Taming Mobile

Developing software for mobile platforms is as essential as it is hairy: a fragmented marketplace and platforms, new user interaction models, unreliable and laggy network connections, performance constraints and many more problems can take the shine off even the fanciest gadget. This track explains the problems with mobile development and shows some ways to tackle them.

Day of week:

Tuesday

Location:

Grand Ballroom B/C

Host:

Bijan Vaez

Presentations

Common Security Pitfalls for Mobile Apps in the Enterprise

4:05pm - 4:55pm

By: Kevin Watkins , Steve Hanna
CTO of Appthority-- Lead Research Scientist at Appthority

In this talk, we'll deep dive common pitfalls app developers make, showing the top 5 app developers' mistakes we've encountered from a variety of apps, including some of the most popular ones. We will examine the mistakes in technical detail, highlighting risks from both the consumer and developer perspective, by looking at the code that creates the behavior, and the actual observed behavior from dynamic analysis.

These mistakes often lead to risky app behaviors, and with corporate environments becoming increasingly aware of the apps their employees bring inside their work place, lead to the creation of policies that blacklist apps that contain risky behaviors. Apps of all kinds, even unrelated to the work environment, can have a negative effect on the user if they misbehave. We'll close the discussion on how to avoid these common mistakes for app developers and how to be more aware of apps in your corporate environment and how they behave.

Mobile Open Space

5:20pm - 6:10pm

By:

The Facebook Mobile Release Process

2:50pm - 3:40pm

By: Christian Legnitto
Mobile Release Engineer at Facebook

A big part of Facebook's shift to being a mobile company has been working on the way we develop, test, and ship code. We're building mobile apps at unprecedented scale and are breaking new ground here. Shipping mobile software is inherently different than shipping web software -- the stakes are higher. But we're taking the lessons we've learned from the past five years of shipping code on desktop web and applying them to mobile. The biggest change is that we now schedule predictable dates when we cut from mobile feature development to testing, stabilization, and polishing. This helps us drive toward higher quality -- one of our top priorities on mobile. In this session, Christian will discuss some of the tools and processes used by Facebook for pushing new updates to our mobile apps.

Presentations

Mobile Web Performance and Stability Through Offline HTML5

10:30am - 11:20am

By: Bijan Vaez
CTO and CoFounder at EventMobi

This is a practical and hands-on session into performance and stability issues facing mobile apps and specifically how they can be addressed through Offline HTML5 techniques. We will walk through an example of taking a simple off ‘offline’ and provide insight into a few tools/strategies required to increase the performance of your mobile apps and make use of new HTML5 capabilities

Conquering the uncanny valley: making web apps as smooth as native

11:45am - 12:35pm

By: Andrew Betts
Director of the Financial Times' Labs division

The FT web app, along with many other HTML5 websites, blurs the boundaries between apps and websites, and opens a debate that still rages about what it means to build using web technologies today.

For newspapers, this stuff matters. The FT is 125 years old this year, and to ensure we’re still going strong at 250, we need to fundamentally change the way we distribute our journalism. We need to invest in technologies that will stand the test of time, and create user experiences as good as reading a physical paper. So our aim is not just to create an efficient and powerful delivery channel for our own content, but also to protect and nurture the development and maturity of the web platform.

Right now creating high quality user experiences in HTML5 is very hard, and to get to where we are today we need a huge bundle of hacks and extreme techniques, many of which I’ll cover in the session.

In the future we hope these rough edges will get smoothed, in the same way that print production has evolved over a century to be the incredible logistical miracle it is today. Hopefully, the web won’t take that long.

Lessons from building LinkedIn Mobile - HTML5 & Node.js

1:35pm - 2:25pm

By: Kiran Prasad
Senior Director of Engineering Mobile at LinkedIn

As mobile applications become central to your business, the architecture of your front end and back end systems changes significantly. Technologies like Node.js and HTML5 help you build an efficient architecture for creating mobile solutions, but they are new to the industry. LinkedIn has been using these technologies to serve millions of users for the past 3 years.

This session will define the impact of mobile on architecture, explain our choices of HTML5 and Node.js and share some learnings about how to use these technologies effectively at scale.