Sessions at Voices that Matter: iOS Developers Conference on Sunday 13th November

Everyone on the planet is rushing to add a social element to their game, picture app, music app, whatever app. Our widely held view of acceptable application development has narrowed to freemium social games that have to monetize. Somewhere along the way we forgot that games should be fun experiences and we became analysts. Graeme's session is about the pitfalls of glossing over the illusion games conjure and the need to focus on a fun engaging game design before we ruin gamers and mobile games forever and ever. Graeme will dissect successful game strategies that offer alternatives to social monetization games, remembering that the biggest game of 2010 had no social elements whatsoever. Along the way, Graeme will try persuade you that as soon as your user sees your app as nothing more than numbers that this bubble will pop and even billions of acres of virtual farmland will not feed your family in the real world.

AV Foundation -- introduced in iOS 4, ported to Lion, and enhanced further in iOS 5 -- delivers a comprehensive framework for audio and video capture and playback. The capture functionality is so good, it's now the preferred option for still photography applications. In this session, we'll focus squarely on AV Foundation as a media capture framework. Attendees will learn:
* How to get the most out of the device for still photography, by using AV Foundation to access the flash, white-balance, and image resolution.
* How to capture audio and video to the file system
* How to process incoming audio and video capture buffers in memory, to create real-time effects or pick out interesting parts of the scene on the fly

Bringing an application from the desktop to a touch device, or vice versa, is never simple. You must reconsider every last interaction from scratch. But the underlying data, and the user's mental model, need to remain the same. Learn how we brought our full-featured Mac productivity apps to iPhone and iPad, and made them feel like they were meant to be there all along. And even better, hear about the lessons we learned on iOS and that we are now bringing back to the desktop.

GLKit is new with iOS 5 and makes it easier to develop high performance applications that take advantage of the latest iOS hardware. GLKit is a high-level framework that combines the best practices of advanced rendering and texture techniques with the latest OpenGL ES 2.0 features. It's optimized to take advantage of hardware accelerated math operations, so you get the best performance without all the work. GLKit also hides many differences between OpenGL ES 1.1 and OpenGL ES 2.0 to simplify your transition to the latest standard.

Apple's Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) specify how Apple-provided interface elements can be used in apps. There are lots of rule; there are a limited set of interactive elements. Why limit yourself? In this session, author and developer Shawn Welch shows you how to break out of the HIG. Join him as he shares case studies showcasing the development of unique looks and feel. Welch will provide inspiring ideas for your own applications and discuss the process that makes them possible. When you walk away from this talk, you'll have discovered how developers have trail blazed their own custom UX, plus you'll have learned important lessons on how you can do the same in your own apps.

In this session we'll introduce MonoTouch, a platform for developing native iOS applications using C# and .NET. MonoTouch enables developing native iOS applications using CocoaTouch, while at the same time bringing much of the .NET framework to the table. By building upon CocoaTouch, MonoTouch applications are able to take advantage of the various frameworks from Apple, resulting in native applications that don’t feel out of place to iOS users, while at the same time offering additional capabilities, code and skill reuse via the .NET framework and C#.

After an overview of what MonoTouch is and how it works, we'll delve into a step by step example that will show off the entire development experience, from getting started with the development environment to deployment and debugging on a device. We'll then survey many common iOS application scenarios and show how MonoTouch can be used across the various iOS frameworks. You'll understand how you can blend .NET framework APIs seamlessly with CocoaTouch in the same code, as well as discuss strategies for reusing portions of your code in other environments, such as Android and Windows phones.