Running an experiment in space usually requires custom hardware to be launched into orbit at enormous cost. ArduSat is a project designed to change that, by maintaining a fleet of general purpose experimental satellites in orbit and allowing anyone with an interest in space science to design and run their own experiments right from their computer. The first three ArduSat satellites have already been launched and many more are on the way. Jonathan Oxer designed the general purpose experiment module called the Payload Processor Module that was launched into orbit in ArduSat-1 and ArduSat-X, allowing anyone from hobbyists and school students to professional researchers to run their own experiments in space. In this talk he’ll explain the background of the ArduSat project, the CubeSat satellite architecture, how satellites get into orbit, and the operation of the Payload Processor Module, showing how you can run your very own experiments in orbit.

Engagement metrics aside, how are the applications you’re making engaging users at an emotional level? How much thinking goes into the personality and tone of your product? Are you thinking comprehensively about every messaging touchpoint your product has with a user? What about writing the error messages, alerts, calls-to-action, descriptions, or release notes?

Jaimee has been helping Fortune 500 companies, agencies, non-profits and startups with digital products for more than 17 years with emphasis on mobile applications for the last 5. What has helped separate the products Jaimee has worked on to stand out from the rest is their ability to engage and empathize with users. Over years of refinement, her process has come to consistently evoke such responses from her clients as, “You’ve earned our trust!”, “You understand who we are!” and “Thank you – We love you!”

Whether you have a concept, a startup, corporation or enterprise product – whether software, website or mobile application – Jaimee wants to share some very important considerations in creating products that connect emotionally with users. In this session Jaimee will walk you through some design and personality thinking, on-boarding dos and don’ts, and copywriting considerations to help your applications become more fun, delightful, and emotionally engaging experiences for your users.

You’ll learn about the journey of taking Smash, a wearable tech startup for tennis, from an early idea to being production ready. The talk will focus on the technical aspects of the hardware and software evolution, but some context of the startup business will be discussed to frame the conversation.

From a technical perspective, Smash began as a generic prototype used to gather data around tennis play. Countless hours of data gathering and analysis was done over a 12 month period. You’ll see a demonstration of how the prototype works, the raw data, and the pattern matching heuristics that evolved from the process. The details of the sensors inside the device and the technical trade-offs will be discussed.

Following the prototype stage, the device underwent a physical transformation through engagements with manufacturing and industrial design companies. You’ll see that evolution and the final design prototype.

With all of those pieces in place, there’s also the challenge of creating some useful software for consumers to provide genuine value. You’ll see the software design process, and hear the story about how that is progressing.

Smash ran a kickstarter campaign during June & July in an attempt to raise money for the first full manufacturing run and development of the software. You’ll hear about whether that was a success or not, and some thoughts on why it turned out the way it did.

Android is becoming the OS of choice for those needing an easy to use embedded operating system.

I’ve spent the last 2.5 years building customised versions of Android to run on various devices for use in the digital signage.

In this talk, I’ll cover the basics of what’s involved in customising Android to work as an embedded OS, with examples for things like video-walls and interactive kiosks and then look at how that can then be extended to sensors and outputs to let your Android device interact with the world and people around it.

There will be code examples, tips for potential pitfalls and coverage of some of the lessons learnt while building devices that are used by opeople out in the real world vs testers in labs.

Wotif.com has embarked on a journey to unify its experience across the travel planning process. An essential part of this included the ability to make the crucial parts of its services discoverable and quickly consumable. With a combination of state-of-art technologies and leveraging the concepts of Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State (HATEOAS) we have simplified the process of consuming our content and inventory. We have achieved this across all our user touching platforms from our website to native iOS and Android applications. We would love to share this journey with you.

The speaker will talk about the variety of problems that could arise, and things to consider when trying to support a vast array of android versions and devices. Building an app that can run seamlessly on any android device is one of the major challenges to get those five stars and being featured on PlayStore.

This talk will be mainly focused on development with numerous examples and techniques of the most common android development problems. All these combined with tips and tools will help you reduce the android fragmentation gap.

