With over 160 dealerships in all corners of Australia, the task of delivering hundreds of individually customised tablets across the Hyundai dealer network at first seemed quite daunting. Learn how through the use of system backups and Android UI automation, webqem was able to streamline the setup process and configure hundreds of devices in parallel, and how these techniques could be leveraged on a wide variety of projects.

This talk will touch on creating software to manage parallel device setup and management, the ins and outs of Android backups, how Android UI automation can be leveraged for more than just application testing, and explore ways in which having root access could simplify this process.

There are many great resources for getting started with Functional Reactive Programming and ReactiveCocoa, but what’s the next step? ReactiveCocoa is not just a nice wrapper for KVO, Signals can be used to model many common problems in Cocoa including managing the state of your UI, notifications and even business logic. Adopting ReactiveCocoa can make for more modular, self-documenting code — while still integrating easily with other APIs and your existing code. We would like to share with you some interesting, practical examples where we’ve used ReactiveCocoa to solve problems in our app. Our goal is to inspire you to consider how ReactiveCocoa can be applied in your own apps.

Windows 10 is here and will be powering a billion devices shortly. The attendees will learn how to develop IoT applications that target Windows 10 IoT core, by developing on the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) and how to integrate the solution with Windows Azure.

In this presentation, Chris Briggs, who heads up IoT at SSW, will teach the attendees how to take advantage of the Universal Windows Platform. The familiar .Net platform now empowers developers do more with less work by building one solution across half a dozen hardware platforms.

The attendees will see a complete Universal app built, then deployed to a Raspberry Pi 2, finally expanded upon to read input from sensors and send to Azure.

With all emerging technologies there are a range of issues. Come hear Chris highlight the common pitfalls and issues to save you the smell of melting plastic.

The key subject areas that this presentation covers

• Windows 10 IoT platform
• Windows Universal Platform app development
• Reading sensors data from the GPIO pins on the Pi via the Windows IoT extension SDK
• Azure

For mobile apps, design and development have traditionally been two separate ventures with some handover. Typically the visual designer prepares graphic elements, which the developer adds on a screen by screen basis to the app. The graphics have to be ready for the developer to use them and the developer has to redo the work if the design changes.

We have adopted a different approach, where the designer and developer can work in parallel. The design elements are continually fluid and automatically update the app without rework by the developer. The designer can change colours, gradients, shadows, drawings, icons, sizes and even animations at any time, with the next build of the app showing the iterated changes. We give the designer the maximum possible power and responsibility.

This mechanism gives us graphics that work on both iOS and Android, at all resolutions. For iOS we get vector graphics that are drawn at runtime for the device resolution, desired colour and size, greatly reducing the number of assets required.

We have enhanced this process over the years for various clients including Philips, CommonWealth Bank, state governments, and we are now integrating it at Optus and some startups like AirShr. In July we released the CommonWealth app for tablet for iOS and Android which sets a new benchmark for visual design and interactivity in a financial app

In this session, you’ll learn about game design: the art and science of constructing enjoyable, engaging games. We aren’t doing any coding, and we’re not talking game engine development – instead, we’ll be taking a deep dive into game design theory, using it to understand how people interact with rules, and how to use it to improve your community, your company, your project, and your software.

Video games are the most glamorous of the electronic arts, but splashy graphics and amazing sound aren’t the defining feature of games. Games are the world’s only interactive artistic medium, and good interaction needs to be designed. Today’s master crafters of interaction design are game designers.

In this session, you’ll get a fresh perspective on user experience design and community engagement by understanding how people are interacting with the fastest-growing form of entertainment in the world.

Topics covered in this session include:

• Why games work, and how to analyse and build engaging experiences
• The Mechanics-Dynamics-Aesthetics framework: what it’s good for, and how to use it
• How to understand what a game’s doing, and how to build for fun

We’ll take this knowledge and apply it to real world examples in the realms of UX and UI design, community management, project management, and company building, as well as a few examples from the actual game development industry.

