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Mobile Applications

Tutorials

MA Introducing the Swift Programming Language
Daniel Steinberg, Dim Sum Thinking, Inc.
Mon, 04/13/2015 - 8:30am

If you are an experienced developer who is interested in the new Swift programming language, this hands-on workshop is for you. Daniel Steinberg introduces standalone Swift functions that are not part of a class or other Swift type. Then, he shows how to give or hide external names for parameters. Daniel shares examples of four fundamental Swift entities: String, Int, Dictionary, and Arrays. You’ll practice creating mutable and immutable arrays and explore different ways of iterating through them, changing values along the way. Learn to save the application’s state, and much more.

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MB Android Development Introduction: A Hands-On Workshop
Ken Kousen, Kousen IT, Inc.
Mon, 04/13/2015 - 8:30am

Learn Android development from the ground up. We'll start with the SDK and the Android Studio IDE, and build, test, and deploy applications on both emulators and physical devices. The basics of Android development will be discussed and implemented, from activities to resources to asynchronous communications.

Examples will be provides to show how to use the new Gradle build system for Android. We'll also use the embedded SQLite database to store data, and access a RESTful web service and parse the resulting JSON data to update the user interface.

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TA iOS 8 Quick Start: The Fundamental Pillars of iOS Development
Daniel Steinberg, Dim Sum Thinking, Inc.
Tue, 04/14/2015 - 8:30am

If you are an experienced developer who is new to iOS development, join Daniel Steinberg as he facilitates this hands-on workshop to teach participants how to write great iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch apps. Daniel introduces Xcode 6 and Apple's suite of freely-available developer tools. He demonstrates how to use Xcode’s visual tools and storyboards to create your app’s GUI. Learn to use Outlets and Actions to connect the visual elements to code and interact with them. Examine the Swift code that implements your application’s Model and Controller layers.

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TC Mobile App Project Kick Off: Get It Right the First Time
Jaimee Newberry, Independent Consultant
Tue, 04/14/2015 - 8:30am

The critical steps that need to happen before coding starts are all-too-often brushed over or skipped entirely. Join Jaimee Newberry as she discusses how to identify and gain buy-in and involvement from all the right stakeholders. Because user experience (UX) will make or break every new app, you have to get it right the first time. Jaimee explores brand/product voice and personality questions that help teams quickly map out the direction that affects everything—product experience, visual design, and timing of animations and transitions.

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TE The Ionic Framework: Build Apps with AngularJS and PhoneGap
Troy Miles, Kelley Blue Book
Tue, 04/14/2015 - 8:30am

Ionic is an open source, front-end framework for building hybrid mobile apps with HTML5. Using the Ionic framework, you can combine PhoneGap and AngularJS—the hottest web MVC framework around for building fast, testable web applications—to create cross-platform apps using standard web development tools like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Troy Miles introduces you to the Ionic framework and discusses how to use it with AngularJS. Participants will build a simple, full-featured application that offers a great overview of Ionic's key features.

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TG Designing Apps for Android Devices
Luke Wallace, Bottle Rocket
Tue, 04/14/2015 - 1:00pm

With the many versions of Android available today on hundreds, even thousands, of device types, just how do you build something that will look good on Android devices you’ve never seen? Is it possible to build an app that will look good on the newest devices and not look strange on your grandma’s phone from 2012? Luke Wallace clears a path through the jungle of Android-based hardware and takes on the fragmentation beast. See how his company, Bottle Rocket, one of the top mobile development companies, handles this challenge day-in-and day-out—without compromising the experience.

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TH Building Cross-Platform Mobile Apps
Troy Miles, Kelley Blue Book
Tue, 04/14/2015 - 1:00pm

PhoneGap (aka Cordova) is a cross-platform framework for developing mobile apps using standard web development tools like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Join Troy Miles to learn how to create mobile apps with PhoneGap by building a simple but full-featured app during this hands-on class. Troy explores PhoneGap’s important capabilities, including GPS, camera, and audio recordings. Because JavaScript has a reputation as a somewhat difficult language, Troy teaches techniques for keeping your code robust and clean.

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Keynotes

K1 Crazy (and Focused) Mobile App Development
Daniel Steinberg, Dim Sum Thinking, Inc.
Wed, 04/15/2015 - 8:30am

Developers mostly focus on improving their creation skills—learning about programming languages and coding techniques; attending dev conferences; downloading and analyzing code; reading blogs, and listening to podcasts. However, they often become so focused on the delivery deadline that they forget they aren't just building an app for some arbitrary faceless customer. They are trying to help real people solve real problems. So, before the coding starts, there is lots of work to do to identify THAT customer. Narrow your scope.

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Concurrent Sessions

W1 Real-Time Contextual and Social Relevance in Mobile
Jason Arbon, appdiff.com
Wed, 04/15/2015 - 10:00am

Personalized mobile user experience is a hot topic today because a smarter app will delight users, keep them coming back, and make your business stand out from the crowd. The extreme version of personalization is real-time contextual and social relevance. According to Jason Arbon, the contextual brain for your app is only a few API calls away. Based on lessons learned working on search relevance and personalization at Google, Bing, and a stealth mobile app startup, Jason describes the value, limitations, performance, and data-privacy of local and web services available today.

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W2 Automate Your Way to Sanity in the Chaos of Mobile App Development
Josh Anderson, Dude Solutions
Wed, 04/15/2015 - 10:00am

Mobile app development and testing are hard. Mobile at scale is even harder. As you scale to the enterprise, automation is the only option. However, many organizations have barely started automating their mobile dev/test efforts. So, how do you actually automate the building, testing, and deploying of hundreds of mobile apps across multiple operating systems and different app stores? Josh Anderson explains that the mobile ecosystem is in its infancy compared to the tools supporting web application development, testing, and deployment.

