Session Videos

Brandon Alexander – We Can Do Better Next Time…

The Six MuskiOSteers: Why UI/UX Details Matter

The Objective-C runtime is a powerful thing. It provides us with flexibility and speed. Understanding the runtime and how NSObject works is key to understanding your application and how to better architect solutions to problems.

In this talk, you will learn how the Objective-C runtime works and how to bend it to your will.

You do iOS memory management every day, but are you doing it right? Learn the best

practices for writing accessor methods, using properties, and connecting to objects in

resource (.xib) files. You’ll also learn some handy techniques for debugging crashes due to

memory problems. Finally, you’ll get an introduction to ARC, the new memory management strategy coming in Xcode 4.2.

Come learn about the Accelerate frameworks introduced in iOS 4 for iPhone and iPad developers. Useful for any area of development that works with large sets of data, from audio and video processing to scientific applications, from game AI to augmented reality.

We’ll get you past the (understandable) trauma and lack of information out there about how to effectively use these libraries and to make your code scream. Often in programming, you just need that moment where all of the sudden you understand the beauty and power of some library. This session aims to give you that understanding.

Example code and demonstrations of the Accelerate framework will punctuate the talk, showing elegant ways to use the frameworks to not only get your code running fast, but even becoming more readable, maintainable and elegant.

The number of options for managing application data continues to grow as mobile applications find new ways of gathering information from the world. From web servers to GPS and other hardware devices, our controller objects are under siege by these multiple sources and destinations of information.

This talk seeks to codify a new architectural pattern that extends the traditional MVC approach for user interface applications. This approach, called Model-View-Controller-Store, involves abstracting the logic for dealing with external data sources and the filesystem into a separate class of objects, thus giving our controller objects a clear and optimal focus. This talk will also include best practice demonstrations for using MVCS.

Learn how to user Core Graphics, Core Animation, and UIKit drawing to create beautiful user interfaces and custom controls.

UIViewController and it’s various subclasses are a key part of any iOS application. In iOS5 Apple has formalized the relationship between containing view controllers (like the UINavigationController) and contained view controllers. Come to this session and understand this relationship and how to use that understanding to write your own containers.

Whether you’re designing apps for small businesses or a very large enterprises, the way you approach your app’s user interface matters. How do you approach design when an employee will receive weeks of training? How do approach design when Grandpa barely knows how to check his eHarmony account? We’ll be discussing advanced techniques that allow you to take advantage of the gorgious Retina Display and ways you can improve your app’s usability for any audience. You’ll lean why every pixel matters in the mobile app universe.

Touch and animation are at the heart and soul of iOS. Good use of both make an app feel natural and organic. Apple has consistently raised the bar for such interfaces as the latest incantations of iMovie and Garage Band show. In this session you will learn how to take full advantage of UIKit, Core Animation and Gestural Recognizers to create stunning and touchable interfaces. This is an advanced, “roll up your sleeves” kind of session with a lot of code. By the time we are finished, you will think differently about how you build your interfaces, and your apps will be better for it.

Simple Concurrency with GCD

Multicore has officially come to iOS devices, and taking advantage of those cores in your apps is simpler than you might think. Concurrent programming is never easy, but GCD makes it a whole lot easier. In this session, you will learn the ins and outs of GCD and how to use it to effectively.

Attention is harder than ever to come by these days. Tired of being ignored by the major tech blogs, or even blogs in your market?

Come join Jonathan as he shares how to hack the press. Not only strategy, but tactics that you can use to get the attention you deserve.

This session shows different ways to interact with JavaScript inside a UIWebView. You’ll learn how to pass data from Objective-C into JavaScript and back. You’ll also see ways to hook web-based UI’s such as Sencha Touch so that user interactions can be handled by native Cocoa Touch objects. You’ll also learn about an open-source library that simplifies some of these cross-language interactions.

A speaking session covering some handy tips for more efficient use of XCode.

Headline from 2012: Apple destroys yet another market by introducing AppleTV AppStore. 60,000 games available today! Nintendo in panic mode…

Did you know the latest AppleTV runs iOS? Is your app ready for the AppleTV AppStore? Do you know how best to present your app on a large-screen format?

This session will teach you everything you want to know about AppleTV, including:

- How to develop unofficially until Apple releases the AppleTV AppStore

- Hardware provided by AppleTV

- Designing your app for the big screen

- User interface issues with limited remote control

- Sending audio and video to your AppleTV via AirPlay

Learn how you can distribute OTA AdHoc builds of your applications to users without iTunes syncing. See how continuous integration can automate your applications build and distribution. Discover hidden command line tools to help script your build process.

Unit testing your code ensures that it does what it was designed to do. This presentation will cover methods of unit testing (OCUnit) for iOS and Mac developers using a hands-on approach. Code will be discussed and distributed for everyone to try out. By the end of this session you will know what a unit test is, why you should test, and how to write one to make your code better.

Discussing the pros and cons of different web service approaches and how they relate to mobile apps. How much data is enough, how much is too much? SOAP or REST? JSON or XML? What’s easier for the client developers? What’s easier for the platform developers? Where’s the compromise?

Xcode 4 finally includes much requested support for Git. Git is a free, distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency, which makes it perfect for indie developers.

While Git has been around for a while, the tools and workflows are only now maturing. Now is the time to examine how you can benefit from using it.