Examples that we’ll cover include

• supporting variety of screens
• reusing software components
• improving performance
• UI and development tips and patterns
• most common issues caused by the fragmentation, and how to fix them
• tools that can help you create a great app

Attendees will learn on this talk how to approach android application development challenges, with confidence that their apps will be compatible across the pool of varieties of android powered devices.

For some time now the proponents of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) have promised this technology will deliver cheap and simple solution for locating “things” within an indoor space. There have been many attempts at this, with mixed results, now Apple has introduced the much heralded iBeacon does this mean it is ready for consumers?

In this talk I will dig into what BLE is and how it can be used to provide location indoors, then move onto some of the experience we have had using it at Ninja Blocks, what worked, what didn’t, and how we are planning on using this technology in our products.

Building an Internet of Things for Agriculture presents unique challenges that don’t exist in many other domains. The typical agricultural environment is not friendly to electronics, lacks traditional infrastructure such as readily available power and ubiquitous network access. And yet, pervasive monitoring and control combined with cloud based applications and big data analytics offers productivity gains that our world-wide agricultural production systems desperately need. In order to move beyond the enthusiast scale, and deliver these benefits at large scale a business has to move beyond the maker model, and deliver scalable, robust systems that can survive in all manner of environmental conditions, delivering predictable & reliable results.

This talk will cover a wide range of technical areas, all of which have been brought together to provide solutions to dramatically improve water and energy use efficiency in agricultural enterprises in Australia and the USA:

• embedded low-power hardware design
• firmware development and over-the-air upgrades
• ad-hoc, multi-radio networks for low power operation
• in-field sensing & data collection methodologies
• large geographic scale data aggregation
• cloud based data warehousing and analytics

Attendees will leave the talk with a real sense of what is required to deliver an Internet of Things borne out of real world experience from a Melbourne based company that has a track record of delivering solutions in this space for many years.

Wotif.com has embarked on a journey to unify its experience across the travel planning process. An essential part of this included the ability to make the crucial parts of its services discoverable and quickly consumable. With a combination of state-of-art technologies and leveraging the concepts of Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State (HATEOAS) we have simplified the process of consuming our content and inventory. We have achieved this across all our user touching platforms from our website to native iOS and Android applications. We would love to share this journey with you.

Finally! That’s the best way to welcome the announcement of the new WebKit in iOS8. Since the first version of iOS web developers have been struggling with the scarce possibilities of UIWebView. “It’s not like Safari” was a common complaint. That time is now over and your wishes have come true. In this presentation we will learn about the many new possibilities enabled by the new WebKit framework. In particular we will focus on the bridge between native code and web content.

Unless you operate at the truly big end of the web, the economics and market pressures of modern application development are all skewed toward developer productivity. Go faster, ship sooner. In this world of financial sympathy, we lose touch with the very thing that brought us here in the first place: the computer.

Don’t settle for the monoculture of mechanical hostility. We can all be better, wiser developers by re-learning the forgotten idioms of the hardware; clock cycles and CPU instructions, registers and the stack.

In this presentation you’ll see how nothing more than a few strips of LEDs is enough to render all your higher level languages useless, and how a developer who thought he understood computers found that he didn’t really understand them at all…

Android L has brought with it a variety of changes, including the Material design for the UI, and tools to aid in the analysis of power consumption. The speaker will walk through an example of how to convert an existing Holo app to utilise Material design. In addition to reskinning the application, the presenter will identify, analyse and improve the battery performance of the app, while maintaining a high user experience.

Very few apps these days are self-contained silos. In all likelihood, your app will need to consume data from external sources. In this session, you’ll learn how to properly write networking code so that you don’t block threads, don’t fetch data you don’t need, and cache data to avoid. We’ll dive deep into caching semantics to enable us to have the right balance between fresh data and a good user experience. All of this will be accomplished this by leveraging the new networking APIs in iOS 7. We’ll also cover some techniques you can use on the API side to make life easy for mobile clients.

