Conference - Feb 15-16, 2013
Union South - Madison, WI

Friday, February 15, 2013

Registration & Coffee Social

08:00

Coffee Service Continues All Day

Welcome Address

09:00

With Jim Remsik, Chris Wilson, and Ashe Dryden

Playnote: Engaging Audiences

09:30

Jessie Shternshus

My iPhone Changed My Life - How mobile devices are affecting the blind community

10:15

Kevin Jones, Eric Knapp

Mobile devices have had a profound effect on the blind community. We will outline and demonstrate some of the uses that are aiding them. This is a joint talk from a sighted and blind developer on how the blind community is using mobile devices. It will focus on the accessibility features in iOS, how they are used, with a little on how to code them.

Break

10:45

Coffee Service

FirefoxOS & the Mozilla marketplace

11:15

David Walsh

This talk will introduce attendees to Mozilla's new, open source FirefoxOS: a phone operating system whose apps are created with just CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. This talk will also introduce attendees to the Mozilla Marketplace, exploring how to create and list their own apps!

Lunch

11:45

Provided: WisCard valid at any Wisconsin Union location on campus. You will have the flexibility to eat at the four onsite restaurants.

Mobile Web Techniques

12:45

Hampton Catlin

How do we tackle mobile from a technical perspective? Users now demand all of the desktop features plus new features and many companies have a lot of investment in their current platform. There are many solutions out there, but all with drawbacks. Mobile-first is a wonderful design pattern, but fails in all but the most idealistic settings as an actual solution. Services oriented architectures are a great idea also, but they don't solve the issue of juggling multiple front ends. Transformation layers do a great job of inheriting features, but how do you add new features. I'll go over all of these techniques and more and discuss their advantages and disadvantages.

So you shipped. Now what?

01:30

Aijaz Ansari

Geared towards the Indie developer, this talk deals with what you do after you release your app. Your app is 'born' when you ship. You have to nurture it to give it a chance to succeed. In development you only had to worry about your code. Now you have to take care of all of your customers and their needs without sacrificing the vision and focus of your app. We'll see how to use tools like analytics and social media as well as how to align your goals with your users' expectations.

Break

02:00

Beverages & Snacks Provided

Consuming REST Services with Android

02:30

Peter Traeg

Mobile apps often need to integrate with backend services. The most common need is to consume JSON content provided by a REST based service. In this session we’ll cover how to write a simple Android application to consume just such a service. The session will cover how to make HTTP connections from Android apps to retrieve JSON data from a REST based service and then transform that JSON response into Java objects that you can use in your application. Also shown will be how to serialize Java objects into JSON for POSTing or PUTing data back to a REST service. This session will assume the attendee has some basic Android development familiarity and is geared towards the beginner to intermediate developer level.

Responsive Design in the Real World

03:15

Clarissa Peterson

Learn about some of the tools that make it easier to create a responsive website/web application: frameworks, navigation patterns, CSS preprocessors such as Sass/LESS, and polyfills. Responsive design is easier than it seems: the secret is taking advantage of resources such as these instead of trying to solve every problem yourself.

Break

03:45

Coffee Service

Build an iOS App on Heroku in 20 minutes with the Core Data Buildpack & AFIncrementalStore

04:15

Mattt Thompson

Networking is an essential part of any mobile application. Unfortunately, it's also one of the hardest to get right. In order to provide a great user experience, an app must be able to synchronize between client and server seamlessly, handling slow connections and unpredictable system events gracefully. AFIncrementalStore presents an order-of-magnitude improvement in developing robust client-server apps on iOS. In combination with the Heroku Core Data Buildpack, it's now possible to build out a fully-functioning app in a matter of minutes. Come learn how AFIncrementalStore and the Heroku Core Data Buildpack work; in doing so, you'll get a deep dive into Core Data itself, and learn about the next big thing in iOS development.

Local Flavor: Coffee & Robots

05:00

Trevor Gruehn, Ben Stein

Parting Remarks

05:30

With Jim Remsik, Chris Wilson, and Ashe Dryden

Party in The Sett

08:00

Live Music, Bowling, Rock-climbing, Pool tables

Saturday, February 16, 2013

Coffee Social

08:30

Welcome Back Remarks

09:00

With Jim Remsik, Chris Wilson, and Ashe Dryden

Well-Designed Travel

09:30

Smith Schwartz

About a year ago, [the speaker and their spouse] applied the principles of mobile UX design to our lives by becoming digital nomads. Since we both work in technology and can work from home, why can’t home be wherever we want it to be? Just as a good mobile app streamlines an existing site into its basic components to free itself from the desktop, we trimmed down our belongings to the most essential items so that we can be truly mobile. We got rid of our apartment, and most everything in it to travel slowly around the world all while working full-time as developers. This new lifestyle (though not without its challenges), has enabled us to visit new places, learn new languages, skip the bitter Chicago winter and spend time with the friends and family that we rarely got to see in our former 9-5 lives. We’ve visited 6 countries and lived in 8 states over the past year. As we embark on Chapter 2 of this adventure, I hope to share what we’ve learned and how our next year will be even more efficient than the last.