A traditional object-oriented hierarchy and architecture isn’t the best choice for most games. Furthermore, the iterative and rapid development cycles on iOS can leave you stuck when it comes to expanding your OO-dependent code base to meet new and changing requirements and design.

A component architecture gives designers and developers (and both for one-man bands) the freedom and flexibility to iterate on a game design whilst provide a solid (arguably more solid) framework on which to deliver a solid, maintainable and testable codebase.

Not everyone can make enough money to survive on app sales alone. We will discuss the basics of running a successful business focused on contract development instead of just App Store sales. We will talk about how to get customers, analyze their needs, and ultimately sign contracts for development work. Things such as sales, proposal creation, a work from home environment, legal contracts, and maintenance work will all be covered. Where possible, real world numbers and examples of real projects will be used to support the discussion.

How to be a successful iOS Consultant while working on your own apps too.

- finding clients

- learning to say NO

- making them love you

- how to negotiate contracts to mutual advantage

- legal traps to try to avoid

- how to worthy of a good rate

- hourly vs fixed bid

- how to structure a project for mutual risk management

The plan for cashing in on a “million dollar idea” tends to start with step 1, an idea, and end with step 3, profit. The mysterious step 2 turns out to be the hard part, both because it is mysterious, and because it is much, much more complicated than one bullet point will allow.

After having a doctor with a flashlight explain where ideas come from, we’ll explore step 2. We’ll start with presenter Mike Lee’s $1000 an hour idea refinement service. Then we’ll lay out the steps necessary to turn a refined idea into a product.

We’ll look at planning, implementing, and testing features. We’ll explore team building, funding, and marketing. We’ll take a close look at your customers, your platform, and your market. And we’ll ask the all important questions of when and what we’ll finally ship.

With out virtual product hitting store shelves, we’ll look at the real meaning of step 3. We’ll talk about customer service, virality, and planned updates. Finally, we’ll learn about the fear and consequences of success, and how to deal with them.

Whether you have shipped an app, or are sitting on the next big thing, you won’t want to miss this hilarious and irreverent nontechnical look at the hows and whys of making a living in technology.

Beta testing needn’t be complicated for developers, nor especially for testers. Learn how to make life as easy as possible for everyone, resulting in the best feedback from your testers, ultimately resulting in a better app.

In this session, we’ll discuss all of the different aspects of successful beta testing. Plus, you’ll learn how to create, distribute, and test beta versions as easy as possible.

You’ll also learn how to automate your software builds, from distributing beta versions using the open source project HockeyKit to managing crash reports using the open source project QuincyKit. Best of all, we’ll show you how to incorporate HockeyKit and QuincyKit into your own apps.

No longer can developers rely on the visual canvas alone. Today’s mobile consumers expect to be dazzled with sight AND sound! Join Ben Long as he reveals some simple DIY techniques to heighten the sonic appeal of a mobile app. Examples include top grossing games on iOS as well as audio implementation tips for Android and WP7. Attendees will leave with an arsenal of free tools to quickly make original music and sound effects.

SOAP and .NET Windows Communication Foundation-based Web services are very widespread. This class will teach you how to connect with and consume SOAP-based Web services in various settings. We’ll start with a short introduction to SOAP and Web services and some of its various flavors, an overview of the functionality and mechanics of working with them, and then look at practical examples of consuming the services. We’ll use examples that cover both published web services and internal web services.

You’ll also learn about HTTPS security and authentication schemes, and also some frameworks for working with SOAP and XML, including the RemObjects SDK. At the end, you’ll be equipped with the information and knowledge to begin integrating and consuming SOAP and WCF Web services from your iOS applications.

Jim McKeeth-Integrating iOS Applications into your Database Infrastructure

This session covers integrating iOS apps into enterprise database architecture, both existing architecture, and creating new architecture from the ground up. We will discuss issues like centralized business logic, LDAP authentication, distributed data storage, load balancing, working offline and data integrity.

Practical examples will be given with RemObjects Data Abstract, but general principles and practices will be covered too. This goes beyond just pulling small amounts of data over a Web service, but looking at creating data rich iOS applications that work with data on remote servers, and some of the concerns with such architecture. Server side will cover Mac, Windows and Linux, with a variety of databases.

By taking this class, you’ll be equipped with the information and knowledge to create data rich iOS applications that work with database servers in your data center and provide offline synchronization.

Instruments is the best way to determine where the bugs and performance issues are in your code without guessing. However, just using Instruments can be quite a challenge. While Instruments won’t pop up a big red alarm announcing “Bug found”, or “This is why your code is so slow”, it does provide valuable clues. In this session, we’ll go over a few real life examples encountered while developing several iOS and Mac apps.

Postage, a virtual postcard application for iOS, won an Apple Design Award in 2009. In this session we will discuss some of the user experience design philosophies the development team applied while crafting Postage.

In this session we will talk about how we designed our application flow around the constraints of a mobile application. We will also talk about your users mental context and how to create a cohesive and natural experience in your application. We will also dive into techniques we used during development to refine our user experience and development considerations to make your application a delight to use.

Daniel Pasco was unable to make it, but did send the funny and awesome Jaimee Newberry to talk in his stead.

The objective of this session is to share the experiences gathered in the last 2 years from my perspective as CTO of a quickly growing company. The hurdles I encountered and how I resolved them may help others move forward in a more painless manner.