On the face of it, Android Wear and the Apple Watch are very similar: they’re both wristwatches, they’re both closely tied to your phone, and the tech media are unaccountably excited about both of them. But how do their differences affect you as a developer? This session explores what it takes to design and consider the same application for the two most prominent wearable platforms in existence today.

In this talk, you’ll learn how to build and design a great application for both platforms. You’ll learn about:

• The design patterns that Apple Watch and Android Wear (and to a lesser extent, other platforms like Pebble) share
• The design patterns that they don’t share
• How to think about multiple same-but-different design patterns for same-but-different hardware at the same time
• Finding the common ground in your ideas and design

This design-focused session will explore what it means to be a watch app, and discuss how a “watch app” is not the same as a “mobile app”

Building experiences for virtual and augmented reality is an unexplored and uncharted territory for many developers. As the technology matures and devices start to reach homes around the world, there is a huge demand for content. What many developers do not realise is that you don’t need to build a whole mobile app or spend lots of money on a big VR system. People everywhere already own capable devices – their smartphone and mobile browser! This presentation will show how virtual and augmented reality experiences can be developed for the mobile browser and run inexpensively on VR headsets like Google Cardboard (as well as be compatible with headsets like the Oculus Rift too!).

JavaScript developers are still relatively unaware of just how valuable their skillset is in the world of the Internet of Things. There is a huge amount of potential for developers without a background in hardware to get started creating connected prototypes quickly and easily. This presentation will cover how developers can get started with the Particle development platform (the Particle Core, Photon and Electron), its JavaScript SDK and the Particle cloud service to build an internet enabled prototype!

The majority of really great apps (think Apple design award winners and Material design award winners) have invested heavily in interaction design. Why? What is it about the ‘feel’ of these apps that makes them so great? How did they incorporate animation, interaction and motion into their design approach effectively, prioritise this against new features and ultimately ship a great product?

To answer some of these questions this talk will explore:

• Why interaction design is so important in mobile apps
• How to communicate the value in designing ‘motion’ to your colleagues, to clients, to end-users
• How can you successfully prioritise UI dynamics alongside new features for your product
• When during your product lifecycle you should invest time in it
• Tools, hints and tips for killer interactions

Fast site speed is essential for a good user experience, and can ultimately drive more traffic and increase conversion to your web site. This is especially important on mobile devices where slow network speeds can make an ordinarily slow site glacial. Usability studies have shown that response times over 1 second make the user feel like they’re waiting. At Expedia, we have been focusing on achieving a Perceived Instant experience for our users. We will present a case study where we achieved a Google Page Speed Insight score of 92 on mobile devices for our SEO pages, and the impact this has had on our perceived load times and traffic.

There are many great resources for getting started with Functional Reactive Programming and ReactiveCocoa, but what’s the next step? ReactiveCocoa is not just a nice wrapper for KVO, Signals can be used to model many common problems in Cocoa including managing the state of your UI, notifications and even business logic. Adopting ReactiveCocoa can make for more modular, self-documenting code — while still integrating easily with other APIs and your existing code. We would like to share with you some interesting, practical examples where we’ve used ReactiveCocoa to solve problems in our app. Our goal is to inspire you to consider how ReactiveCocoa can be applied in your own apps.

Are you ready? Here are some lessons we have learnt making virtual reality work at realestate.com.au in no particular order:

• Nobody can describe what VR actually is
• VR is a bit yuck
• Everything you’ve learned about UI is now probably useless
• The psychological effects are unknown
• Hardware sucks. And so does software
• Google will probably win
• Everyone who saw Lawnmover Man in 1992 is a frickin expert
• If you can buy it in Kmart, it’s probably not a revolution
• You can now tell your Mum all those hours on Quake 3D are totally paying off
• Science fiction tells us the long term prospects are grim
• Not sure people will ever be convinced to wear things on their heads

Fast site speed is essential for a good user experience, and can ultimately drive more traffic and increase conversion to your web site. This is especially important on mobile devices where slow network speeds can make an ordinarily slow site glacial. Usability studies have shown that response times over 1 second make the user feel like they’re waiting. At Expedia, we have been focusing on achieving a Perceived Instant experience for our users. We will present a case study where we achieved a Google Page Speed Insight score of 92 on mobile devices for our SEO pages, and the impact this has had on our perceived load times and traffic.