Hardware Access and Device APIs with JavaScript and HTML5

10:15

Wes Bos

The browser on your device is growing up! With new HTML5 APIs we are able to access your device's hardware and start writing apps that rival native big boys. HTML5 APIs include access the the device's camera, microphone, GPS, compass file system and accelerometer. This talk will take a look at what we can start integrating into our apps today as well as what we can look forward to in future releases of mobile browsers. Be sure to make it out to this as as it will be packed with fantastic live examples including a mobile based motion detection security camera and a CSS3 speedometer!

Break

10:45

Coffee Service

iOS BDD Beatdown

11:15

Stephen Caudill

Figuring out how to do BDD for iOS isn't exactly clear cut. There are a number of contenders for framework of choice for both the integration and unit layers. Even when you've figured out which framework, it's not always easy to figure out what parts of your application to test and why. You're in luck! I've spent the last 1.5 years doing all the hard work for you! I'll offer a comparison of the popular BDD frameworks so you can figure out what will work best for you. I'll also be going over how to effectively BDD iOS applications as well as looking at how to retrofit your application with tests to cover the application's high value paths.

Lunch

11:45

Provided: WisCard valid at any Wisconsin Union location on campus. You will have the flexibility to eat at the four onsite restaurants.

Extending Ruby Motion with Gems and Pods

12:45

Ray Hightower

RubyMotion enables developers to write native iOS apps using the Ruby language. Developers can amplify the power of RubyMotion by using of some of the available libraries, packaged as Gems and Pods. This talk will demonstrate some of the more popular libraries, while highlighting some of the "gotchas". The first eight minutes will introduce RubyMotion for those who are unfamiliar with it. The remainder of the talk will feature demos of the libraries in action, live coding, and a generous helping of TDD. To get the most out of the talk, the audience member should have some experience programming iOS, Ruby, or both.

Faster, Stronger, Cheaper: Building Apps with a BaaS

01:30

Tim Anglade

Backends-as-a-Service like Parse, Stackmob, Kinvey or baas.io are the new hot thing. By packaging data storage, user management, file storage and other advanced features (social, geolocation, etc.), they can drastically reduce the time it takes mobile developers to build their app, and minimize the costs they’ll incur maintaining a server infrastructure. In this talk, Tim will cover how this class of tools came to be and how they work, explain how to structure your projects to maximize their usefulness, detail common problems & security issues you may encounter with a BaaS, and give specific examples of how real-world apps are using them, from Silicon Valley to Seoul.

Break

02:00

Beverages & Snacks Provided

Android build automation with Ant and Jenkins

02:30

Tristan Waddington

Many software engineers are already familiar with continuous integration and how it can supercharge your development. However, Android projects require a unique blend of tools and can be tricky to automate unless you know the pitfalls. This talk will introduce you to the Jenkins continuous integration server and the basics of building Android projects with Ant. We'll discuss why you might want to automate your Android builds, strategies for doing so and what plugins will make your life easier. Topics will include Ant, Jenkins, linting, signing, testing and versioning. This talk will assume the attendee has some familiarity with the Android SDK and is geared towards the intermediate developer level.

Global Mobile

03:15

Tim Kadlec

No doubt about it: mobile is an exciting, rapidly evolving technology. There's a lot of talk about what features will be supported next, what new technologies will emerge. But in the midst of our obsession with the latest and greatest, mobile is changing lives around the world. It's providing connectivity to people who wouldn't have it otherwise, and empowering everyone from your next door neighbor to farmers in Kenya. Only by looking at how people around the world are using mobile technology can we really understand just how important mobile really is, and the potential it has.

Break

03:45

Coffee Service

Windows Phone 8: From a developers perspective

04:15

Adam Steinert

With the release of Windows 8 on the Microsoft Surface tablet and new phones from companies like HTC and Nokia, this operating system has started to gain notice and market share. That is great news for developers as this technology stack enables us to build out awesome applications. Adam Steinert will present an overview of this platform from a developer’s perspective. He will cover the creation of a windows phone application using Visual Studio 2012 and XAML/C# as he walks us through his application which manages a Jenkins continuous integration server.

Developing PhoneGap Applications

05:00

Don Coleman

You've probably heard of PhoneGap, but do you know how it works? PhoneGap is a framework that lets you build native mobile applications using web technology. We will look at how to get started, what a PhoneGap project looks like, tools for creating and building projects, as well as strategies for debugging and troubleshooting.

Closing Address

05:30