I strived to maintain the personal feeling with the team while focused on quality and respecting the constraints of a self funded company. This demanded devising and implemented new methods and processes many times as the team grew.  I’ll speak about what went right and what I’d never do again.

Learn how to add this crucial functionality for monitizing your apps. You’ll learn the ins and outs of the StoreKit SDK and adding both client-only and client-server versions of this increasingly popular capability for selling digital goods and subscriptions inside your own applications.

iOS devices not only continue to get more and more powerful, but they are also outfitted with great cameras for image and video acquisition.

In this session I’ll introduce the OpenCV library. We will go over the basics and move on to more advanced algorithms. By the end of this talk you will have an excellent understanding of OpenCV’s structure, how to build it for iOS devices, and how to pass OpenCV data back and forth between UIKit.

This talk will cover a number of topics around mobile user interface design and the challenges for designing for a small screen. The talk will cover techniques, design patterns, differences from traditional web or desktop design and the various challenges for different phone and tablet platforms. The talk will also cover specifics on iPhone wire-framing techniques.

Topics include

- Mobile yesterday vs. Today

- Unique challenges of Mobile

- Widgets and Techniques

- Mobile Wireframing

- Mobile Usability

- Designing for the Mobile Web

High Level Overview – Leveraging Game Center and Game Kit functionality inside and outside of games to bring rich social networking and connectivity to your Apps.

Kyle Richter-Going Indie Without Going Broke

This talk covers the ins and outs of starting a startup development company. Learn from my experiences over the last 7 years and avoid the pitfalls that I wasn’t lucky enough to get a heads up on. We will cover 3 major ways to bring in income (Consulting, In House Products, and Training), legal hurdles, bootstrapping (Doing it without investors), marketing, time management, how to hire great developers and designs, selling off products or the entire company, and many more vital topics not found anywhere else.

Free used to mean loss leader and unprofitable for developers, but the modern App store ecosystem actually makes free a completely viable alternative. Riptide Games has released the majority of their titles to date for free, and this session will discuss their successes (and failures) for attendees to learn from. The majority of references will be from Riptide Games’ own titles, but other examples will be used as appropriate. The main discussion will be around the pros and cons to creating free iOS titles, and the methods and monetization strategies developers should consider when creating free games for this market.

Without a doubt the most ironic tool you can use to build apps is Adobe Flash. But there are actually some advantages to creating apps in Flash. It is quick, easy, and has a great vector graphics engine among other things. This session will demonstrate some of the strengths and weaknesses to using Flash to make iOS apps for the iPhone and iPad.

This session is an overview of legal issues facing iPhone developers as they create and bring applications to market. The session will cover the types of intellectual property protection available for your apps, and some of the legal threats emerging from “patent trolls” like Lodsys. We will also discuss fundamental business issues like putting solid contracts in place with your employees and contractors. Bring questions.

At the beginning of 2009, Michael Schneider left Silicon Valley technology law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati to found HiveBrain Software. After a number of early hits on the app store, HiveBrain has emerged as a content publishing company focused on the Andrew Johnson series of self-help applications. Michael is co-author of the book The Business of iPhone App Development: Making and Marketing Apps that Succeed, published by Apress.

Get insight on how to market and sell your apps beyond the expected details. Features, design, price, messaging, even the app’s name all play a crucial part in your app’s success. We’ll discuss all of the ingredients needed for a successful product launch and making sure it stays successful. Of course, this all assumes your app idea doesn’t suck. :)

Automated functional testing is crucial to the development of all but the most trivial iPhone and iPad applications. A core suite of automated functional tests provides a solid foundation for rapidly iterating product releases by ensuring that the introduction of each new feature doesn’t inadvertently break pre-existing functionality.

In this class, we’ll explore how to use FoneMonkey — a free and open source tool that automates functional testing of iPhone and iPad applications — to record, edit, playback and verify application functionality on iOS simulators and devices. We’ll also see how FoneMonkey scripts can be embedded within Objective-C programs and extended to handle arbitrarily complex application usage scenarios. We’ll also look at how FoneMonkey test suites can be run using XCode and OCUnit, and how FoneMonkey can be run with continuous integration tools.

In addition, we’ll discuss best practices for test automation that let developers get the maximum benefit from creating the minimum number of automated tests.

Want to make an iPhone game? There’s never been a quicker and easier way than using Cocos2D! In this session, we’ll teach you how to make a simple minigame in Cocos2D through a series of lectures and demos.

After taking this workshop, you will be able to create a simple Cocos2D minigame yourself from scratch, and be familiar with the some of the most important techniques in Cocos2D development, including

sprites, scenes, and actions. Perfect for those who are interested in attending the 360iDev Game Jam!

Since the opening of the Mac App Store, more iOS programmers are writing Mac apps. The challenge, however, is sharing code between the two platforms. Copying code between projects certainly works but it’s cumbersome and error prone. A better approach is to package your shared code into a reusable library. In this session you learn how to manage shared code using a single Xcode project that builds a static library for iOS and a framework for OS X. A comparison of code sharing approaches is also covered including using Xcode 4 Workspaces, git modules, and Subversion externals. Lastly, you’ll learn tips on writing platform specific code within the shared code library, common gotchas when targeting 32-bit and 64-bit flavors of OS X, and how to unit test your shared code library.

