Eventer

Touch is leading us to a future with less and less chrome, possibly even none at all, as gestures replace familiar buttons, menus, and tabs. But if there are no visible controls, how do users figure out how to use the damn thing? The talk will show how to teach users new interfaces and gesture vocabularies by creating discoverable gestures even without visible controls. The talk will show the power of animation, reveal the influence of game design, show how toddlers are better at this stuff than we are, and discuss the new ways we have to start thinking about the visual and functional design of our interfaces.

The current trend in patent assertion has many developers concerned. Who are these litigating companies and how did they come to be? How does the patent assertion business model work and what can defendants do, if anything? Should Australian developers be worried? In this talk Duncan will discuss what you need to know about intellectual property rights, common pitfalls and how to avoid them.

As developers we often think that successful applications and companies are built on great products. The hidden truth is that a great product is nothing without great support. In order to be successful in the long term you need to provide your customers with an experience that makes them want to buy from you again, and again. Through real world examples and amusing anecdotes Russell will explain what good support is, how to be true to who you are, and maybe even have some fun along the way.

Discover the inner secrets of great interface designers as we dive into the look & feel of popular iOS apps and find out what makes them so great. Learn about the techniques that pros use to build touchable, realistic interfaces that look like they're bulging off the screen. This session will analyze current interface design trends being used in top iOS apps, and will discuss how to incorporate these design techniques into your own apps.

Vijay and Sherman will discuss the process of designing and building the SMH and Age iPad apps. Vijay will share the process they followed for determining the user experience positioning – how and why the experience must differ from print, websites, competitors websites and news aggregators. He'll also reflect on how their audience research was conducted, the user experience objectives that were set and outline some the the key challenges from a business, user experience and ongoing production point of view.

Meanwhile, Sherman will discuss some of the details involved with getting content into the app, integrating native code with HTML and the challenges they faced developing the apps.

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.