There are few frameworks that have promised “Write once, run everywhere” but the reality as we know it is every platform is different with different nuances that requires a different way of thinking. Facebook’s React Native offers a new promise is “Learn once, write anywhere”. In this talk I will show you as JavaScript developer can go from no mobile experience to building a performant Native App using JavaScript. You’ll learn about:

• What is React Native and how it differs from React JS
• What is possible using React Native – some sample apps
• How to think in React and Structure your components
• Getting started with App development in React native
• Bridging the gap – how to access native features from Javascript
• What’s coming up in the future for React Native

In this talk you will get a brief overview of Continuous Integration and Delivery for Mobile Development. What exactly does it mean in this context? The talk will also include some handy tips and best practices.

As an Android developer, I want to deliver features without making compromises on code quality.

Scenario 1 – Given I am dealing with 1000+ line activities, When I have to develop a complicated feature, Then I waste time orienting myself and fixing bugs.

Scenario 2 – Given I have integrated a backend API directly into my app logic, When that API changes, Then I have to refactor large segments of unrelated logic in order to utilise the new API.

Scenario 3 – Given I have cleanly architected my application, When business/presentation/backend logic changes, Then I can easily update the relevant code without breaking unrelated features!

In this talk, two Android developers will present their take on what a cleanly architected app looks like and why it makes our lives easier. A well-defined separation of concerns has benefits not just for our sanity as developers, but also for the project workflow as it allows multiple developers to collaborate on a single feature with ease. We will be exploring how the domain-driven approach can improve code clarity, allow you to easily write tests, and provide a scalable infrastructure for you to quickly iterate on. Join us on our path of discovery as we discuss the advantages, drawbacks and implementation specifics in the context of a small sample project.

With the 100th year anniversary of World War 1 the Australian War Memorial in Canberra needed to provide a unique way for visitors to experience their displays. They wanted to allow people to both contemplate and experience spine chilling moments, to relate to individual stories, to create a personal connection between visitors and the exhibits. Their solution was to commission a system which allows visitors to experience customised audio, through a mobile device, triggered by indoor positioning technology. At the entrance to the gallery visitors select one of 5 tours from a wall length touch screen, and then with a Nexus 5 device and headphones, enter the world of World War 1. As they explore the galleries their movements trigger audio files which are combined, based on the users’ movements. This creates an experience which is personal and moving.

Everyone loves to use the phrase wearable tech–and to talk about how many billions there are to be made–but if wearables are so great, why do they all suck? Author and fashion tech strategist Liza Kindred takes a look at the missteps so far and proposes a new way that finally goes beyond strapping a screen on your wrist–or throwing a sensor in a bracelet. Explore an eye-opening set of design principles and opportunities that go beyond novelty or technology for technology’s sake. Learn how to create real insight, joy, and utility with this most personal of technologies—for broadcast, interaction, privacy, tracking, and more. Find out why it’s important to think beyond screens and to consider the crucial roles of fashion, utility, fun, and sustainability in your product concept. The landscape is fractured, the technology is burgeoning, & the real adoption is just getting started. Liza shares a corrective vision for how to make the most of the amazing opportunity—instead of creating more glassholes.

The Agile Manifesto makes little mention of anyone except developers pairing with each other, which we feel is a missed trick.

The idea is that designers and developers should work more closely. Share desk space, war stories, and insight into customers and technology. From better mutual understanding comes better results.

We will use a live pairing demo to show just how valuable designer and developer pairing can be.

We’ll use examples to cover off pairing developers with designers: from understanding of the customer to the opportunities presented by the technology, and why it’s so relevant in out IoT, mobile and multi-touchpoint society

Unlike their showy cousins Activities and Fragments, Android Services are often left out of the limelight, staying quietly in the background, carrying out the book-keeping jobs needed to display all those fancy UI elements on the screen.

But do you really know about Services? While they have much fewer life-cycle callbacks then Activities, there are plenty of interesting and unexpected behaviours and not-quite documented features that you should be aware of when using Services.