Can a group of scrappy devs who never have to come into work really pull of a big iPhone game project? A post mortem of Tiny Heroes and how ROWE* works or doesn’t work in the iPhone development megaverse.

*ROWE: Results Only Work Environment

This session will walk the user through a basic introduction to the syntax of blocks to get everyone on the same page and then discuss the following:

Replacing callback methods with block handlers

A walkthrough of using NSNotificationCenter+Blocks

Extended KVO to use blocks

Using blocks to better handle network operations

Using blocks with Core Location on both Mac OS X and iOS

Writing your own frameworks and classes to be powered by blocks from the start.

I’ll walk the user through the design of either my SGHTTPOperation REST library or my new Dropbox library called SyncKit that I designed in blocks.

How do you design a user experience that meets the needs of connected professionals while maintaining an air of sophistication? How do you find the right balance between over-the-top period stylization and crafted subtlety? What would Don Draper do? He’d probably pour a glass of scotch and enjoy a cigarette.

There are now over 25 million iPads in the hands of consumers around the world. The iPad literally is a device that has defined the tablet category. It also happens to be one of the hottest places of innovation for mobile applications. Whether it’s your first time creating an iPad app or you already have one in the App Store, come learn how to “think iPad.” This session will include no code, focusing instead on the strategy and user experience considerations necessary to build a compelling iPad application.

Code review of a image caching solution specifically designed for iOS devices. During this session we will discuss what issues arise on iOS applications where they have a high reusable media content. Once we understand the problem we will review a solution to the problem.

Purchase all 360|iDev Austin Session recordings available as 1 purchase, $85.00 Please note, this collection is Austin only, and only those sessions that individually have a “add to cart” button by them. Other sessions are forthcoming, and will be added to the bundle as we finish rendering them. You’ll be able to get those as well.

How can you know that a little dude jumping from platform to platform is killer fun before you build it? Can a company owner really tell his employees to only show up to work if they feel like it, ever? How can we gel all of the swirling ideas and thoughts that make up everything we are trying to accomplish into something magical, memorable and profitable. Fun is an elusive, squirly thing but when you understand its nature you can harness its power. For the first time anywhere, David Whatley introduces a radical ways of thinking about fun and shows the results of his efforts to take a company that had lost its mojo and make to the most creative, fun and productive place on Earth while making a lot of money doing it. You’ll see how flipping a few bits in your mental map of the universe will give you the power bring more to your life, your business, and your projects than you’ve ever imagined. This is the power of Funonomics.

Warning, there is a significant chance of having your mind blown.

However, that is no reason to not have great design. Rather than give up or ignore UX we will discuss guerrilla techniques to 1) refine your application’s core value and purpose, 2) understand your users and their needs, 3) brainstorm and evaluate ideas, concepts and designs, 4) and test those designs with real users quickly and iteratively all within the unique context of the iOS indie developer and the app store.

There’s no question about it: the most valuable apps are ones that are networked with other apps and information services. We’ll take a broad look at tools and resources that you can use to build great networked apps. Then we’ll dive into a specific example that’s built with a variety of different technologies that you can use to make your own comparisons and build your own apps. Specific topics we’ll cover include data-driven app architecture, Google App Engine and other hosting options, working with APIs (finding them, creating them, and making them great), and big data storage solutions including relational and NoSQL database engines.

This session will build on my talk at 360iDev Denver and my chapter in the book “More iPhone Cool Projects” to discuss using NSOperation, NSOperationQueues, GCD queues, and blocks.

Book: More iPhone Cool Projects

The iPad introduced a new style of computing, confronting designers with unfamiliar aches and pains. Learn the symptoms (and fixes) for a range of new-to-the-world iPad interface ailments, including Greedy Pixel Syndrome, the dreaded Frankeninterface, and the “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” bait and switch. Explore practical techniques and eye- opening gotchas of iPad interface design, all grounded in the ergonomics, context, psychology, and nascent culture of these new devices (both iOS and Android). The presentation inoculates you against common problems with close-up looks at successful iPad apps from early sketches to final design.

Josh Clark-Designing for Touch: Mobile Design Is Industrial Design Designing for touch means you’re doing more than just slinging pixels: you’re designing a physical interface to be explored by human hands. Just as surely as if you were soldering circuit boards, molding plastic, or shuffling die-cast buttons, your design defines the physical experience of the device, with honest-to-god ergonomic issues. Explore how industrial-design principles apply to mobile app design, and learn the rules of thumb (and fingers) that describe the best app designs.

Bonus session covering GIT.

Jiva DeVoe-Classes – Better Living Through Customization
Take an in-depth tour of some of cool ways that you can extend and customize classes in Objective-C. In this session, we’ll dive heavily into how to use categories to add functionality to existing classes. How to associate variables with classes without using inheriance, and finally how you can use Objective-C’s dynamic nature to reuse more code.

Nathan Eror-Practical UIKit: Creating Custom Views and Components

The iOS SDK ships with a rich and flexible set of UI components, and these built in views and controls cover about 90% of potential iOS interfaces. They should make up most (if not all) of your app’s UI, but sometimes, standard UIKit just isn’t enough. Whether you want to add a little touch of flair to your UI, or your app design calls for components that simply are not available, your app’s success could hinge on the quality of your custom views.

