360|iDev 2018 Conference Highlights

Roundabout Creative Chaos – LIVE with John Wilker

As a special treat, conference organizer-cum-author John Wilker returned to the hot seat as the Roundabout Creative Chaos podcast was recorded live. John had been on the show previously, but this year he was grilled by host Tammy Coron and guest hosts Joe Ceiplinski, Jean MacDonald and Tim Mitra — all seasoned semi-professional podcasters.

The focus of the podcast was John’s books Space Rogues, which are set in the near future. They follow the adventures of astronaut Wil Calder, one of the last remaining humans. John is currently working on the fourth book. Tammy and her hosts grilled John about his passions for writing, science fiction and space travel. Along with the usual roster of questions, the podcast revealed how John aims to misbehave and vie for a role in Tammy’s zombie army. Stay tuned for the episode to come to a podcatcher near you — eventually.

Other Interesting Talks

There are a few other interesting talks that might interest you. This is a sampling of all of the sessions this year, and there are several more I might have included, if I’d been given the space in this article!

“Advanced Debugging With Xcode Extending LLDB” by Aijaz Ansari was a fascinating talk. It built on last year’s talk about Xcode Debugging. Setting breakpoints in Xcode can be used to manipulate an object’s values during runtime. Aijaz demonstrated how we could explore objects with LLDB, unpacking the results of a JSON packet. He showed how to use his script to loop through a blob of JSON and extract the values within. Using the techniques he presented in conjunction with his scripts available on GitHub, it’s possible to observe the values, validate the contents and transform it into other meaningful data. This talk is definitely worth a look.

“Concurrency From the Ground Up” by Greg Heo takes a look under the hood of Grand Central Dispatch. With the goal of improve your skills as a developer, Greg shows us the way to better-performing apps and easier-to-maintain code. By breaking things into tasks and demonstrating concurrency building blocks, pthreads and locks, Greg helps us explore concurrency and parallelism. Using breakpoints’ ability to play sound and speak, he demos how processes can initially be run out of order, and then corrected with judicious use of pthreads and locks.

“Customize your Notifications for iOS 12” by Kaya Thomas explores the use of notifications and the new enhancements in iOS 12. Kaya presents a clear interpretation of notifications by investigating local notifications, the addition of Notification Service Extensions in iOS 10 and the newly-minted Notification Content Extensions. She covers grouping notifications with a thread identifier as well as quiet delivery and provisional authorization. This is an excellent survey of everything you need to know about notifications and how they can benefit you and your app’s users.

The Day Two Keynote was given by Jay Freeman. Jay’s session, “Hindsight Can Be 50/50”, takes a different look at history. As the saying goes, “Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.” Jay briefly examines the Fall of the Roman Empire and disappearance of people on Easter Island. This led into The Fall of Microsoft and how it competed with internet rival Netscape who may have been more “evil” than Microsoft was purported to be. By analogy, Google seems to be similar to Microsoft, but in some ways, worse. Google’s Android OS appears to be moving from open to a more closed model, and may become chargeable in the future. At the end of the talk, Jay discussed the fall of Jailbreaking. iOS has evolved into a more secure platform, and Apple has been recognized to release fixes for bugs faster than before. Because of this, the iOS jailbreak community has lost its purpose and its audience. Jay was once a leader in the jailbreaking community and his perspective is worth considering. Check it out.

Day Three Keynote – John Wilker

On day three, John Wilker gave a keynote about the state of the conference and offered some insights. John also puts on an 360|AnDev conference, which is a sister conference to 360|iDev and is equally well-received. Along with the organizers, John thanked the speakers, sponsors, volunteers, and one special angel investor that helped make 360|iDev possible. This is the 11th 360iDev conference in 10 years; the first conference was presented just after the iPhone SDK was announced, and was developed to be the antidote to John’s underwhelming experiences at various conferences.

The organizers try to have more code-related talks than “not-code” talks, and they try to make sure you walk away from each code-related talk with some insights you can use right away in your projects. However, the “not-code” talks are always amazing full of real-world and relevant concepts that will benefit you and your career years from now.

The community of 360iDev supports Alt-Conf and App Camp For Girls. They also offer two free tickets to various CocoaHeads around the world. Members of the military and students also benefit from half-price tickets to the conference. John notes that this year has been a year of recovery for the conference, and 360|iDev is set to run again in 2019. Early-bird tickets will be available soon, as well as a Patreon campaign where you buy tickets though patronage. I hope to see you all at 360iDev 2019!

Where to Go From Here?

I can’t recommend 360iDev highly enough! It’s a great experience for any developer, designer or anyone involved in app production. There were even more great talks than I could fit into this article. I highly recommend that you check out the other 360|iDev videos when they come out.

The conference hosts, John Wilker and Nicole Wilker, made all attendees feel at ease, and the collective masses of attendees are super-friendly. No matter what obstacles come up, I feel I cannot afford to miss this conference. Every year I’ve attended I come away re-energized, enlightened, and ready to take on the next year’s work.

Ray’s said a number of times that 360|iDev is one of his favorite iOS conferences, and I’d have to agree.

Did you attend 360iDev this year? Will you attend next year? Will you step up and submit a talk of your own? Let us know in the forum discussion below!

Photo Credits: Fuad Kamal, Zev Eisenberg, Ben Chatelain, John Wilker, Tim Mitra.

Note: The videos are being processed by the fine folks at 360 Conferences. We will link them here in the article as they become available.