working on now, and present a number of demonstrations of our approach to building mobile software for IoT devices.

In this session, I will summarise what we think makes a good children’s app from both a design and a technical perspective, with examples from our own work and others. Attendees will come away with a set of solid dos and don’ts for building mobile games for children.

What gestures are good in children’s games? Does load time matter? Why shouldn’t you include ‘trash can’ imagery? Is there a right way to do in-app purchases in kids games?

Web developers across the globe have been empowering the web with JavaScript applications for years and have been taking the scripting language to new heights above and beyond its original implementations. Through the power of JavaScript APIs, frameworks and open web APIs, JavaScript developers can expand their existing skill set to empower devices and technology poised to enter the homes and attire of the future. In this presentation, I’ll provide an overview of how JavaScript developers can get involved with technology such as Ninja Blocks, Arduinos, the Leap Motion, Android (via on{X}), the Pebble Watch and more. It will provide an overview of the Internet of Things ecosystem from the perspective of the JavaScript development community.

My presentation will begin with an overview of technology that can use JavaScript in one way or another, whether as its primary form of scripting or as a supporting technology bringing further capabilities to the device. I’ll be covering technology such as Ninja Blocks, Arduinos, the Leap Motion, Android (via on{X}), the Pebble Watch, Google Glass (via Wearscript), Oculus Rift (via vr.js), Raspberry Pi, awe.js, Tessel, Espruino and the Myo armband.

We’ll explore the development of the Fireballs in the Sky app, designed for citizen scientists to record sightings of meteorites (“fireballs”) in the night sky. We’ll introduce the maths for AR on a mobile device, using the various sensors, and we’ll throw in some celestial mechanics for good measure. We’ll discuss the prototyping approach in Processing. We’ll describe the iOS implementation, including: libraries, performance tuning, and testing. We’ll then do the same for the Android implementation. Or maybe the other way around…

Fireballs in the Sky app (iOS: https://bit.ly/1eZ68BA, Android: https://bit.ly/1eK6X1S). Fireballs in the Sky website (https://www.fireballsinthesky.com.au/), sponsored by Curtin University.

An enterprise and productivity biased talk about design and development for more than just Glass and Android Wear, delving into the technical and ergonomic limitations of the latest wearables to hit the market.

Linden’s been working on head-mounted wearable apps to help doctors perform their duties more efficiently, while keeping things real (busy) designing and developing clockface apps for the more recent Android smartwatches. Join him as he unfurls lessons learnt in doing all the usual stuff plus attempting to disrupt the healthcare industry, targeting more than just Glass, and “responsible” design.

This talk will provide attendees with practical advice for securing iOS applications against the vulnerabilities that are most prevalent on the iOS platform.

The presentation will draw from the security assessments and code reviews I have performed for clients ranging from large financial institutions and government organisations to small development houses.

It is aimed at anyone interested in designing and developing secure iOS applications and will cover key security controls to mitigate iOS application security risks. Topics covered include:

• Understanding the risk profile of iOS applications
• Storing data securely
• Managing sensitive data leakage
• Implementing effective transport security
• Developing robust and secure authentication mechanisms
• Implementing secure and robust runtime security checks

We all dream of that greenfields project, using the latest technologies and targeting modern mobile devices, but most of us live in a world of existing legacy systems that weren’t built with mobile in mind. In this presentation, I’ll show how REA is tackling mobile development in a sea of legacy systems systems to make “mobile first” a reality. Attendees will learn about the challenges and rewards of microservice architectures and hypermedia APIs, as well as how that influences client side development for mobile devices.

The hardest aspect of building mobile apps is generally not the app itself, but in massaging the backend systems to provide the useful APIs that make developing mobile apps possible. Yesterday’s software systems are unable to deliver today’s mobile experiences. I present the shift from a monolithic desktop web app, to a system of microservice APIs with multiple mobile clients, using examples from REA sites realestate.com.au and 1Form.com.au.

I will present the challenges we faced and lessons we’ve learnt around:

• moving from a single deployed system to many systems running in AWS
• using consumer driven contracts to document and enforce system interactions
• consuming hypermedia APIs from mobile clients
• designing and developing for multiple mobile platforms in parallel
• structuring your teams for end-to-end delivery of features for mobile devices

Learn about Gadgeteer and Netduino prototyping devices, designed for education, hobbyists and start-ups looking to perfect an idea. Understand Windows Embedded for commercial opportunities supporting scenarios such as package delivery, point-of-service and scan-capture. Bring it all together with Microsoft Azure cloud services including secure communications services enabled by Intelligent Systems Services and deep data analysis with the Microsoft data platform.