In this hands-on, code heavy session we will craft a strategy for designing and building stable and reusable custom views, and we will actually build some of our own. You will learn how to combine UIKit components, Core Animation, and Quartz 2D in your custom

views. You will also learn the performance and complexity trade-offs between these different technologies and when you should avoid them.

There is a lot more to building custom views than subclassing UIView and overriding drawRect. In fact, you should avoid drawRect if at all possible. Want to learn why and how? This session is for you.

Cocos2D is a library that a lot of developers use to build interactive/animated games and other applications. This talk introduces the user to the Cocos2D framework – its capabilities, components, and the structure of the framework. During this presentation, I not only introduce the Cocos2D components, but the attendees will actually build a small game app that helps them get comfortable with this tool to allow them to incorporate it into their own applications. All these skills are applicable to both the iPhone and the iPad (and any other iOS devices in the future).

Expedite the development process by approaching user experience first. Get to know wireframing tools and techniques that will help you formulate a cohesive user experience for your app that can be passed off for polish and implementation with minimized iteration.

Book: iPhone Adv. Projects

There’s plenty of work involved getting the client side of a iOS app into production, so what kind of masochists create an app that implements a server component? And how does an indie development shop find the time and resources to give it the care and feeding it so desperately needs?

We’ll cover some of the fantastic things about having a server component (metrics, Push Notifications, App Store receipt handling, did we mention metrics?) as well as the not-quite-as-fantastic (24×7 system monitoring, rolling upgrades for services that can’t go down, data security considerations/regulations, the occasional sleepless night) and will then focus on processes, products and technologies that make this all easier for a small team to implement, including continuous integration strategies, use & abuse of Amazon Web Services (EC2), and open source solutions for security & otherwise.

Topics: 1. The Marketing Model 2. Viral Vectors (SMS, email, Facebook, Twitter) 3. Predicted Growth vs Actual Growth 4. Conversation (Adoption) Rates and Optimization 5. Analytics & Customer Behavior 6. The Goal: Revenue

In this session you will learn why and where you can and should use videos, how to capture them, edit them, host them and show them inside and outside your apps.

It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that piracy rates are very high in the App Store. With a simple click of a button, your app is decrypted, repackaged and uploaded for the public to download and use…and you don’t see a penny of this. While you will never completely solve the problem, there are things you can do to slow down the crackers and perhaps increase your initial sales.

This session discusses countermeasures you can add to your app to make it harder for crackers to do what they do. Beat them at their own game and take back your app sales!

I will describe in detail the countermeasures that were added to our iPhone game “polyhedra”. I will also discuss how to hide your data from any snooping eyes and even how it relates to Lite versions. I will also show how to monitor your app usage and how it pertains to knowing if your app has been compromised.

Book: Learn Mac OSX Snow Leopard

Legendary product engineer Mike Leeâ drawing from 8 years of experience working on such hits as Delicious Library, Tap Tap Revenge, Obama ’08, and Apple’s Mobile Storeâ will show you how to squeeze the suck from your app. You’ll explore common types of suck and their remedies, then dive deep on the underlying causes of suck to help you become the type of developer who makes apps that don’t suck.

Making Apps That Don’t Suck (Optional Workshop)

Master the concepts of the “Making Apps That Don’t Suck” presentation with a speaker- led, audience-directed discussionâ then subject your masterpiece-in-progress to live critique in a fun, irreverent, learning laboratory.

Book: iPhone Advanced Projects

Attend this session to see how to add mediation layer into your app to manage multiple ad networks.

Jim McKeeth-Advanced Data Infrastructure

Do your data needs go beyond connecting to local data? Then proper data infrastructure is important. Whether you are adding an iPhone or iPad application to your existing enterprise database architecture, or you just want to leverage a centralized data store, you need to plan beyond just the connection to the database. Learn the basics of security, scalability, and how proper planning today makes it easier to expand later. This is an advanced course that assumes familiarity with iOS development and fundamentals of data access. It provides theory and practical examples to use today. Take your data access to the next level with secure multi-teir and multi-database solutions.

an expansion/enhancement of what’s new in Push Notifications in iOS 4.0 (NDA permitting), including updates that will make your server-side service work more efficiently, as well as coverage of the new “Local Notifications” functionality (which does not require a server).

Book: iPhone Advanced Projects

While apps are hot, mobile web optimization initially has a much better and demonstrable ROI for an organization. This should be the first step in entering the mobile world; but where do you start? The mobile web is reminiscent of the web in the mid-nineties where no one knew what to do with it. What designs work best? What devices do you target? What content do you expose?

Come join me as I explore the mobile web and examine best practices as well as tools and options to fully maximize the mobile web experience.

High Level Overview – Leveraging Game Center and Game Kit functionality inside and outside of games to bring rich social networking and connectivity to your Apps.

Topics Covered:

• GameCenterOverview:Briefintroductiontogamecenter,whatdevicesandOS’s

  support it and what the fundamental ideas of Game Center are.

• LeaderBoards:Settingupandusingaleaderboardinsideofyourapplicationto

  track any measurable progress.

• FriendsList:FindandmakenewfriendsusingGameCenterandexpandingyour

  social network.

