Creating inclusive and accessible apps is easy using React Native! Javascript developers can have a working app on their phone in less than an hour. Join me to see a working demo of how to plan, develop, and test for accessibility in the mobile space.

I will also be talking about resources and guidelines you can use and share with your organisation to develop apps for everyone - including what the bare minimum looks like to help you prioritise your requirements!

There are many advantages to using vector-based assets in your Android apps — smaller binary size, faster loading, easier support for all pixel densities, dynamic drawing, and more ways to animate. Despite the upsides, SVGs and VectorDrawable assets are more complex to author and use.

Luke and Marc explore everything needed to create, export, and implement SVGs and VectorDrawables on Android, including common issues and their remedies.

The Internet of Things is undeniably here. In the last year we have heard tell of of security cameras, dishwashers and even ovens roaming the internet unsupervised.

As a consultant and writer about the Internet of Things, I have worked to bring my experience from 20 years in manufacturing and internet security to the IoT world. This presentation will cover the tools and techniques I use to build secure, reliable and rapidly updatable IoT devices.

The techniques covered are applicable to both the simplest embedded devices with no general-purpose OS, and more powerful devices running Linux or Windows.

At WWDC this year, Apple announced their CoreML and Vision frameworks. These allow you do easily implement machine learning models inside your app, running on the GPU on an iPhone. Suddenly a world of machine learning is possible in ways that it wasn't before.

In this talk, you'll see a real world example written in just hours which implements a freely available object classification model to find out who is a good dog. Silly as this sounds, it shows the power now at our disposal.

We’ll look at what you need to do to build a simple app, and then dig into some of the innards of machine learning to see what we need to do to create something really useful.

With a building bursting at the seams and a move to a new location some years away one of our Hackathon teams came up with an idea to improve the “facilities” for the building staff. Initially what started as a bit of a joke soon grew into a fully-fledged idea of building a comprehensive IoT solution that can constantly keep check of the usage state of the showers and toilets at Seek. Not just for morbid curiosity, but to help maintain better cleaning and hygiene of the facilities and also help people use them more effectively. The solution was met with great success and is in the process of becoming a permanent solution in the building.

We will cover:

• What IoT devices we found effective
• How you can leverage the capabilities of AWS to rapidly stand up complex solutions without investments in Infrastructure
• Which “areas” of Seek are more popular than others!

As the future approaches us more and more rapidly, we feel the impact of the choices we make today sooner and with more force. This talk offers practical advice on how to drive and deliver value to a business continuously by building systems that scale to the needs of a business working towards an unknown future.

Did you know that less than 30% of the internet population speaks English? And this percentage is slowly decreasing as cheaper smartphones become ubiquitous and new users from Brazil, Russia, India and China come online everyday. If you want to reach this global market, it is important to translate your mobile apps into your user's native language. This is why Canva decided to build a localised app from the get go.

In this talk, we will present a quick introduction to internationalisation and the key things to consider when localising your mobile app. You will learn about the various tools available to enable translations at scale and how those integrate with your app. You will also get some hands-on, practical information about the unique development challenges presented by languages that have different pluralisation rules to English and languages that are written from right-to-left. We will show some examples of our internationalisation approach in our iOS app. Lastly, we will wrap up with how this fits into our Feature development and Release process. Expect lots of practical advice that will help you get started on localising your own mobile app.

An ever growing ecosystem of connected devices needs newer methods of interaction and UX. While mobile applications are common for interfacing with the IoT, more and more devices make managing a growing number of apps infeasible. Rather than opening up separate apps for each intended action, voice interfaces are starting to become more powerful and commonplace with the Amazon Echo, Google Home and more bringing an expectation of voice commands to the IoT.

With voice interfaces emerging comes another expectation — intelligent responses from these voice interfaces! This is where early artificial intelligence and chatbot creation will come in handy. While these areas sound like they'd be complex to get started with, there are platforms and technologies out there today that can enable you to do a whole lot out of the box which you can build upon.

