Agile Apps: Effective Mobile & Native Development
As the rise of iOS, Android, and the Mac App Store brings more web developers into the world of native applications can our existing processes and best practices survive the transition? How can we release early and often in an environment where each update must pass through a review process? How do we aggressively refactor code when outdated clients must be supported? Can we iterate efficiently on features when design changes require more than a stylesheet update? A group of experienced web, mobile, and native app designers and developers will discuss our experiences working on native applications. We will explain what unexpected challenges we encountered coming from a web background, what strategies have helped us design and develop native applications, what did not work, and what we should learn from experienced native application developers.
Presenters
Amanda Wixted is the co-founder and CTO of Hyperspace Inc creating Turf Geography Club.
She has been a game programmer for 6 years, riding the wave from J2ME phones to iPhones to the web. She worked for Octopi and Namco Networks and was the first iPhone developer hired at Zynga. Some of her App Store #1 hits are FarmVille, Live Poker, Mafia Wars, PAC-MAN and Ms. PAC-MAN. Outside of mobile, she worked on PoxNora and PetVille. She splits her time between New York City and San Francisco.
Anne Halsall is a product designer at Quora, a social network for question answering and information sharing of all kinds. She works on the Quora iPhone app and writes UI and front-end code for both the iPhone and web applications. Previously she has worked at Inkling, Google, and the McHenry Public Library.
Jonah is a developer at Carbon Five, an agile software development firm in San Francisco. He builds web and native applications using Rudy, JavaScript, Objective-C, and Java. He is an advocate for test driven development, process automation, and for bringing agile and lean practices to new platforms.
Kyle Neath is something like a designer who has an irrational fear of checkboxes. He spends his nights (and sometimes days) designing and building tools for other designers and developers at GitHub, where it's rumored they're trying to build the best company in the world. Kyle has an addiction to building great things, shipping, and fine IPAs.
Tuesday, March 13
