"My 4 year old loves it, my 40 year old wife loves it." An iTunes user's response to Play School Art Maker

Play School Art Maker for iPad was released internationally in November 2011. It quickly became and remains one of the ABC's most popular apps and consistently ranks in the top free Education apps in the App Store.

Art Maker is a fun digital sticker book that allows kids to freely create pictures, animations and story slideshows, and play puzzles. In the first week after launch kids had made over 80,000 animations – that figure has now reached over 3 million.

So in a market saturated with apps for kids how do you make an app that parents will download and kids will love?  The ABC Innovation team took an iterative approach to design and tested extensively with 2-5 year olds - all on a shoestring budget, and with a looming deadline. Amy Nelson (Creative Producer) and Meena Tharmarajah (UX designer) will take you through the steps in their process, including:

• How to learn from your competitors and gauge best practice for creating apps
• Techniques and processes for user-centric, iterative designs
• Fast low-doc user testing (with 2-5 year olds)

Responsiveness is critical to the success of your iOS app. When someone starts an app they typically need the information right away. The less they have to wait the happier they will be. But, optimizing an app without data is a loosing proposition. To know where to optimize you need to know where the hot spots are.

In this session we will learn how to use Instruments to find and fix performance bottle necks. We'll look at three critical areas:

• Startup time
• Memory Usage
• Scrolling & Graphics Performance

These three areas of performance analysis and improvement are critical to the success of any app. Come to this session and learn the to make your app fly!

The goal of this talk is to help demystify OpenGL ES for iOS developers. You will learn how to render primitives using GLKit and best practices for OpenGL ES programming on iOS devices. You will learn the basics of shader programming and how GLKit can do the hard work of writing shaders for you. Finally, we will use the knowledge learned to dissect the OpenGL ES project template provided by Apple with Xcode.

Blocks, closures, lambdas call them what you want, are a concept not new to programming. They are however, relatively new to ObjectiveC. As of the iOS4 SDK, blocks were introduced and most if not all of the newer APIs use blocks extensively. As an iOS developer, it is crucial you understand blocks in order to properly use these newer APIs.

In this session, we'll cover the history of blocks, how they're used in other languages, and why they've become such a popular and powerful tool in programming. We'll cover the basics of blocks in ObjectiveC and learn how to create them, use them with the iOS SDK, and how to use them to create simple and clean abstractions in your own APIs. Further we'll discuss some of the potential pitfalls of creating and using blocks in iOS; when blocks are, and are not appropriate. Finally we'll cover some of the gotchas with memory management, particularly with Automatic Reference Counting.

Although usually not noticed by the final users, the backend is a very important piece in the context of a mobile application. It is the place where data are stored and organized.

A few years ago building a back-end meant renting some hardware or virtual machine, setting up the operative system, configuring the server, database, storage and writing the back-end logic. In case the app had success, you had also to take care of scaling. While this is still possible, nowadays great services that allow to quickly setup a back-end are growing and spreading.

In this talk I will provide an overview of the services which allow developers to integrate their mobile applications with back-end functionalities enabling features like back-up, synchronization and data exchange. The goal is to illustrate different services and frameworks ranging from mobile-specific, to managed, to generic ones, helping the developers to make an informed choice about the most suitable solution for their applications' needs.

When working out how to build a 2D game, you often have to figure out whether you want to use UIKit and views, or go all-out with OpenGL. While OpenGL is more powerful than UIKit, it's a lot fiddlier. Cocos2D is a graphics toolkit that abstracts much of OpenGL's fiddly bits and lets you get actual work done.

This session will teach participants what Cocos2D is, how to get set up and productive, and how to build a simple interactive game in record time. Along the way, participants will learn where to find additional helpful resources, and come away with a working knowledge of how to use Cocos2D.

Specifically, attendees will learn about:

• How to create a project that uses Cocos2D
• Displaying graphics and images with Cocos2D
• Handling touches and creating interactivity

This session is designed for people who have a working knowledge of Objective-C and UIKit, and have an interest in (but not necessarily a mastery of) graphics.

Putting pixels to canvas for your first iOS project can be hard. You want to build the kick-arse interface you and your developer mates have always dreamed of, but where do you begin? The goal of this session is to share some great ideas about iOS Interface Design to help you get started with apps.

Attendees of this session will hear all about:

• What your friendly neighbourhood developer expects from you.
• Going from napkin scribble to pixel perfection.
• Photoshop sucks, and there’s no alternative. Do the best you can.
• Join the designer community. Ask questions. Share your work.

You'll also see some informal behind the screens examples of the design process of Pocket Weather Australia's interface and icon – and how important an icon is to marketing your app.

No app is an island. Many iOS and Mac apps interact with network services. This session examines some of the techniques, frustrations and mistakes made when you create applications that are highly dependent on network interactions.

You'll find out why the principles of REST matter and how they allow you evolve your application in a clean and predictable manner. It'll also cover internal multiplexing and how to make the most of the meagre connection resources you get though most carriers as well as a host of other bits and pieces.

If your app connects to a network service, don't miss this session.

Automated UI testing is somewhat of a hot topic in the iOS space. Furthermore, the value of any automated testing can only be truly realised when it's incorporated into your product's Continuous Integration (CI) pipeline.

In this session I'll be covering KIF (Keep It Functional) - one of the latest automated testing frameworks available for iOS - and how it can be used with the Jenkins CI platform.

You'll learn why KIF is a good alternative compared with other iOS testing frameworks, and which types of applications KIF is most practical for use with.

I'll then demonstrate how to setup KIF with a new iOS project, write some test scenarios and steps, and integrate it with Jenkins.

Finally, you'll see how to run KIF test suites with Jenkins on both the iPhone simulator and on a physical device.

You'll leave this session with the understanding of how KIF and Jenkins can be combined to automate UI testing and ultimately, improve the quality of your apps.

The Swipe Design Awards are an opportunity to recognise some of the best apps being created in Australia at the moment.

The Swipe organisers will review apps created by conference attendees and in this final session we'll announce the winners of the inaugural Swipe Design Awards.

The winners will be presented with their awards by the panel who will discuss and debate what it is that makes these apps work so well.

Whilst we know about many of the apps created by conference attendees, we don't know about them all. If you'd like to make sure your app is in the running, please tell us about it well before the conference.