A behind the scenes look at the design and development of Cook – The World’s Cook Book.

Cook is a social Cook Book for iPad, helping people create, share and discover beautiful recipes with family, friends and the world.

Released with iOS 7 in September 2013, Cook reached over 500,000 downloads in just three weeks, becoming the #1 Food and Drink app in over 100 countries, featured on Apple’s iPad Air Site and awarded App Store’s Best of 2013.

This talk looks at the challenges faced by the team from developing an App designed specifically for iPad to making an engaging and social content creation experience and the impacts of iOS 7 in the last months of development.

It will explore the iterative and collaborative process used by the team both up to the initial launch and in the ongoing development of the App, a process that encourages using any tool to help further understanding and never being afraid to throwaway work to make a superior experience.

We’ll explore the development of the Fireballs in the Sky app, designed for citizen scientists to record sightings of meteorites (“fireballs”) in the night sky. We’ll introduce the maths for AR on a mobile device, using the various sensors, and we’ll throw in some celestial mechanics for good measure. We’ll discuss the prototyping approach in Processing. We’ll describe the iOS implementation, including: libraries, performance tuning, and testing. We’ll then do the same for the Android implementation. Or maybe the other way around…

Fireballs in the Sky app (iOS: https://bit.ly/1eZ68BA, Android: https://bit.ly/1eK6X1S). Fireballs in the Sky website (https://www.fireballsinthesky.com.au/), sponsored by Curtin University.

Building an Internet of Things for Agriculture presents unique challenges that don’t exist in many other domains. The typical agricultural environment is not friendly to electronics, lacks traditional infrastructure such as readily available power and ubiquitous network access. And yet, pervasive monitoring and control combined with cloud based applications and big data analytics offers productivity gains that our world-wide agricultural production systems desperately need. In order to move beyond the enthusiast scale, and deliver these benefits at large scale a business has to move beyond the maker model, and deliver scalable, robust systems that can survive in all manner of environmental conditions, delivering predictable & reliable results.

This talk will cover a wide range of technical areas, all of which have been brought together to provide solutions to dramatically improve water and energy use efficiency in agricultural enterprises in Australia and the USA:

• embedded low-power hardware design
• firmware development and over-the-air upgrades
• ad-hoc, multi-radio networks for low power operation
• in-field sensing & data collection methodologies
• large geographic scale data aggregation
• cloud based data warehousing and analytics

Attendees will leave the talk with a real sense of what is required to deliver an Internet of Things borne out of real world experience from a Melbourne based company that has a track record of delivering solutions in this space for many years.

Android is becoming the OS of choice for those needing an easy to use embedded operating system.

I’ve spent the last 2.5 years building customised versions of Android to run on various devices for use in the digital signage.

In this talk, I’ll cover the basics of what’s involved in customising Android to work as an embedded OS, with examples for things like video-walls and interactive kiosks and then look at how that can then be extended to sensors and outputs to let your Android device interact with the world and people around it.

There will be code examples, tips for potential pitfalls and coverage of some of the lessons learnt while building devices that are used by opeople out in the real world vs testers in labs.

In this session, I will summarise what we think makes a good children’s app from both a design and a technical perspective, with examples from our own work and others. Attendees will come away with a set of solid dos and don’ts for building mobile games for children.

What gestures are good in children’s games? Does load time matter? Why shouldn’t you include ‘trash can’ imagery? Is there a right way to do in-app purchases in kids games?

Connected devices that support ‘hackable’ software development are becoming increasingly common: the Lifx, the Holiday by MooresCloud, Philips Hue, and so on.

This talk will explore the development of a number of iOS apps built for the Holiday by MooresCloud, including a device discovery app and a musical visualiser. The talk will summarise the best practices for developing IoT-related apps for iOS, how to talk to such devices in a reliable and network-friendly way, and best practices for UX and interaction with IoT devices.

We’ll showcase our past work, demonstrate what we’re working on now, and present a number of demonstrations of our approach to building mobile software for IoT devices.

This talk shows how easy it is with very little experience and skills to design and fabricate your own PCB to create your own OSHW Arduino Shield and to scale that to manufacture in low volumes. All you need is the the right tools and a tiny bit of knowledge. I’ll look into how to go from breadboard to prototype to making a few working shields to making shields in small volumes (10 boards) to low volume manufacture (100 boards) with minimal effort and cost.

