Grab a bag of popcorn, sit back and enjoy! In this last episode of Tales from the mdevcon archives, Graham Lee (@secboffin) talks about how ordinary sand can be turned into the magical mobile devices we use every day. Graham Lee has a Master of Physics degree from the University of Oxford, including a number of projects in condensed matter physics. He’s also been writing software professionally for a number of years, initially on NeXTs and other UNIX systems and latterly as a software security expert specialising in iOS and other mobile platforms. He’s the author of two books: Professional Cocoa Application Security (Wiley, 2010) and Test-Driven iOS Development (Addison-Wesley, 2012).

Graham Lee has presented at every NSConference event, twice at Voices That Matter: iPhone Developers in the US and in a few other contexts including talks to other conferences and to the British Computer Society.

Graham about his session: All app developers stand on the shoulders of giants: but not just those of the companies that make the phones and tablets our apps run on, or the software developers who create the APIs, frameworks and tools we use to create the features our users desire. Underpinning all of this is the semiconductor industry, which takes the very material the Earth’s crust is made of and turns it into the bedrock of the whole software business. In this talk I’ll tell the story of how ordinary sand can be turned into the most magical of devices.

There are also slides available for this talk, you can get them here.

This next episode of Tales from the mdevcon archives is about voice navigated apps. We all heard about Siri and Google Voice, but there’s more to voice navigation and Robert van Loghem (@soundbites) knows all about the subject. Robert is always interested in the latest and greatest when it comes to; User experience, mobility, communication, infrastructure and coming up with some crazy creative solution by combining tech.

Since 2010, He gets a kick out of building apps for mobile devices, especially ones that his girlfriend loves, all this doing TDD of-course! So evangelizing what he practices he’s heading up Xebia’s mobile division in 2011, and loving it! It’s great to work with all these technologies, Android, iOS and HTML5 and pouring a nice Continuous Integration sauce all over it, to deliver secure, robust, integrated and performant apps, that look great!

Robert about his session: Using your voice to navigate your device, is something people have been working on for decades. Since Apple introduced Siri with the iPhone 4S, we now know that voice recognition and having a conversation with your phone works. It feels better and more natural for a human being to work that way. But how can you use voice recognition when developing apps? What do you need to take into account? How can it be that the use of voice is only now turning into something common? And how do you start coding-up your own voice navigated app?

There are also slides available for this talk, you can get them here.

Tales from the mdevcon archives is back, bringing you a presentation from Wiebe Elsinga (@welsinga) on Prototyping your mobile applications. Wiebe is technical Lead at ItudeMobile. He has a long experience in software development of mobile, web and enterprise applications. He is mainly focused on the development of mobile applications, and is continuously seeking quality improvements within the development process of mobile applications.

Wiebe about his session: Prototypes can be a great way to improve mobile software development project results on two fronts: they can prove a concept or improve on it, and they can teach the development team valuable lessons about the best ways to develop the product.

This session will provide practical information about the approach and experiences implementing prototyping inside a mobile software development process.

There are also slides available for this talk, you can get them here.

Today, we have Ronald Warners talking about creating Android games using AndEngine and Box2D physics. Ronald worked in the banking industry as Java developer for seven years and is now consultant at Xebia (Java and mobile enterprise). He was always interested in creating games, it’s how he got interested in programming in the first place. Less than a year ago he started creating a game in Android as a hobby/pet project in his free time. During development he learned a lot about mobile games and programming for mobile devices in general. But even more important: it is really fun trying to create a game for a mobile device. Ronald wants to share his experience so more people get enthusiastic and get some directions when they are going to create a game themselves.

Ronald about his session: Game development is hard, it’s not your average ListView application and there is no standard way to design and create a game. At the same time, creating a game on android is fun, you need to be creative on every level. You need to think about gameplay and graphics, but you also need to make sure your game performs well on all those devices.

Overview:
- Canvas2d and OpenGL
- Introduction to AndEngine (library, concepts, UI thread, examples)
- Game loop
- Bitmap and vectors
- Level editor?
- Introduction to Box2d
- The Box2d ContactListener
- More about performance (GC is not your friend, Batching, Java and C (JNI), Box2d)

There are also slides available for this talk, you can get them here.

We’re continuing our podcast series with Cesare Rocchi (@_funkyboy), who talks about iCloud development. Cesare is a UX designer and developer specializing in web and mobile applications. He began working on interactive applications 13 years ago, while he was a researcher in the academia. Winner of the 2009 Adobe RIA Application contest for students, he runs Studio Magnolia, an interactive studio that creates compelling web and mobile applications. His focus is now on the design and development of mobile applications. He is author of the iCloud chapter included in the book “iOS5 by tutorials“.

Cesare about his session: I will describe how iCloud works, what it is meant for, best practices to set up a project and implement synchronization strategies to replicate content on iOS and MacOSX devices.

There are also slides available for this talk, you can get them here.

This week, we’re covering a more graphical topic from last years mdevcon, being GLKit. And which better expert than Jeff LaMarche (@Jeff_LaMarche) to talk about it? Jeff is the author of several books on iOS and Mac programming and a principal at MartianCraft, LLC, a software development firm focused on Mobile and Mac development software. He maintains a technical blog on iOS software development at http://iphonedevelopment.blogspot.com/ and speaks at several conferences a year. We were very happy he could join us at mdevcon 2012 and enlighten us about GLKit.

