NSNorth 2016 Conference Highlights

Lightning Talks

One of the cool features of NSNorth are lightning talks. These are short 15 minute presentations given by attendees, selected from proposals ahead of the conference. They are a great way for new speakers to get experience and for those who want to impart a bite size bit of knowledge.

As an example, one talk I really liked was by Zev Eisenberg, discussing his open source library BonMot, which allows you to take the pain out of attributed strings.

In essence, it allows you to layout type like a typographer. He developed the library out of necessity for some projects he was working on.

BonMot allows for the creation of attributed strings through the use of BonChain arrays, where effects can be applied and the sent to BonText. The resulting output is an attributed string with the format added to each individual BonChain item.

Very slick and worth checking out for your typography needs!

Carving out a Space in the Continuum of App Store Success – Jon Edwards

Another fascinating talk was given by watchmaker and iOS developer Jon Edwards.

Building on Charles Perry’s talk at NSNorth 2014 on finding your niche in the App Store, Jon started out by reminding us that only 0.01% of app developers are successful and happy with their App Store results.

By analogy, Jon also used the example of the surfing mecca Mavericks, where some of the biggest waves exist. In the movie Chasing Mavericks, the protagonist learns that careful observation can lead you to find the best waves. Rather than fighting things head on, a keen observation of the laws of nature offers better results.

Steve Jobs suggested that one should zoom out and see what is really going on. Jon said that in the world of watchmaking, the ratio of watches to watchmakers is 5000:1. Currently, 50% of watchmakers are of retirement age or close to death. Last year, just around 50 watchmakers graduated from colleges. With that insight, it seems to be no wonder why watchmaking is a lucrative business!

Jon went on to discuss the hedgehog concept, where unlike a fox that knows many things, a hedgehog knows one big thing. The key is to discover your sweet spot. As Jim Collins explains in his book Good to Great, it’s critical to determine what you passionate about.

The takeaway is to find out what you can be the best in the world at, and also find out what can drive your economic engine. The intersection of these is the sweet spot.

Tell Your Story – Jonathan Rhyne

Jonathan Rhyne began his talk with a definition of story: an accounting of incidents or events. He explained that one of his favorite films, Forrest Gump is an example of great storytelling. It’s about destiny versus coincidence, and overcoming obstacles.

Jonathan argued that we are all storytellers. We form our identities and understand life through stories. Most of us have vivid memories, and memories are often attached to emotions.

We can remember where we were when significant events happened, but sometimes we remember the emotions at the expense of details. For example during the events on 911 the first plane crash wasn’t broadcast until the next day. Many of us can remember that as if we experienced it live. We have changed our memories with emotion.

We as developers are also in the people and emotion business. He suggested that you don’t just give a feature list: instead, ask many whys. Why can’t I do that, and why does my app do this?

Here are some examples of focusing on the why’s:

• Toms Shoes donate a pair of shoes to impoverished children with every pair you buy. People embrace that idea.
• Apple commercials demonstrate how their products are used, rather than discussing the features. They ask us to consider what we will create with them.
• Lego teaches us that making things is fun.

Get to know your target audience and ask how your product feels. Make people the center of your story and make your app have a supporting role. The take away is to ask yourself: why it is that you do what you do?

The Value of Platform Tourism – Michael Gorbach

Michael Gorbach’s talk invited the audience to consider where we place our values in the platforms we choose to work with.

Beginning with conference name, NSNorth, he reminded us that the name and many Apple frameworks came from NextStep. Founded by Steve Jobs after he was ousted from Apple 30 years ago, NeXT and values that the company contained still matter today.

He argued that values should be a top priority. NeXT valued well designed UI, ease of use, and power. Values are about the choices we make and many of the NeXT’s values are still with us, especially given that NeXT was the seed that led to OS X and iOS.

Michael worked at Apple for a time and recalled attending C4, an early developer conference. A speaker from Appcelerator gave a talk on using Java instead of Objective-C. Following the talk, the questions from the audience were very negative – Michael being among the naysayers! The C4 conference organizers were very upset because of the attendees xenophobic behavior. The takeaway was that we shouldn’t criticize someone just because they use a different stack.

The reaction was caused by a conflict of values:

• Appcelerator sought to democratize development. They valued accessibility to tools and reducing time to market.
• The C4 audience responded negatively because the speaker didn’t belong to their tribe of Objective-C users.

In this talk, Michael invited us to become “xenophilic” – to be more open to ideas and new platforms.

For example, recently Micheal was asked to work on Xamarin project, that is built using C#. He found that working with C# had certain advantages over the tools he was familiar with.

Even exploring Android development opened his eyes to some interesting features; such as a built in annotation system, collections of components, different ways to manage resources and animations with built-in tweeting to name a few.

In conclusion, he suggests that we all should become platform tourists and be inspired to explore other mobile stacks.