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W4 Mastering Android Development Tools
Luke Wallace, Bottle Rocket
Wed, 04/15/2015 - 11:00am

There are so many tools and tricks for developing Android apps, but which ones actually help when you're building apps day in and day out? Luke Wallace introduces the critical development tools you need and demonstrates how to use them to build real apps. Learn about the six critical tools every developer must have, find out about the key techniques that will help you build masterful Android apps, and discover at least one weird trick to speed up your app development.

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W7 From Web Developer to Hybrid App Developer
Greg Avola, Untappd
Wed, 04/15/2015 - 1:00pm

You or your company have a great idea for an app—and now you need to build it. So, what architecture do you use to support iOS, Android, Windows Phone 8, and future operating systems? How can you deal with all these platforms and still re-use your skills as web developer? The answer is a hybrid app, which allows developers to use part native code and part web code to create cross-platform apps.

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W10 A DevOps Approach for Building 100 iOS Apps
Leigh Williamson, IBM
Wed, 04/15/2015 - 2:00pm

Apple and IBM forged a global partnership to transform enterprise mobility, which includes delivering 100 applications built exclusively for iOS devices. There are myriad challenges involved in producing that many mobile apps quickly—and with excellent user experience and quality. The team had to work smarter rather than simply throw more people at the project.

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T1 Today and Tomorrow: Mobile's Impact on Development and Testing
James Montemagno, Xamarin
Thu, 04/16/2015 - 11:00am

There are more than 1.4 billion smartphones in the world—one for every 4.5 people on earth. Over the next decade wearables and the Internet of Things (IoT) will make those numbers look puny. In fact, mobile is transforming how people and things connect and dramatically changing software development, as we know it. With more than 189 million apps downloaded daily from app stores and new IoT devices being released daily to the public, developers and testers are already behind the curve.

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T2 A Look into the Future: App Testing and Quality in 2025
Jason Arbon, appdiff.com
Thu, 04/16/2015 - 11:00am

In ten years, the applications we develop—mobile, embedded, wearable, and more—will be radically different from today’s apps. And so will be the testing and quality tools, methods, and solutions we employ. Extrapolated from his experiences at Google, Microsoft, and Applause (formerly uTest), Jason Arbon leads a thought-provoking look into the future. Our new world will be powered by nearly infinite—and almost free—computing power, storage, and networking. Standardized software stacks and centralized testing as a service will enable machine learning not possible today.

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T3 The Software Developers Guide to Prototyping Wearable Devices
Lance Gleason, Polyglot Programming Inc.
Thu, 04/16/2015 - 11:00am

Prototyping wearable devices used to be something that required specialized skills in electrical engineering, embedded development, and mechanical engineering. Today, thanks to the maker revolution, we can combine our deep knowledge of programming with basic electronics, soldering skills, and access to a 3D printer to create useful devices. In this session, we’ll take a quick tour of some of the options and then do a deep dive into creating a wearable prototype using off the shelf boards.

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T4 Plotting a Better Beer with Geolocation: An Untappd Case Study
Greg Avola, Untappd
Thu, 04/16/2015 - 1:00pm

Geolocation enhances the experience of many services and provides users with customized results based on their current location. Many people don’t realize what an important role geolocation can play in locating their favorite beer—and Untappd, a mobile application around beer discovery, can help! Greg Avola offers a case study on how Untappd is employing geolocation to enhance the experience for its users and how geolocation has helped Untappd grow its business. Adding location to Untapped personalized the app and provided data that shows users what is being consumed locally.

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T5 Mobile Application Dev and QA Testing with Simulated Environments
Wayne Ariola, Parasoft
Thu, 04/16/2015 - 1:00pm

Do you know that 63 percent of your users would be less likely to do business with you if they experience problems with your mobile application? To ensure top-notch user experience, you need to conduct thorough testing on unpredictable network conditions—even if testing components are unavailable. Wayne Ariola describes an innovative strategy of using simulated test environments to bring the behavior of system dependencies and network conditions under your direct control.

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T7 Windows Azure: Connecting the Dots for a Mobile Workforce
Mike Benkovich, Imagine Technologies, Inc.
Thu, 04/16/2015 - 2:00pm

We live in a mobile bring-your-own-device kind of world with a proliferation of devices—smart phones, tablets, and UltraBooks running iOS, Android, and Windows. People are working in online and offline modes, and moving from device to device. How do you build applications that provide a consistent view of identity, data, and services so that your workforce can be productive wherever they are?

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T8 Tips and Tricks for Building Secure Mobile Apps
Jeffery Payne, Coveros, Inc.
Thu, 04/16/2015 - 2:00pm

Mobile application development is now a mission-critical component of IT organizations and a big part of software industry’s landscape. Due to the security threats associated with mobile devices, it is critical we build our apps—from the ground up—to be secure and trustworthy. However, many application developers and testers do not understand how to build and test secure mobile applications. Jeffery Payne discusses the risks associated with mobile platforms/applications and describes proven practices for ensuring the safety of your mobile applications.

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T10 Architect a Winning Mobile Application
Shadi Saifan, FIS Mobile
Thu, 04/16/2015 - 3:15pm

Building mobile apps in today’s highly dynamic environment comes with great uncertainty and risk. It’s imperative to make the right design choices early on. Poor architectural decisions can make or break an app. In this technical session, Shadi Saifan focuses on the architecture and design considerations critical for building a winning mobile application—regardless of the device, operating system, or language.

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