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Architecture - Design

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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MC Building Universal Apps for the Windows Platform
Mike Benkovich, Imagine Technologies, Inc.
Mon, 04/13/2015 - 8:30am

TF Super Rad Brainstorming
Jaimee Newberry, Independent Consultant
Tue, 04/14/2015 - 1:00pm

Ever had a brainstorming session that failed to produce the quality results you’d hoped for? Think you already have good brainstorming sessions but know there’s room for improvement? Facilitating Super Rad Brainstorming sessions for eons now, Jaimee Newberry is an industry leader in improving brainstorming skills and surfacing incredible ideas. Work together as Jaimee facilitates a real time, hands-on brainstorming session that highlights tips and tricks for making your own brainstorming sessions more productive.

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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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K2 Designing for Engagement
Jaimee Newberry, Independent Consultant
Wed, 04/15/2015 - 4:00pm

Do the products you’re creating engage users on an emotional level? Do you deliberately design in the personality and tone of your product? Are you thinking comprehensively about every touchpoint your product has with a user? Jaimee Newberry has been helping Fortune 500 companies and startups with their digital products for more than seventeen years. Through years of refinement, Jaimee knows how to create products that engage and empathize with users. Her abilities evoke client responses such as “You’ve earned our trust,” “You understand who we are,” and “Thank you.

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K3 The Perfect Storm: Mobile Application Quality
Jeffery Payne, Coveros, Inc.
Thu, 04/16/2015 - 8:30am

Mobile applications are fraught with risk. The unique, portable nature and multiple uses of mobile devices bring a wide variety of critical quality properties into play: reliability, usability, security, availability, and maintainability. Allocating the effort to identify and ensure these properties is a difficult challenge—and not for the faint of heart. New testing and validation approaches must be used if we are to meet quality goals for mission-critical and widely distributed mobile applications.

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K4 Thought: The Future of Mobile and Embedded Application Input
Jim McKeeth, Embarcadero Technologies
Thu, 04/16/2015 - 9:45am

Control of complex machines by human thought has been a mainstay of science fiction writing and films for years. In the movie Firefox, Clint Eastwood steals a highly advanced Russian fighter jet that is controlled by the pilot’s thoughts. But real devices are now appearing that purport to use our brainwaves as input. Is this technology a reality today? If not, how far away is it? What sort of thought input is possible and where could it be used?

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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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W3 Embed Yourself in Our Wearable Future
Noble Ackerson, Byte an Atom Research
Wed, 04/15/2015 - 10:00am

It could be on your wrist or your ankle. It may be embedded in your jacket, your shoe, your vest, or your hat. It may eventually be under your skin. It may help you walk or talk; find your way; or communicate with a friend, with your doctor, or your coach. It monitors your heart rate, the moisture on your skin, every breath you take, and every move you make. And it’s connected. And networked. Wearable devices are here to stay and are projected to be a $30 billion market by 2018.

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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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W9 Using Apps to Help Users Experience Wearables and IoT Devices
Chris Beauchamp, Crittercism
Wed, 04/15/2015 - 1:00pm

Wearables and other Internet of Things (IoT) devices are optimized for gathering data about a user and their environment. According to Cisco, this emerging industry will produce and deliver over 20 billion devices worldwide by 2020. Join Chris Beauchamp to learn about how to leverage mobile apps to develop a compelling user experience with one or several connected wearable or IoT devices. He’ll discuss the options for transmitting data from and to devices and how to ensure these connections are happening in real time once the app is live.

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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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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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T6 Wearables and Contactless Technology—for Payment Processing and Much More
David Meyer, FIS Mobile
Thu, 04/16/2015 - 1:00pm

The emergence of wearable devices like Google Glass, Apple Watch, and many others—combined with contactless technology such as near field communications—are being combined in new applications for payment processing, banking, and much more. Adopting wearables for contactless transactions will require technology shifts by both merchants and consumers. Using Google Glass as the wearable example, David Meyer demonstrates how users can see their account balance inside Google Glass to make purchase decisions, transmit the purchase authorizations, and transfer funds between their bank accounts.

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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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T9 The Internet of Things and You
Jim McKeeth, Embarcadero Technologies
Thu, 04/16/2015 - 2:00pm

What is the Internet of Things (IoT)? What are the technologies that make it happen? Where do we see it today? Where will we see it tomorrow? What capabilities will it provide, and what do we need to know to take part in it? Jim McKeeth considers where IoT is taking us and discusses the hurdles we face today and in the future. With a focus on applications, Jim offers examples of IoT technology from the perspective of developers. Join Jim to learn about cross-platform development, cloud synchronization, app-to-app communication, Bluetooth, WiFi, security concerns, privacy issues, and more.

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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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