I’m excited to be attending and speaking at 360iDev 2022 in Denver, Colorado at the end of this month. 360iDev was one of my first iOS conferences and is also one of my perennial favorites. The Wilker’s are really good people, and I’m excited to get to attend after a long hiatus.

On Sunday morning 28 August I will lead a half-day tutorial on engineering design systems and on Monday 29 August just after lunch, I present a conference talk on typography. (Yes, I’m obsessed with design systems and with typography in particular. My goal is to enable teams to build UI’s quickly and accurately with as many accessibility features as possible.)

Engineering Design Systems

Format: half-day tutorial

Many companies are coming to realize the many benefits that design systems bring. A good design system (and its accompanying set of engineered components) can improve design quality and consistency and provide significant reduction in production times for both design and development teams. But how do you engineer the components depicted in the design system? In this talk we will learn how to consume design files and then engineer our own mini design system beginning with the foundations of color, spacing, and typography. We will use our foundations to create a few simple elements, and then we will assemble those into a card component, form fields, and finally a form. Along the way we will consider accessibility through the lens of dark mode, increased color contrast, landscape support, Dynamic Type, and bold text support.

Engineering Beautiful and Accessible Text

Format: conference talk

An integral part of design systems and style guides is typography. Typography declares how text will appear in your product by specifying the font family, size, weight, line height, etc. While much of our focus on design goes towards colors, icons, and images, text is the primary way users interact with the majority of apps. Learn how to implement typography in your apps in a way that is accurate to the source designs, fully accessible, and that makes assembling pixel perfect implementations of the source designs a breeze.

Tickets are still available.

I’m also hoping to host a D&D one-shot during the hackathon/game night during the conference. So come geek out about design systems and typography, and then roll some dice with me.

I’m excited to be attending and speaking at AppDevCon 2022 in Amsterdam.

On Thursday 23 June I give a half-day tutorial on engineering Design Systems and on Friday 24 June I present a conference talk on typography.

Engineering Design Systems

Format: half-day tutorial

Many companies are coming to realize the many benefits that design systems bring. A good design system (and its accompanying set of engineered components) can improve design quality and consistency and provide significant reduction in production times for both design and development teams. But how do you engineer the components depicted in the design system? In this talk we will learn how to consume design files and then engineer our own mini design system beginning with the foundations of color, spacing, and typography. We will use our foundations to create a few simple elements, and then we will assemble those into a card component, form fields, and finally a form. Along the way we will consider accessibility through the lens of dark mode, increased color contrast, landscape support, Dynamic Type, and bold text support.

Engineering Beautiful and Accessible Text

Format: conference talk

An integral part of design systems and style guides is typography. Typography declares how text will appear in your product by specifying the font family, size, weight, line height, etc. While much of our focus on design goes towards colors, icons, and images, text is the primary way users interact with the majority of apps. Learn how to implement typography in your apps in a way that is accurate to the source designs, fully accessible, and that makes assembling pixel perfect implementations of the source designs a breeze.

Tickets are still available.

Hit me up if you’re in Amsterdam as I will be there for 6 days / 5 nights.

This past weekend I had the pleasure of attending and speaking at CocoaConf San Jose. This was the 6th CocoaConf event I’ve attended, and I believe it was one of the best. Highlights for me included:

• Matt Drance‘s opening keynote where he discussed the importance of people in our work: our customers (users), our co-workers, and ourselves. This is something that we as engineers can often lose sight of.
• Jaimee Newberry‘s session on brainstorming. Jaimee is a fantastic speaker and always fun to watch, and there was plenty of info on how to manage and get the most out of brainstorming sessions, which I’d like to try on my next project.
• Ben Lachman‘s session on prototyping, which covered a variety of tools and workflows and included a demo of the yet to be released Briefs 2 (which I plan on buying as soon as it is available. Seriously, just take my money already!).
• Marcus Zarra‘s session on the MVC-N design pattern, which contained a strong admonition against relying on 3rd party code (especially networking code). This is going to change how I approach the next client project I manage. This talk alone made attending the conference worthwhile.
• Daniel Pasco‘s session on the long road and various pitfalls encountered in transforming his company, Black Pixel, from a client-work company into a product company (Black Pixel makes the excellent Kaleidoscope 2 — you should buy it). Valuable lessons for anyone seeking to go indie.

I presented 2 talks of my own. Thursday evening I delivered a talk on UICollectionView. This was the 4th (and probably final) time I delivered this talk over the past 6 months. The sample app (which contains 5 different layouts and multiple examples of advanced customizations) is available on GitHub here, while the slides can be downloaded here.

Saturday morning I presented “Animation: From 0 to Awesome in 90 Minutes”, which is an animation talk that begins with some design principles of animation (drawn from Phil Letourneau’s portion of our joint animation session at Renaissance), proceeds to discuss UIKit and Core Animation (and the limitations of UIKit), then takes a close-up look at flipping and folding animations, and wraps up with some general graphical performance tips. This talk is sort of an evolution of both the Renaissance talk and my Enter The Matrix: Reloaded sessions from 2012, and yet is also its own thing. I debuted it last month at CocoaConf DC and this was its second iteration. The sample app is available on GitHub here, while the slides are available for download here. My favorite portion of the app is the touch-enabled timing curve widget that lets you create custom cubic bezier curves by dragging 2 control points (and shows you their values). I think that was also one of the big takeaways from the talk: that you can have an animation overshoot its endpoint and then snap back by simply applying the right timing curve to a basic animation with no need for multiple or keyframe animations.