Jeff about his session: With iOS 5, Apple introduced a support framework for OpenGL ES called GLKit. In addition to providing hardware accelerated functions for common 3D math operations and much easier setup and configuration of OpenGL ES views, it also introduced the ability to use OpenGL ES 2.0 without having to write shaders for the most common types of drawing operations. GLKit provides nearly all the “for-free” functionality we used to get with OpenGL ES 1.1 combined with the power of OpenGL ES 2.0, and the ability to skip the tedium of shader writing for common types of drawing, including texture mapping, per-vertex and per-fragment lighting, cube maps, and reflections. This entry-level talk will show the basics of using GLKit.

There are also slides available for this talk, you can get them here.

We’re almost half-way there in publishing the audio from mdevcon 2012! For this week, we give the mic to Hugo Visser (@botteaap), who talks about Android fragmentation. He discusses the different aspects of Android fragmentation and how you can “embrace” the fragmentation in order to make apps that run on a multitude of devices and Android versions.

Hugo is 35 years old, and works at Qbus on mobile and web projects. Over the last 13 years he has had several flings with mobile technology, ranging from JavaME to Windows Mobile, but since 2.5 years he is active as Android developer. In 2009 Hugo published his first Android app called ‘Rainy Days‘, a weather radar app which is nearing the 500.000 downloads now.

Hugo about his session: The word “fragmentation” is often used to denote a big problem with the Android platform. Multiple manufacturers creating a plethora of Android phones, tablets that differ in screen size, Android version and hardware capabilities. But while some dismiss the Android platform for this reason it is at the same time the reason why Android is as successful as it is. For a business this means one important thing: reach. Instead of fearing fragmentation we should embrace it!

In this talk we’ll discuss the various aspects of fragmentation and how that changes the way you design and develop great Android applications by looking at best practices and anti-patterns. We’ll discuss the technical mechanisms available in the Android platform, like the resource system, Fragments and more, and show how you how you can combine these techniques to create apps that run on phones and tablets, across different Android versions.

There are also slides available for this talk, you can get them here.

We have Maxim Zaks (@iceX33) in this week’s podcast, talking about test essentials from a developers perspective. Maxim is a passionate software developer, who tried him self in different disciplines of software development. He worked on java enterprise projects, rich web applications, developer tools and mobile applications. Now he is working as iOS game developer for Wooga.

Maxim about his session: I will talk about test from the developer perspective. Why should we test, how should we do that and what are the tools/techniques we have to manage. I will provide examples in different languages:
- ObjectiveC
- Java
- JavaScript
- Scala

We’re happy that Maxim will be back for mdevcon 2013, where he will be doing a half-day tutorial on Cocos2D!

There are also slides available for this talk, you can get them here.

This week’s podcast is from Nathan de Vries (@atnan), talking about debugging on iOS. Nathan is a pocket-sized app obsessive & creative technologist from Australia, specialising in iOS. He declared email bankruptcy long ago, but for the few who make it through the unrelenting waves of bits & bytes, Nathan helps them make sense of the staggering trend towards mobile experiences. Every so often, research & insights magically appear on his blog at http://atnan.com.

Nathan has the following to say about his session, titled “The Path To Better Debugging on iOS“:
Brian Kernighan famously quipped, “Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.”

That debugging is hard is a universal truth, however the unmanaged code we write as Cocoa developers does make our life somewhat more difficult. We can’t always stand on the shoulders of @mikeash, @gparker & @bbum when we get a crash in objc_msgSend()!

Kernighan’s second point is even more salient — while it may be tempting to write tricky code, it can become a debugging nightmare. If you anticipate the need to debug code while you’re writing it, you’ll be better off when you’re tracking down yet another heisenbug.

In this talk I’ll discuss the tools you can use to make debugging easier, and some techniques for ensuring you’ve not coded a rope long enough to hang yourself. You’ll walk away with some extra arrows to your debugging quiver, and a better idea of how to write more debuggable code.

Areas Covered:

* Debugging basics; reproducibility, reduction & deduction
* The challenge of a C-superset and non-open source frameworks/libraries
* Tools that make debugging much easier (gdb/lldb, instruments, hidden debugging facilities etc.)
* Unit tests as a debugging harness, using git-bisect to find when bugs were introduced
* Resolving bugs ‘in the wild’ (symbolication, reproduction etc.)
* Writing more debuggable code (macros, categories, one-shot variables etc.)

The slides that go with this talk are also available here.

This week’s episode is brought to you by Matteo Manferdini and it’s all about code quality and how to write clean code. Matteo is a freelance iOS developer and coordinator of the Appsterdam Speakers bureau. He has been working on iOS since 2009 and worked on a diverse set of apps for different companies. He’s also working on some projects of his own. He is currently planning to move in the education and training market. His most recent endeavour is with New Lemurs, a Amsterdam start-up focussed around making games educational.

Matteo about his session: For a developer the code is the material of which his software is built. To have a quality product you need a quality material. It’s my experience that a lot of project fail, get delayed or waste resources because of a poorly written code base. This talk focuses on tips and guidelines on how to make a codebase cleaner and more maintainable.

The slides that go with this talk are also available here.