This talk will take a quick journey through some interesting facets of using Services, with plenty of real world code examples from apps I’ve recently worked on to help you make the most of using Services in your Android apps.

One of Swift’s most distinct feature is the Optional type. Despite it being new to most iOS developers, some functional programming languages have been dealing with optionals for a long time. In this talk we will explore techniques from the functional world that make working with Swift Optional a real pleasure.

On the face of it, Android Wear and the Apple Watch are very similar: they’re both wristwatches, they’re both closely tied to your phone, and the tech media are unaccountably excited about both of them. But how do their differences affect you as a developer? This session explores what it takes to design and consider the same application for the two most prominent wearable platforms in existence today.

In this talk, you’ll learn how to build and design a great application for both platforms. You’ll learn about:

• The design patterns that Apple Watch and Android Wear (and to a lesser extent, other platforms like Pebble) share
• The design patterns that they don’t share
• How to think about multiple same-but-different design patterns for same-but-different hardware at the same time
• Finding the common ground in your ideas and design

This design-focused session will explore what it means to be a watch app, and discuss how a “watch app” is not the same as a “mobile app”

In this session, you’ll learn about game design: the art and science of constructing enjoyable, engaging games. We aren’t doing any coding, and we’re not talking game engine development – instead, we’ll be taking a deep dive into game design theory, using it to understand how people interact with rules, and how to use it to improve your community, your company, your project, and your software.

Video games are the most glamorous of the electronic arts, but splashy graphics and amazing sound aren’t the defining feature of games. Games are the world’s only interactive artistic medium, and good interaction needs to be designed. Today’s master crafters of interaction design are game designers.

In this session, you’ll get a fresh perspective on user experience design and community engagement by understanding how people are interacting with the fastest-growing form of entertainment in the world.

Topics covered in this session include:

• Why games work, and how to analyse and build engaging experiences
• The Mechanics-Dynamics-Aesthetics framework: what it’s good for, and how to use it
• How to understand what a game’s doing, and how to build for fun

We’ll take this knowledge and apply it to real world examples in the realms of UX and UI design, community management, project management, and company building, as well as a few examples from the actual game development industry.

As an Android developer, I want to deliver features without making compromises on code quality.

Scenario 1 – Given I am dealing with 1000+ line activities, When I have to develop a complicated feature, Then I waste time orienting myself and fixing bugs.

Scenario 2 – Given I have integrated a backend API directly into my app logic, When that API changes, Then I have to refactor large segments of unrelated logic in order to utilise the new API.

Scenario 3 – Given I have cleanly architected my application, When business/presentation/backend logic changes, Then I can easily update the relevant code without breaking unrelated features!

In this talk, two Android developers will present their take on what a cleanly architected app looks like and why it makes our lives easier. A well-defined separation of concerns has benefits not just for our sanity as developers, but also for the project workflow as it allows multiple developers to collaborate on a single feature with ease. We will be exploring how the domain-driven approach can improve code clarity, allow you to easily write tests, and provide a scalable infrastructure for you to quickly iterate on. Join us on our path of discovery as we discuss the advantages, drawbacks and implementation specifics in the context of a small sample project.

Most people think of SAP as the terribly ugly and unusable finance/HR system. In this presentation, we will explain how we are trying to change this image by using the design thinking methodology to better understand our customers. I will cover three scenario’s on which we used design thinking to improve the customer engagement process. The first being Australia Post and the parcel collection process which we used an iPad and beacons to improve the tracking and parcel collection process. The second scenario being an electrical field service technician having to complete a work in the field. We use a MYO and our visual enterprise software on an iPad to demonstrate how we can improve machine maintenance processes by providing a gesture control schematic where the technician can continue the animation process without having to put down tools or remove gloves. The final scenario combines an iPad, beacons, iPhone and Apple Watch to improve the loan origination process. I will then detail the design thinking process that was used to develop the above customer demonstrations and steps others can take to use design thinking in their customer engagement process.