• Achievements:UsingachievementstobringpeoplebacktoyourAppandextend

  user interest in your App. Examples of Foursquare’s achievement model. • AutoMatching:Howtoleverageautomatchingtoconnectuserstogether.

• Invitations:UsingGameCentertoinformfriendsthatsomethingnewisgoingon

  inside your App. •

• UsingGameCentertoSellmoreApps:Leveragingnewtechnologytoallowusersto

  push their friends into your App store page through notifications.

• PeertoPeerNetworking:NetworkingmadeeasythroughnewtechnologiesinGame

  Center and Game Kit

• JoiningMultipleAppsTogether:UsingGameCentertocreateabrand. • VoiceChat-IntroducingsimplevoicechatintoyoursocialApp.
• CustomSkinningofGameCentertomatchyourApp’slookandfeel.
• CodeTipsandTricks:Somehandytipsforavoidingsomeofthecommonmistakes

  made by beginners with Game Center.

Overview of legal issues facing iPhone developers as the create and bring applications to market. This session tends to be an open Q&A regarding legal and business issues in iPhone development.

Come learn how to market and sell your apps beyond the traditional stuff. Features, design, price, messaging, even the app’s name… they all play a part in your app’s success. We’ll discuss all the ingredients to a successful product launch and ensuring it stays successful. Or giving it as good of a chance as possible (since I can’t help you if your app idea sucks!) :)

Topics covered in his talk include:

• Whyyoumightsellyourapplications
• The process of finding a buyer (Where are they? How to you judge whether to sell to them or not)
• Determiningthevaluationofyourproduct
• Dealingwiththecontractsandtransferringofassets
• DealingwithAppletofacilitatethetransferiniTunesConnect(Surprise,itsnoteasy)
• If Apple won’t handle the transfer, what are your options.
• Notifyingandhandlingcustomersafterthetransfer

iOS design basics for developers who want to improve the usability and attractiveness of their applications, or are just too cheap to hire a designer.

FREE

After spending all night Tuesday building games the Game Jammers show everyone what they’ve got during lunch on Wednesday. The Game jam is an awesome way to tinker, learn, collaborate and explore game making. And it’s fun as hell!

David delivers an incredible keynote, that really kicks off 360|iDev the way it should be. David talks about doing awesome things, and being a part of a community like the iPhone developer community.

Mike kicks off the final day of 360|iDev with a talk that inspires everyone in the room. Mike talks about his past, the future, our responsibilities as engineers, and even the time he almost beat the crap out of a bad driver.

Some of the best apps on the iPhone so far are about audio: capturing it, processing it, playing it, and even synthesizing it. But how are some of these apps even possible? A quick look at the AVAudioRecorder and the MPMusicPlayerController doesn’t show much more than file-based playback and recording with level meter methods whose math doesn’t even make sense (hint: logarithmic scale, dude).

In this session, you’ll discover the true power of the iPhone’s audio system, by going down to the deepest levels of Core Audio. Armed with just plain ol’ C — Objective-C is off-limits here — you’ll discover the APIs that read and write audio file formats, convert between supported codecs, and capture, mix, render, and play music with audio units, coordinating their actions with AUGraphs. You’ll also learn the tricks of the Core Audio trade that aren’t in the docs: how to deal with threading, when you’ll need to deploy ring buffers, and how the RemoteIO unit can be in two parts of a graph at once.

The term ‘marketing’ used to be an afterthought in the iPhone app product cycle. Henry Balanon will be discussing marketing and promotional thoughts with Brian Chen, writer for Wired Magazine, Rana Sobhany, author of upcoming O’Reilly book ‘Marketing iPhone Apps: Getting Your App into Users’ Hands’, and Doodle Jump creator Igor Pusenjak.

Rather than arguing about which is better we’ll look at using web and native techniques together in hybrid apps that blend the performance of native code with the extensibility and flexibility of web technologies.

Whether for just a simple “About” page or for most of the user experience many apps would benefit from a hybrid approach that uses HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript to display and style information.

In this session we’ll examine considerations, approaches and existing frameworks for combining your custom code and leveraging all of the work that has gone into WebKit and you’ll gain an understanding of when where and how to use the appropriate technology.

Many designers have great ideas for iPhone apps but lack the coding skills to build it themselves. Learn how to spec out your game, find a programmer, and get it made. Will cover game design, prototyping, working with a developer, and some marketing.

Driven by the phenomenal success of the iPhone and the App Store, smartphone app usage is finally taking off in the enterprise. Many developers are still uncertain about how to create a great user experience for information-intensive business apps on smartphones.

In this session, attendees will learn general principles of creating compelling smartphone apps (for the iPhone, BlackBerry and other devices) for business. For each principle they will see example of flagrant violations among existing apps on the iPhone App Store creating a bad user experience. Attendees will then learn how to create an app that follows the best practices and guidelines, driving user adoption and customer satisfaction. Development techniques that help ensure following best practices will be highlighted.

As the App Store momentum continues, learn how large enterprises are exploring mobile application initiatives and what it means for iPhone developers in the year ahead.

How can an indie developer succeed in an overcrowded app store? How can you differentiate your app from the rest? App success is not based on pure luck, there is a science to it.

With over 75% of the apps being paid, it’s much easier to get to the top of the free app market. Get the inside scoop from one of the industry experts. See case studies of developers who have gone from a paid to free model and how they used our analytics data to enhance their app. Learn the characteristics of a successful free app, how to
effectively drive revenue with a “freemium” model, and when and why an app should just go the paid route.