Building an app is easy, right? 16 year-olds build million dollar apps in their garages every other day. But things get a little trickier when the app you’re building is for a bank.

Designing and coding an app with lots of cool new features is the easy part. Creating a whole new customer channel, that is effectively the bank’s most highly visited branch, comes with a whole different set of challenges including:

• Shifting the businesses mindset from a one-off project to treating mobile as a first-class channel that needs to be supported and evolved on an ongoing basis.
• Provide all the features that customer’s expect from web banking and deliver those in a lean fashion, with a mobile first approach.
• Balancing security and fraud constraints whilst still making the app easy to use for customers.
• Pushing the boundaries of traditional brand guidelines that didn’t translate to native mobile environments.

With a conservative financial institution that’s just beginning to understand how mobile is going to revolutionise its business, you have quite a mountain to climb before your designs can see the light of the app store.

This is the journey that Toby Pritchard (Suncorp) and Ben Melbourne (ThoughtWorks) have recently been through. In this case study presentation they’ll share the highs and lows they went through while rebuilding and launching the new Suncorp Mobile Bank App.

Wotif.com has embarked on a journey to unify its experience across the travel planning process. An essential part of this included the ability to make the crucial parts of its services discoverable and quickly consumable. With a combination of state-of-art technologies and leveraging the concepts of Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State (HATEOAS) we have simplified the process of consuming our content and inventory. We have achieved this across all our user touching platforms from our website to native iOS and Android applications. We would love to share this journey with you.

Android L has brought with it a variety of changes, including the Material design for the UI, and tools to aid in the analysis of power consumption. The speaker will walk through an example of how to convert an existing Holo app to utilise Material design. In addition to reskinning the application, the presenter will identify, analyse and improve the battery performance of the app, while maintaining a high user experience.

Learn how you can implement presentation model like MVVM in Android to achieve better separation of concerns, maintainability and testability. We will explore approaches to implement MVVM along with choices of using a third party data binding library.

Further this session will extend the discussion on how this approach can help you share common code path across multiple mobile platforms.

Engagement metrics aside, how are the applications you’re making engaging users at an emotional level? How much thinking goes into the personality and tone of your product? Are you thinking comprehensively about every messaging touchpoint your product has with a user? What about writing the error messages, alerts, calls-to-action, descriptions, or release notes?

Jaimee has been helping Fortune 500 companies, agencies, non-profits and startups with digital products for more than 17 years with emphasis on mobile applications for the last 5. What has helped separate the products Jaimee has worked on to stand out from the rest is their ability to engage and empathize with users. Over years of refinement, her process has come to consistently evoke such responses from her clients as, “You’ve earned our trust!”, “You understand who we are!” and “Thank you – We love you!”

Whether you have a concept, a startup, corporation or enterprise product – whether software, website or mobile application – Jaimee wants to share some very important considerations in creating products that connect emotionally with users. In this session Jaimee will walk you through some design and personality thinking, on-boarding dos and don’ts, and copywriting considerations to help your applications become more fun, delightful, and emotionally engaging experiences for your users.

The speaker will talk about the variety of problems that could arise, and things to consider when trying to support a vast array of android versions and devices. Building an app that can run seamlessly on any android device is one of the major challenges to get those five stars and being featured on PlayStore.

This talk will be mainly focused on development with numerous examples and techniques of the most common android development problems. All these combined with tips and tools will help you reduce the android fragmentation gap.

Examples that we’ll cover include

• supporting variety of screens
• reusing software components
• improving performance
• UI and development tips and patterns
• most common issues caused by the fragmentation, and how to fix them
• tools that can help you create a great app

Attendees will learn on this talk how to approach android application development challenges, with confidence that their apps will be compatible across the pool of varieties of android powered devices.

Running an experiment in space usually requires custom hardware to be launched into orbit at enormous cost. ArduSat is a project designed to change that, by maintaining a fleet of general purpose experimental satellites in orbit and allowing anyone with an interest in space science to design and run their own experiments right from their computer. The first three ArduSat satellites have already been launched and many more are on the way. Jonathan Oxer designed the general purpose experiment module called the Payload Processor Module that was launched into orbit in ArduSat-1 and ArduSat-X, allowing anyone from hobbyists and school students to professional researchers to run their own experiments in space. In this talk he’ll explain the background of the ArduSat project, the CubeSat satellite architecture, how satellites get into orbit, and the operation of the Payload Processor Module, showing how you can run your very own experiments in orbit.