In this talk, PatCat will give you a crash course in voice interfaces and AI — looking at how you can get started with existing services and APIs, and how you can take all of this and apply it to your own idea or connected device.

Diving into the feasibility of using a single code base for generating multiple front-end applications.

We'll discuss using React and React-Native for building apps that provide a consistent experience across native, mobile and desktop web.

Using React and React-Native as the UI layer upon a shared JavaScript core codebase can greatly improve your organisation's delivery of new features to customers.

We'll talk about our migration strategy for the new apps replacing our existing apps, piece by piece. Not slowing down our continuous release of features to customers while replace the apps.

How can you use robots to help you test?

Meet Tappy McTapFace, Tappy is a robot that was built during a 2 day hackathon to help demonstrate how robots could be used to automate testing on mobile apps. It's made out of 3D printable parts, based on Taptser 2.0 open source designs and can be programmed in javascript.

You could also use a robotics challenge to engage your team around testing ideas. Sam will give her insights from running multiple testing challenges that engaged over 100 software engineers. From a lunch time robotics challenge to a company wide bug bash. Sam has run many events that help raise a companies testing culture.

The importance of good software testing in the larger software development world is taken as a given, yet in many IoT projects, software testing is done in an ad-hoc manner if it is done at all.

In this talk I will show how there are multiple techniques for software testing your IoT projects, when each of these techniques is appropriate, and hands on examples of how to use them. I will show how Test Driven Development can be used to improve the reliability, reproducibility and speed of development of your IoT projects.

When designing a mobile app, specifically on iOS, one must consider Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines. These are the set of guidelines that needs to be followed to create an app that is cohesive with the rest of the operating system. The chances are, most people in the industry are familiar with the guidelines. However, there are items that seem to be commonly ignored. The talk will go through few of those items and at the end discuss the technical impacts for not following the guidelines

One of the items is the use of the launch screen. In many apps, the launch screen is used as a splash screen, with some variation of a logo and sometimes with fancy animations. However, the launch screen actually has a different purpose, which is to be a static state to provide a seamless transition between the launcher and the app. Thus, the launch screen should look like blank state of the first screen of the app. For example, look at the launch screens of Facebook and Twitter, in this case Facebook follows the guidelines.

Following the design guidelines not only affects the user experience side of the app, it also has a technical impact. An example is using a hamburger menu. Developers tend to use a third party library, which reduces maintainability. Third party libraries are of course useful, but using them to purposely ignore the guidelines is questionable. Moreover, there is an accessibility impact of using non-native elements. Adding accessibility support manually to custom UI elements is another overhead to consider.

Aeons ago, in the year 2000, Joel Spolsky proposed the Joel Test, a set of questions that he recommends all software development teams should be able to answer “yes” to, in order to help them build great software.

This talk takes a look at these questions through technical, people, and process lenses, to see if they are still relevant in software development today. It investigates whether we should add any new questions, given the changes that have occurred in the industry in the last 17 years. And looks in to changes to these questions to make them more relevant for development of mobile products.

The excitement around augmented reality isn't limited to people with the Microsoft HoloLens, Google Tango devices or in-depth knowledge of game engines or complex positional tracking techniques — it's available to any developer who is keen to write a bit of JavaScript and experiment with a new concept for the future of the web.

Augmented reality on the mobile web has had one Achilles heel for years that has prevented its growth and adoption — a lack of iOS support. This year marks the first year that iOS will actually support the WebRTC features that make WebAR possible! This presentation will explore how you can get started building Web-based augmented reality using frameworks like AR.js and awe.js, the benefits of doing so over app-based AR and, of course, some live demos to show what's possible! WebAR isn't as difficult as many developers expect it to be!

This session will give a practical demonstration of how to convert an existing deeply nested view hierarchy for a typical Android app into a more efficient (in terms of measure and layout performance) hierarchy using ConstraintLayout. I will also show how you can use the features of the ConstraintLayout library to create view hierarchies that enable rich animations with little effort.