A clean architecture makes your project more maintainable, the intent of your code clearer and helps you achieve a higher test coverage. When we first read about VIPER we were interested in its normative approach and how it could give a strong structure to our projects. After using VIPER for 8 months with more than 10 developers on an enterprise iOS app, we can share how it helped us achieve our goals and what didn’t work so well.

This talk will give you a short introduction to VIPER, explain its benefits and limitations, and present what we gained as a team and what I learned as an individual.

The goal of this talk is to provide attendees with practical advice that can help app designers and developers work together more effectively. It draws on the experience Chris has gained through 4 years at Deloitte Digital, leading both design and/or engineering for prominent Australian clients including Australia Post, ING Direct, Telstra, The Victorian and Federal Governments.

At the heart of the discussion is the fact that designer’s goal of UI consistency and the developer’s goal of cleanly architected code are not opposing desires, but in fact the same goal spoken in a different language. The talk will include both general advice about how teams can work together more effectively and also very tangible recommendations for structuring design deliverables and UI code.

TL;DR – If you have callbacks manipulating object state, you have bugs.

Most modern mobile apps are event driven – location, touch events, network calls, push notifications etc can all trigger app behaviour. Traditional imperative approaches to managing these events are difficult to understand/maintain and are a reliable source of semantic bugs in your app.

ReactiveCocoa is an open source Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) implementation for iOS, and offers a better approach to implementing event-driven code. This presentation will show how to use the new ReactiveCocoa 3 to build better Swift apps.

Internet connected devices must occasionally phone-home to report measurements, receive new instructions, or generally respond to control. Often, it does this unattended, on unreliable low-bandwidth connections.

Today, there are readily available public online services that can play the role of the phone-home server for a modest fee. Yet, we still find ourselves building our own; perhaps for unique technical requirements, data sovereignty, cost savings, or just for “reasons”.

Drawing from experience of rewriting a legacy custom IoT backend platform, this talk discusses some dos and dont’s should you want to DIY. It covers security, authentication, API versioning and deprecation, device relationships (eg, hierarchies and grouping), live notifications, and more.

Experimentation with software is easy, quick, and cheap, and it has been used with great effect to try out product ideas and test the feasibility of businesses. Now it is easier than ever before to apply experimentation with hardware as well, to create application-specific devices using inexpensive, open-source modules, and strong community support.

Experimentation with software is easy, quick, and cheap, and it has been used with great effect to try out product ideas and test the feasibility of businesses. Now it is easier than ever before to apply experimentation with hardware as well, to create application-specific devices using inexpensive, open-source modules, and strong community support.

What could wearables for cats be? I’ve been working on wearables that aim to improve feline fitness and overall happiness. The system is made up of a smart collar and smart toys.

The talk will cover:

• Research involved: hardware, cat psychology and IoT
• Prototyped the different parts of the wearables at different stages
• Calculating an algorithm for cat steps
• User testing with cats

I would like to challenge attendees to think of new directions for where to take the internet of things. This talk will empower attendees to pursue IoT projects that they otherwise would have been scared off of, through showing them how to simply and effectively prototype and carry out user testing.

As mobile developers, accessibility often gets pushed aside. For people with disabilities, the communication tools we take for granted are often denied to them. I want to talk about ways of building new interfaces to enable inclusivity and expand peoples understanding of the complex landscape of users with accessibility needs.

It’s obviously not easy to make mobile apps accessible – otherwise more apps would be. Over the past few years, apps have become more complex and accessibility has suffered.

Through research, user testing and experimentation, I’ve found ways to speed up the process of making a mobile app accessible.

For the first part of the talk, I would like to cover understanding the complex landscape of users, and the tools that Apple provide developers to enable these users to use their devices. This would include a few short demos of different aspects of accessibility features available on iOS – mostly VoiceOver and Switch Control.

The second part of the talk would focus on ways of improving accessibility UX and how to quickly and effectively implement it in mobile apps. The talk would be helpful for any mobile app developers regardless of platform, but the code examples and demos would be given on iOS.