Apps that succeed all have a few things in common. Get the tricks of the trade and insight into the app market that you can’t get anywhere else!

A walk through application types, design considerations on iPhone, and creating applications using a notebook and pencils from a developers perspective, so you can code faster and better. Learn how to present your ideas in terms a graphic designer can understand so that your vision can be brought to life.

James Eberhardt is co-founder of Echo Mobile and a Technical Director with over 13 years of experience of leading convergent media projects, and works with production companies to deliver content and stories to audiences through any available screen – particularly the ubiquitous screens of mobile devices.

For aspiring designers and developers who want to expand their horizons by learning how to make more interesting, engaging, and beautiful iPhone apps.

Core Animation puts a tremendous amount of graphical power at your fingertips. You can accomplish quite a bit with very little effort, but once you decide to step out of Apple’s pretty little sandbox, things get more complicated. In this session we will get out our tools and make that sandbox a lot bigger. After an overview of the key pieces of the Core Animation API, we will create utility code to help us build complex, interdependent animations. This code will help us manage delegate callbacks, complex grouped animations, chained sequences of animations and much more. Before you know it, your UI elements will be bouncing, popping, fading and sliding on the screen with a single method call.

Peter Farago of Flurry organized an awesome lunch time panel to talk about app discovery.

I love analyzing data, and I spend way too much of my time doing it. To do this, however, you need to /have/ data. Cyrket has provided a means to feed my data fetish, providing me access to the nearly live information from a number of mobile markets. During this talk I intend to do an overview of my findings to date. Through a number of graphs and a lot of statistics, developers will hopefully come out of this talk with a few juicy lessons to apply to their applications and marketing practices.

(Knight Rider reference for you young-in’s)

With iPhone OS 3.0, Apple has finally made it possible to interface directly to custom hardware devices via the External Accessory Framework. In this session, you will receive an overview of the Made for iPhone/iPod licensing program, what it means to build and ship an authorized Apple accessory (within Apple NDA limits), and a live demonstration of a custom car diagnostic device designed to allow your iPhone to talk directly to your cars’ On-Board Diagnostics (OBD-2) port. This demonstration will walk the attendee through a sample XCode project to illustrate the use of the External Accessory Framework, and will show how to setup and communicate with the diagnostic accessory device connected via the 30-pin iPhone dock connector.

Get inside the mind of a designer and see what makes them tick so you can use them to your advantage. Procure the tools you’ll need to communicate effectively and summon designers, especially those unfamiliar with iPhone, into your world.

Join Owen Goss, founder of Streaming Colour Studios, as he takes audience suggestions and attempts to create a prototype game in under 80 minutes. Owen will walk the audience through his process for rapid game prototyping and show them the entire process of creating a simple prototype.

Open source application development platforms are changing the development game. By utilizing web technologies like Javascript, HTML, and CSS, you can build applications for iPhone, Android and Blackberry all from a single code base. And best of all – you can utilize the native capabilities of the phone, so you don’t sacrifice anything in the user experience.

How do you know if your iPhone app idea can make money? What can you change in your existing apps to make them more profitable? Developer Mark Johnson will tell the marketing story of Focus for Facebook and describe how his 2 person business is experimenting with Customer Development, the sales funnel, AARRR metrics, and positioning to help him answer these questions to move from apps based on guessing, luck, & hope, to apps based on testing, measuring, and customer feedback.

What is Quartz 2D and why would I want to use it on the iPhone? We’ll dig into this question a little bit and learn the basics of Quartz 2D – including how to get started, and how to do basic drawing. Then we’ll explore some interesting techniques like applying transformations to drawings, using image masks to do cutouts, and other image transformations. (Any advice, thoughts, requests beyond this that you can think of?)

A lot of people think that choosing to use OpenGL means giving up on all the goodies that UIKit provides. Nothing could be further from the truth! In this session we’ll show how to combine OpenGL views with other UIKit elements, how to transfer graphics data back and forth, and even how to have multiple OpenGL views. Finally, we’ll cover best practices and performance measurements of what can be achieved combining the two systems. You might not have to give up those pretty fonts or Core Animation transitions after all!

Natalia talks about making a living on the app store, and what it takes to do it. Hint, it’s a lot of work, but the payoff is huge.

ass Objective-C & OpenGL iPhone apps

Many Flash developers are eager to try their hand at iPhone

development but may find the move to Xcode, Objective-C, and OpenGL a

little overwhelming. We’ll approach iPhone development from the

perspective of a Flash developer, and discuss what you need to get

started. To put it all together we’ll demonstrate how to use our

upcoming open-source PixelSquared engine, which wraps native iPhone

functionality and OpenGL code into Actionscript-like classes any Flash

developer would be familiar with.

What you’ll probably get out of this session:

- Learn about what it takes to migrate from Flash to iPhone development

- Getting started working with the wicked-awesome PixelSquared engine

- How to get your beloved MovieClips and animations out of Flash and

into the iPhone

- How to extend the framework with custom OpenGL ES code

Unit testing in the cocoa and iPhone world hasn’t taken off as it has in other popular platforms like Java, C# and Ruby. The long term viability of success and agility lays in the foundation you set for your code, and unit tests are a cornerstone of this foundation. In this session, we’ll cover not only the built in unit testing tools, but some of the alternative open source unit testing platforms and go over topics such as mocking objects, and running your tests in a continuous integration server like cruisecontrol.rb. Build and test your code like the big boys without the extra overhead.