Amazon Alexa, Google Home, HomeKit, and Cortana are more than personal assistants and seem to be the next big battle the big four will go into, but why is this so important to them? There are two components to those assistants; the first is integration with your personalized data gathered from the apps you use and the second is their IoT capability automating your devices at home.

With almost every manufacturing company hiring engineers like crazy to get their devices into the cloud, the results are very different ranging from really bad to great solutions. This behavior shows that we are in the Wild West when it comes to how cloud integrations, device security, and backend security is being implemented. That is why we as pioneers of this technology have to help shape the future by avoiding common pitfalls, secure private data responsibly and don’t end up accidentally weaponizing our IoT creations.

In this talk, I’m going to talk about lessons learned from developing a major IoT platform that controls about a quarter million appliances in the US and Canada. We’re also going to take a look at pitfalls we have overcome and which possibly nice looking shortcuts you should avoid no matter how small your iOS client or IoT device is.

Automated Acceptance Testing is one of the essential ingredients of a healthy agile software practice. Unfortunately, attempts to adopt this on mobile usually result in the creation of slow, brittle and highly complex UI tests - where did we go wrong?

This approach is a far cry from the original idea of acceptance testing and does little to improve the reputation of mobile development. Automation is meant to bring confidence – but used in this way, it creates more problems than it solves. This leaves development teams and businesses left on a seemingly never ending quest for the next thing - usually in the guise of a new framework promising to be better than the last e.g. KIF, Calabash, Appium etc.

React Native allows developers to create native cross-platform using JavaScript, or really anything that will compile to JS C#, TypeScript, or even F#. But why would you use React Native? How run-time typed language like JavaScript be a better choice for developing apps than say, Swift, Java, Kotlin, C# ( Xamarin ) or C++ all compile time static type checked languages. Firstly is just that, there is no need for a compile step, React Native can update the JS without having to reload compile and replace the previous application. Compiling an app everytime can take a long time for a small project this might be 1-5min, but larger apps can easily take as long as 45 minutes or more to build a single app.

In this talk, we will explore how features like hot code reloading allow for much faster edit and run cycles, how you can use tools like Flow or TypeScript to add type safety without incurring the long compile times found in more native methods. To Prove the how simple and fast React Native is to builds apps we will create a simple app live on stage. To top it all off, you can even embed React into existing Native Apps, avoiding the need for total rewrite.

Imagine the following. You're happily coding along when you suddenly realize that there is a serious security flaw with your app. At first you may be in disbelief. You might turn to your co-worker and ask, "Does this sound right to you?" Then the realization of the magnitude of the problem slowly dawns on you. You might swear, walk outside for fresh air, or even laugh out loud, not knowing how else to respond.

Xamarin as a compiled cross-platform solution claims to offer obvious benefits that seem to make it the perfect solution when trying to reuse code or integrate with an existing solution. The tech industry increasingly requests Xamarin experience and more Xamarin consultancies and startups pop up in the scene, making it attractive for newcomers and job seeker alike. But it wouldn’t be the first solution to promise everything and deliver nothing. With Microsoft’s seemingly disinterest with its own Windows Phone, Xamarin as a Visual Studio native seems to be their biggest stake in the mobile market, but how good is their play and is it worth even looking into this technology?

Three years ago I wrote my dissertation about the usability of Xamarin, evaluating Xamarin against native development and doing performance testing between the two approaches. Back then, it was clear that Xamarin had a lot of work to do to overcome being a nice product only for a small number of businesses, still lacking a long list of important things. In the meantime, Microsoft has taken over and we see more Xamarin apps pop up every day, so it is time to reevaluate.

In this talk, we’re going to explore Xamarin as a cross-platform solution and we compare it with other promising solutions such Facebook’s React Native under the aspects of usability and performance. Having heard the talk you will leave with an overview of key technologies in the cross-platform sector as well as an idea when Xamarin can help you boost your business and what pitfalls to avoid. Distilling the essentials of a 110-page dissertation and cleaning up with myths from the PhoneGap era that will make it clear whether or not this is just another bubble or this has real potential.