Amidst a the hype and buzz of wearables, the stark truth is that to date most have failed to deliver life-impacting benefits. But there is one exception, and surprisingly it’s in the world of elite sport. Aussie business Catapult Sports invented the category almost a decade ago, and today is an ASX-listed public company worth close to $200m and ranked as the 12th most innovative company globally by Fast Company magazine. Executive Chairman Dr. Adir Shiffman will reveal the tech behind Catapult’s ability to reduce injury and boost performance, what is driving its global growth, and how it came to be the world leader with over 700 teams globally including the AFL, NRL, NFL, NBA, EPL, NCAA D1 College, EU Soccer, and many, many more.

The Agile Manifesto makes little mention of anyone except developers pairing with each other, which we feel is a missed trick.

The idea is that designers and developers should work more closely. Share desk space, war stories, and insight into customers and technology. From better mutual understanding comes better results.

We will use a live pairing demo to show just how valuable designer and developer pairing can be.

We’ll use examples to cover off pairing developers with designers: from understanding of the customer to the opportunities presented by the technology, and why it’s so relevant in out IoT, mobile and multi-touchpoint society

With the 100th year anniversary of World War 1 the Australian War Memorial in Canberra needed to provide a unique way for visitors to experience their displays. They wanted to allow people to both contemplate and experience spine chilling moments, to relate to individual stories, to create a personal connection between visitors and the exhibits. Their solution was to commission a system which allows visitors to experience customised audio, through a mobile device, triggered by indoor positioning technology. At the entrance to the gallery visitors select one of 5 tours from a wall length touch screen, and then with a Nexus 5 device and headphones, enter the world of World War 1. As they explore the galleries their movements trigger audio files which are combined, based on the users’ movements. This creates an experience which is personal and moving.

In the beginning, SoundCloud mobile and web clients both used our public API, which allowed us to “be our own customers” when driving our public API development. As our mobile and web clients evolved, public API development became a bottleneck for feature development, because mobile and web clients have different needs. To unblock ourselves, we introduced BFF (Backend-for-the-Frontend!), a framework to build custom, usecase-oriented APIs which allowed our mobile engineers to develop and maintain their own API (in Scala!). BFF’s goal is to make writing robust, scalable APIs easy. This talk describes the wins and learnings in moving to this architecture and how it enabled us to transition to feature teams at SoundCloud.

Facebook’s React framework has taken the web development world by storm. Building on a model of lightweight components and one-way reactive data flow, it has proven itself as a way to build complex yet performant single-page applications.

Now, recognising that the principles underlying React are not unique to the web, Facebook have released React Native, a framework for building native apps. In short, React Native gives you a native look-and-feel, but uses a Javascript-based component model. With an iOS version out since January and an Android version on the way, React Native aims to bring a “Learn Once, Write Anywhere” approach to native app development.

In this talk, we’ll start by discussing the fundamentals of React, specifically:

• The concepts of the virtual DOM and render-tree diffing
• The basics of the React component model
• The benefits of one-way data flow

Then we’ll go into how React Native translates these ideas into the native app development world. This will include:

• How render-tree diffing works with native apps
• How the React component model works with React Native
• How React Native handles layout, styling and animation

Along the way, we’ll also see:

• The benefits of React’s declarative component model
• How React Native differs from other hybrid app technologies like Phonegap or Titanium
• How Javascript’s inherently asynchronous nature makes it easier to write apps that are fluid and responsive

Those coming from a native development background will leave this talk with an understanding of how the React programming model can make their app easier to comprehend and reason about. Those with a background in web development will learn how it will let them apply their skills to the world of native app development. Either way, this talk will be a great opportunity to learn about the revolutionary principles behind this exciting new framework.

IoT devices vary from extremely limited 8/16/32 processors to Linux capable machines. In order to quickly develop products/applications, one needs higher level tool chain for productivity. In this talk, we describe the essential features and constraints of programming models for different device classes. Device programming typically requires substantial low-level coding which often needs to be substantially rewritten for different processor configurations. Productivity and portability are often achieved by using discipline programming techniques and high level language abstractions. We then discuss our experience with table driven interpreters, procedural, object and vector virtual machines and associated tooling.