This wraps up the CocoaConf Spring Tour and my own 3 conference “Spring Tour” as well. I plan to take the summer off from speaking and pick it up again in the Fall.

The Art And Science Of Apps

Tim Burks and Bill Dudney are collaborating to put on a new conference for App Makers early next year in San Francisco: Renaissance.  The conference aims to be (roughly) equal parts design, business, and technology.  This is a 3-day single track conference, so you don’t have to miss anything.  The entire speaker roster has yet to be announced, but already includes folks like Daniel Pasco, Rob Rhyne, Brent Simmons, James Dempsey, Chris Clark, and Matt Drance.

I am proud to announce that I will be presenting a session on animation (the technical half) in conjunction with Phil Letourneau of Black Pixel (the design half).  I’m really excited about the session format (50/50 design/technology).

Early bird tickets are available through the end of November.  Even better, for $200 more you can get a combo Renaissance / CocoaConf ticket that is good for Renaissance plus any 2013 CocoaConf conference.  There are four confirmed dates/cities for next Spring (Chicago, DC, San Jose, and Dallas) with more planned for the Fall.

Personally I think this conference is going to be epic.  If you’re an indie, startup, or small company iOS App Maker, you’ll especially want to be there.  The main sessions look great and cover a wide variety of topics, and I’m certain all the informal breakout sessions and after hours conversations will be fantastic.

Update: Use code “mpospese” to register by November 30 and receive an extra $100 off the early bird price!

I want to present a few tips I have for presenting at technical conferences, specifically at iOS / Mac-focused technical conferences. This isn’t going to be a list of tips on speaking — you can go to Toastmasters for that — just a few things I’ve picked up or think are important.

Have your slides and code posted online by the start of your session

They have to be ready by then anyway, right? Right? So take a few extra minutes to make sure they’re uploaded someplace where they can be shared whether that’s GitHub, DropBox, or your website. There are plenty of free options available, so there are no excuses. How many times have you heard during a session, “I’ll post the slides/code soon” and then how often do you remember to go back and check later to download them?

Bring a few thumb drives with your slides/code on them

Many times conference WiFi is slow, flaky, or nonexistent. Having your materials available online doesn’t necessarily help if your attendees can’t access them immediately. Small capacity flash drives are super cheap nowadays, so buy a few and take a few minutes to copy over your slides and code just before the talk (you know, just after you finish finalizing them).  Attach ribbons or spray-paint them hot pink to help keep track of them.

Bring all your converters, adapters, cables, and chargers

Bring more than you think you’ll need. If the conference projector is VGA, then you’ll definitely want your mini DisplayPort to VGA adapter, but you should also bring your other adapters and maybe an HDMI cable just in case. And if you’re running any iOS apps and have either an iPhone 4S or an iPad 2 or newer, then bring adapters (VGA and/or HDMI) so that you can project directly from the device via AirPlay Mirroring if necessary. (You never know when Xcode might refuse to run your code in the Simulator.) The Apple Digital AV Adapter (HDMI) is especially useful as the only one that lets your do video out from your iOS device simultaneously while debugging or running Instruments from your MacBook over USB, so bring a USB sync cable too.  It goes without saying that you should have chargers for your MacBook and iOS devices as well.

Bonus tip: If you use a retina MacBook Pro or a new 2012 MacBook Air to present, remember to pack a MagSafe to MagSafe 2 converter so that you can charge your laptop using the power adapter that’s hopefully installed on the podium.

Have Contingency Plans

If your session relies on live-coding and/or executing sample code from Xcode, what will happen if Xcode refuses to cooperate with you?  Do you have the code already compiled on an iOS device (possibly multiple) and the cables necessary to present from it?  Do you have git branches or tags for all the major stages of your live-coding demo?  If all else fails, do you have slides showing screenshots of what would have happened?  Expect the unexpected and you will recover more quickly and gracefully when it inevitably happens.

Rev Your Talk

In an ideal world, every conference presentation would be a new original talk crafted specifically for that conference session.  But in reality, good presentations are incredibly time-intensive to create and this just isn’t possible.  I’ve been trying to debut 1 new talk for each conference, but even that may not be sustainable long-term.  Also, some talks are great and should be shared widely with different audiences, so in that sense, repeating them is perfectly acceptable.

However, you should still rev your talk with each presentation:

• Review your slides and update / correct them as necessary.
• Fix a bug or add a feature to your sample code.
• Make a change based on feedback from the previous rendition of your talk.
• Imagine that someone in your audience attended the previous version of your talk and ask yourself, “What new tidbit of knowledge will I include this time that she didn’t get last time?”
• And run through your talk at least once, even if you’ve already given it a half dozen times before.

In Closing

Essentially all of the above tips are corollaries derived from the following 2 axioms:

1. Be Prepared
2. Respect Your Attendees and Value Their Time

As a presenter you have an obligation to provide value to your attendees.  In exchange for presenting you are receiving entry to the conference, probably accommodation, and possibly airfare and maybe even a speaker’s fee.  But more importantly you will be receiving recognition from your peers and a platform from which to promote yourself, your book, your app, your company, etc.  I know you’re busy with your day job, the next great app, your next book or a demanding high-profile consulting client.  So is everybody else.  You owe it to your audience to put in a modicum of effort (and preferably much more) into each conference appearance.

I encourage you to share your domain-specific knowledge and areas of expertise with the community, and I look forward to seeing you at a tech conference soon.