T19: An introduction to mobile app development

Half Day Tutorial

Benjamin Watson (short bio)
North Carolina State University, USA

Vidya Setlur (short bio)
Tableau Software, USA

Objectives:

A half-day, journeyman developer's introduction to developing apps for mobile devices including phones and tablets; platforms such as iOS, Android, Windows Phone and the web; and an overview of the industry and its app stores.

Content and Benefits:

This hands-on course will help journeyman developers who have never developed for mobile devices before get a start in this market. The course will span a comprehensive set of topics focused on developing mobile apps, including an overview of the mobile industry and its app markets, a comparison of mobile and desktop applications, and a survey of mobile development environments. The course will then move to a detailed discussion of UI and graphics development for mobiles, including simple examples for iOS, Android, Windows Phone and the web. During the course itself, various smartphones will be loaned to attendees enabling them to follow along with in class exercises.

Outline:

• Ben Watson - Introduction, Mobile Industry and iOS
  • Welcome
  • The state of the mobile industry
  • The state of app stores worldwide
  • Design patterns and storyboards
  • Cloud services
  • iOS coding examples
  • Questions and break
• Vidya Setlur - Mobile UIs in Windows Phone and on the web
  • Good design practice
  • UI layouts
  • UI components
  • Event handling
  • Maps and sensors
  • Cameras
  • Windows Phone and web coding examples
  • Questions and break
• Ben Watson - Mobile graphics in Android and on the web
  • OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0
  • WebGL
  • Android and web coding examples
  • Questions
• Watson & Setlur: open questions

Target Audience:

The course is designed for journeyman developers who have not built any applications for mobile devices. Good programming skills in Java, C or C++,and familiarity with a programming environment suchas Eclipse or Visual Studio are expected. Some knowledge of at least one graphics API such as OpenGL or DirectX would also be helpful.

Course home page:

Developing Visual Interfaces for Mobile Devices

Bio Sketch of Presenters:

Benjamin Watson Watson is Associate Professor of Computer Science at North Carolina State University. His Design Graphics Lab focuses on the engineering of visual experience, and spans the intersections between graphics, perception, design, and interaction. Much of his work has migrated to the mobile platform, as the most pervasive of visual interfaces. Watson co-chaired the Graphics Interface 2001, IEEE Virtual Reality 2004 and ACM Interactive 3D Graphics and Games (I3D) 2006 conferences, and was co-program chair of I3D 2007. Watson is an ACM and senior IEEE member. He earned his doctorate at the Graphics, Visualization and Usability Center of the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Vidya Setlur is newly principal researcher in mobile experience at Tableau Software. For several years before that, she was principal research scientist in mobile experience at Nokia Research Center. Her research interest lies at the intersection of HCI and computer graphics, particularly in the area of iconography and content retargeting. At Nokia, much of her work emphasizes practicality and usefulness to better facilitate tasks performed with a mobile computational device. Vidya has taught mobile courses at conferences such as MobiSys, ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, the International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE) conferences as well as at universities such as Carnegie Mellon University and San Jose State University. She earned her doctorate in Computer Graphics at Northwestern University.