Building an Internet of Things for Agriculture presents unique challenges that don’t exist in many other domains. The typical agricultural environment is not friendly to electronics, lacks traditional infrastructure such as readily available power and ubiquitous network access. And yet, pervasive monitoring and control combined with cloud based applications and big data analytics offers productivity gains that our world-wide agricultural production systems desperately need. In order to move beyond the enthusiast scale, and deliver these benefits at large scale a business has to move beyond the maker model, and deliver scalable, robust systems that can survive in all manner of environmental conditions, delivering predictable & reliable results.

This talk will cover a wide range of technical areas, all of which have been brought together to provide solutions to dramatically improve water and energy use efficiency in agricultural enterprises in Australia and the USA:

• embedded low-power hardware design
• firmware development and over-the-air upgrades
• ad-hoc, multi-radio networks for low power operation
• in-field sensing & data collection methodologies
• large geographic scale data aggregation
• cloud based data warehousing and analytics

Attendees will leave the talk with a real sense of what is required to deliver an Internet of Things borne out of real world experience from a Melbourne based company that has a track record of delivering solutions in this space for many years.

A behind the scenes look at the design and development of Cook – The World’s Cook Book.

Cook is a social Cook Book for iPad, helping people create, share and discover beautiful recipes with family, friends and the world.

Released with iOS 7 in September 2013, Cook reached over 500,000 downloads in just three weeks, becoming the #1 Food and Drink app in over 100 countries, featured on Apple’s iPad Air Site and awarded App Store’s Best of 2013.

This talk looks at the challenges faced by the team from developing an App designed specifically for iPad to making an engaging and social content creation experience and the impacts of iOS 7 in the last months of development.

It will explore the iterative and collaborative process used by the team both up to the initial launch and in the ongoing development of the App, a process that encourages using any tool to help further understanding and never being afraid to throwaway work to make a superior experience.

Learn how you can implement presentation model like MVVM in Android to achieve better separation of concerns, maintainability and testability. We will explore approaches to implement MVVM along with choices of using a third party data binding library.

Further this session will extend the discussion on how this approach can help you share common code path across multiple mobile platforms.

WWDC 14 has been called the most important WWDC since the announcement of the original SDK in 2008. Apple announced a new language, additions to the APIs available, and structural changes to iOS codebases. This presents a set of challenges to codebases of substantial size which were structured according to best practices in previous versions of iOS. If you must maintain a legacy application with backwards compatibility, what improvements are available to you and which are dead ends?

The situation is still in flux. We intend this talk to clarify the situation for developers and project managers so that they know what is easy, difficult or impossible when transitioning legacy projects to Swift and iOS8.

This talk outlines our experiences using Scala to build an Android app. We explore the benefits of using Scala instead of Java for Android development.

Attendees will learn the benefits & pitfalls of using Scala to develop an Android app, including guidance on toolchain selection, common libraries & traps to avoid.

We all dream of that greenfields project, using the latest technologies and targeting modern mobile devices, but most of us live in a world of existing legacy systems that weren’t built with mobile in mind. In this presentation, I’ll show how REA is tackling mobile development in a sea of legacy systems systems to make “mobile first” a reality. Attendees will learn about the challenges and rewards of microservice architectures and hypermedia APIs, as well as how that influences client side development for mobile devices.

The hardest aspect of building mobile apps is generally not the app itself, but in massaging the backend systems to provide the useful APIs that make developing mobile apps possible. Yesterday’s software systems are unable to deliver today’s mobile experiences. I present the shift from a monolithic desktop web app, to a system of microservice APIs with multiple mobile clients, using examples from REA sites realestate.com.au and 1Form.com.au.

I will present the challenges we faced and lessons we’ve learnt around:

• moving from a single deployed system to many systems running in AWS
• using consumer driven contracts to document and enforce system interactions
• consuming hypermedia APIs from mobile clients
• designing and developing for multiple mobile platforms in parallel
• structuring your teams for end-to-end delivery of features for mobile devices