Book:

Book: More Cool iPhone Projects

As the first generation of location-based apps are maturing, we are witnessing new uses of location from new categories of apps. Music, book, and news apps are beginning to include location features to bring social networks into their user experience and to increase the lifetime of their users. We will review some of these examples and discuss what this growth means. This session will also include a coding session so developers can get a sneak peek of the Skyhook Wireless Local Faves SDK before it’s launched publicly!

This session will cover methods and strategies people can use to build a successful business in the iPhone marketplace that doesn’t depend on apps reaching the Top 10 in order to be successful. It’s easy to make money on the iPhone with Top 10 apps, but most apps will never get there, yet there are still ways to build a viable business developing for the app store. This talk will cover Brian’s experiences building and running a fully funded development studio for a larger company, as well as what he’s learned since going independent in August 2009. As much as possible this talk will provide actual numbers and hard data to back everything up.

User Input in a multi-touch, accelerometer, location aware world.

The iPhone is the first device since Nintendo’s WiiMote that is actually changing the way players play our games. This session will discuss what it truly means to have an accelerometer driven, multi-touch capable, location aware device for players to play with.

Gone are the days of multi-submenu driven selection and they have been replaced with gesture-based context aware touches that emphasize a natural way to interact with games.

While the focus of this session will be player input as it relates to games, the underlying concepts and approaches should be applicable to all manner of iPhone applications.

Most every iPhone developer has said something like this at one point or another: If only Apple would release their photo viewer component, or perhaps their calendar UI, or maybe their coverflow (R) view, then life would be so much easier. Happily, several open source developers have concluded the same and written code so we don’t have to. Join iPhone developer and author Jonathan Saggau (Sounds Broken inc) as he demonstrates open source libraries that mimic much of the UI that you see in Apple’s own iPhone applications. Learn the ins – and – outs of these components and leave with sample code that uses the image views available from the Three20 framework, an open source coverflow view called OpenFlow, and a recreation of Apple’s calendar view from Klazuka’s branch of the three20 framework. Apple has built it, the community has rebuilt it and now you can use it in your app.

Have you built your own 2D/3D game engine based on OpenGL? Looking for ways to make it faster? Come learn some tips and tricks to optimize your game engine!

Overview of legal issues facing iPhone developers as the create and bring applications to market. This session tends to be an open Q&A regarding legal and business issues in iPhone development.

Learn how to write content apps — apps that deliver text, audio, video, and photos to iPhones. The talk will cover both client-side programming (including XML parsing, networking, image handling, and data storage) and server-side programming (including best practices for serving feeds and other content).

(Disclaimer: This video was really dark. The audio is great, but if you need to see Brent, grap the photo to look at)

Video is cool. Video on the iPhone is even cooler. The capabilities of the iPhone 3GS opens up a whole new possibility for applications to both produce and consume video as part of an iPhone application. This session will provide an in-depth look at how you can leverage the video capabilities of the iPhone SDK to incorporate video into your applications. At the end of this session you will understand the following:

+ What a video codec is, what codecs are supported on the iPhone, which you should use and how to optimize the delivery of the video bits to the iPhone.

+ How to use the iPhone SDK APIs to playback video and how you can achieve interesting affects/functionality on top of a video screen (whether its social controls to integrate with Facebook, twitter or metadata display that is overlayed onto the video)

+ How to use the iPhone SDK APIs to capture video from the device and submit it to different services. This will explore both how to optimize the UI that is presented to the user as well as provide technical guidance on how to optimize the video file itself so that the bits can be delivered in a timely manner.

Are you still using Apple’s SoundEngine.cpp sample code for your app’s audio? Are you frustrated with the latency of AVAudioPlayer? In this session we’ll explore each of the iPhone’s audio APIs and when to use them. We’ll analyze Hello World code with the easy-to-use AVAudioPlayer as well as the game-designer’s preferred OpenAL. Then we’ll spend significant time navigating through the dark, mysterious world of Audio Units to start you on your way to developing powerful audio-centric apps.

I will take the attendees through an overview of Cocos2D and Box2D and then guide them through building a simple physics based game through lab exercises (installing Cocos2D+Box2D, creating the physics objects, connecting the graphics, accelerometer+touch input). Anyone with basic iPhone + Objecive-C experience can follow along and be familiar with both frameworks by the end of the session.

Leveraging web services are becoming common place in many of today’s applications. Web services have many uses, from providing access to online content to calling additional functionality by way of server-side APIs. This session will cover the core concepts needed to connect your iPhone application to web services. Together we will explore SOAP-base and RESTful web services, XML and JSON, and different toolkits such as gSOAP and ASIHTTPRequest that simplify connecting your iPhone applications to public and private web services.

In this session, Marcus will be discussing his solution to local network data synchronization using Core Data and his new open source project ZSync. In this session we will walk through how the synchronization of data works between a Mac OS X desktop/laptop and a Cocoa Touch device. This synchronization works whether the associated desktop application is running or not and has the added bonus of being able to synchronize with MobileMe if the end user happens to have an account.