Building an Internet of Things for Agriculture presents unique challenges that don’t exist in many other domains. The typical agricultural environment is not friendly to electronics, lacks traditional infrastructure such as readily available power and ubiquitous network access. And yet, pervasive monitoring and control combined with cloud based applications and big data analytics offers productivity gains that our world-wide agricultural production systems desperately need. In order to move beyond the enthusiast scale, and deliver these benefits at large scale a business has to move beyond the maker model, and deliver scalable, robust systems that can survive in all manner of environmental conditions, delivering predictable & reliable results.

This talk will cover a wide range of technical areas, all of which have been brought together to provide solutions to dramatically improve water and energy use efficiency in agricultural enterprises in Australia and the USA:

• embedded low-power hardware design
• firmware development and over-the-air upgrades
• ad-hoc, multi-radio networks for low power operation
• in-field sensing & data collection methodologies
• large geographic scale data aggregation
• cloud based data warehousing and analytics

Attendees will leave the talk with a real sense of what is required to deliver an Internet of Things borne out of real world experience from a Melbourne based company that has a track record of delivering solutions in this space for many years.

Building an app is easy, right? 16 year-olds build million dollar apps in their garages every other day. But things get a little trickier when the app you’re building is for a bank.

Designing and coding an app with lots of cool new features is the easy part. Creating a whole new customer channel, that is effectively the bank’s most highly visited branch, comes with a whole different set of challenges including:

• Shifting the businesses mindset from a one-off project to treating mobile as a first-class channel that needs to be supported and evolved on an ongoing basis.
• Provide all the features that customer’s expect from web banking and deliver those in a lean fashion, with a mobile first approach.
• Balancing security and fraud constraints whilst still making the app easy to use for customers.
• Pushing the boundaries of traditional brand guidelines that didn’t translate to native mobile environments.

With a conservative financial institution that’s just beginning to understand how mobile is going to revolutionise its business, you have quite a mountain to climb before your designs can see the light of the app store.

This is the journey that Toby Pritchard (Suncorp) and Ben Melbourne (ThoughtWorks) have recently been through. In this case study presentation they’ll share the highs and lows they went through while rebuilding and launching the new Suncorp Mobile Bank App.

A large percentage of iOS apps today use Core Data for persistence, but is this always the right option?

NoSQL databases offer a compelling alternative in web applications, but developers seem firmly attached to a relational model on the device. There are a number of scenarios where this can deliver sub-optimal outcomes, such as query performance and data sync. This presentation will cover these issues and present a few alternatives, focusing on practical demonstrations of specific NoSQL approaches on iOS, however the concepts are highly applicable to other mobile platforms.

Finally! That’s the best way to welcome the announcement of the new WebKit in iOS8. Since the first version of iOS web developers have been struggling with the scarce possibilities of UIWebView. “It’s not like Safari” was a common complaint. That time is now over and your wishes have come true. In this presentation we will learn about the many new possibilities enabled by the new WebKit framework. In particular we will focus on the bridge between native code and web content.

Wotif.com has embarked on a journey to unify its experience across the travel planning process. An essential part of this included the ability to make the crucial parts of its services discoverable and quickly consumable. With a combination of state-of-art technologies and leveraging the concepts of Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State (HATEOAS) we have simplified the process of consuming our content and inventory. We have achieved this across all our user touching platforms from our website to native iOS and Android applications. We would love to share this journey with you.

Very few apps these days are self-contained silos. In all likelihood, your app will need to consume data from external sources. In this session, you’ll learn how to properly write networking code so that you don’t block threads, don’t fetch data you don’t need, and cache data to avoid. We’ll dive deep into caching semantics to enable us to have the right balance between fresh data and a good user experience. All of this will be accomplished this by leveraging the new networking APIs in iOS 7. We’ll also cover some techniques you can use on the API side to make life easy for mobile clients.

As a freelancer, many of the customers I work with have extensive iOS experience, but little or no Android dev experience. iOS focused organisations and developers have many questions about Android development: About the android ecosystem, fragmentation, test devices, app design, libraries to use and what to expect from Android development. Making the situation even worse there is a large amount of hyperbole and uninformed opinions spouted online by the supporters and detractors of both operating systems.

We will cover many of the common questions those with iOS experience have about Android, providing concrete advice on subjects such as dealing with multiple screen sizes, choosing test devices, what versions of android to support, etc. We will discuss the Android ecosystem and the business aspects of building Android applications. Finally we will conclude with some short code examples, showing how to use the Android SDK to create a simple ‘hello world’ project in Android studio.

A simple, scalable app architecture using the Android Annotations library will be presented. The app architecture has been used in multiple projects to quickly and reliably produce well architected, maintainable apps, with a minimum of effort. We explore how the Android Annotations library can be used to solve several problems with android application development, such as excessive boiler plate code and dealing with interactions between background tasks and the UI thread. We will also discuss how this architecture can be easily scaled from small apps with no persistent storage all the way up to complex applications backed by a DB and interacting with multiple web services and 3rd party APIs.

Unless you operate at the truly big end of the web, the economics and market pressures of modern application development are all skewed toward developer productivity. Go faster, ship sooner. In this world of financial sympathy, we lose touch with the very thing that brought us here in the first place: the computer.

Don’t settle for the monoculture of mechanical hostility. We can all be better, wiser developers by re-learning the forgotten idioms of the hardware; clock cycles and CPU instructions, registers and the stack.

In this presentation you’ll see how nothing more than a few strips of LEDs is enough to render all your higher level languages useless, and how a developer who thought he understood computers found that he didn’t really understand them at all…

In the world of mobile app development, web apps have seemed like an annoying younger sibling: always nagging for attention but not really grown-up enough to play with the big kids. However, just like a real kid-brother or sister, mobile web apps have grown up in recent years. For certain classes of application they now represent a viable proposition, and can even be superior in some circumstances.

The goal of this presentation is to give attendees an accurate picture of the current state of mobile web development, especially in relation to the native app development world. Attendees will learn what’s possible with the mobile web today, and when it might be preferable to use web technologies to build a mobile app instead of writing it natively. They’ll also learn best-practices in mobile web development, when and how frameworks can help, and when it’s appropriate to build a hybrid app that uses both native and web technologies.

I’ll start with a summary of the current state of mobile web development, talking about how advances in both hardware and web standards over the last couple of years are now enabling a whole new class of mobile web application.

Next I’ll move onto guidelines for when to go native and when to go web. This will include coverage of the limitations of Javascript, CSS3, and mobile browsers in general. We’ll discuss the pros and cons of distributing an app over the web vs an app store. Finally, we’ll compare the development effort of native vs. web development.

After that I’ll talk about best practices in mobile app development. This will include a discussion about single-page web apps and their associated frameworks, minimising download and startup times, reducing latency during user interactions, and maximising animation performance.

Finally, I’ll discuss when a hybrid approach (i.e. a web app within a native app) can be useful, from both an app-distribution and hardware-access perspective. This will include a discussion of when a wrapper framework (for example, Phonegap) can be useful, as opposed to just doing it all yourself.

WWDC 14 has been called the most important WWDC since the announcement of the original SDK in 2008. Apple announced a new language, additions to the APIs available, and structural changes to iOS codebases. This presents a set of challenges to codebases of substantial size which were structured according to best practices in previous versions of iOS. If you must maintain a legacy application with backwards compatibility, what improvements are available to you and which are dead ends?

The situation is still in flux. We intend this talk to clarify the situation for developers and project managers so that they know what is easy, difficult or impossible when transitioning legacy projects to Swift and iOS8

WWDC 14 has been called the most important WWDC since the announcement of the original SDK in 2008. Apple announced a new language, additions to the APIs available, and structural changes to iOS codebases. This presents a set of challenges to codebases of substantial size which were structured according to best practices in previous versions of iOS. If you must maintain a legacy application with backwards compatibility, what improvements are available to you and which are dead ends?

The situation is still in flux. We intend this talk to clarify the situation for developers and project managers so that they know what is easy, difficult or impossible when transitioning legacy projects to Swift and iOS8.

For some time now the proponents of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) have promised this technology will deliver cheap and simple solution for locating “things” within an indoor space. There have been many attempts at this, with mixed results, now Apple has introduced the much heralded iBeacon does this mean it is ready for consumers?

In this talk I will dig into what BLE is and how it can be used to provide location indoors, then move onto some of the experience we have had using it at Ninja Blocks, what worked, what didn’t, and how we are planning on using this technology in our products.