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This blogpost marks the end of Xamarin Evolve 2016 already. Wow, time flies, but this was another great Evolve. I didn’t expect that the same vibe of Evolve 2013 could be recreated but Xamarin has some special fairy dust and made it happen again, only bigger. Much bigger.
Today was a bit of a roller coaster ride for me – and I wasn’t even at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter anymore! But more on that later…
I attended the Xamarin MVP breakfast at 7:00am, bright and early. A nice bunch of people from the MVP community showed up and we got to chat with some of the Xamarin folks about the Microsoft acquisition and the way forward.
Keynote
The main Evolve event continued with the Day 2 Keynote session with special guest Grant Imahara from Mythbusters. Grant had an inspirational story about his time as a Mythbusters team member, doing all these crazy things for the sake of science (and fun). The way he had to solve problems and challenges has parallels with how we approach software development. It comes down to fostering creativity and using failure as a design tool.
Sessions like these always work great for inspiration.
Breakout sessions
Designing for Touch – Josh Clark
I planned on attending the 2 hour ‘Designing for Touch’ seminar by Josh Clark. Josh is an engaging speaker and his presentation covered a lot of great tips about how people hold and operate their mobile devices using Touch.
Depending on the size of the phone, there are roughly three different types of grips: one-handed, cradled grip + 1 finger, the so called “BlackBerry prayer” grip. As it turns out, the thumb is the most important input “device” a user has, so it makes sense to optimize for input and/or manipulation via thumbs.
The preferred placement of controls on Android differs from iOS. Android has a fixed “soft button” navigation bar at the bottom of the screen, and putting controls just above that bar is tricky. On iOS it makes sense to put tab-navigation at the very bottom of the screen. Per platform native UI’s have very specific needs, so if you want to build a quality app, you must keep this in mind.
Josh put his slides up for download. They’re worth checking out:
Unfortunately I had to leave the second part – just when Josh started to talk about gestures – because I had a special invite for…
Lunch with Woz?!
Wow! I was privileged to join a party of Xamarins and customers in a small lunch setting together with Apple co-founder and inventor of the Apple I and II computers, Steve Wozniak! It was mind blowing to meet and greet such an icon of our industry.
I guess it was overwhelming to most of us because we sat there most of the time just marvelling at his amazing stories. Woz told us that he doesn’t eat lunch, he sticks with just one meal per day, which gave him plenty of room to talk. It was great to hear about his first endeavours in making computer hardware, soldering the circuits for arcade games, his favourite apps and the Apple Watch.
What struck me most was that he has a sincere passion for software development and software developers. He is definitely a tech geek for life and a genuinely nice guy. I got my picture taken with Woz, but I’m still awaiting the pic from the photographer… Exciting!
Xammy and Closing keynote
Xammy Awards – Stephanie Schatz
At the end of the day, it was time for the Xammy Awards, an award for outstanding apps built with Xamarin technology. The finalists are listed on the Xamarin Blog. One of them, in the Enterprise App category, was NS / Dutch Railways.
Marco and Patrick from Info Support are members in the team building this app. I worked at Info Support for 16 years and my last project before I left the company for Xpirit was: this very project! I was the solution architect during the startup and first iterations of development of this app and the team did a fantastic job building these apps on top of that architecture. So I was pretty proud when this happened:
Congratulations Marco and team, great job!
Closing panel discussion – Steve Wozniak & Miguel de Icaza
Steve Wozniak and Miguel de Icaza joined on stage for a panel discussion about the history and future of apps. The same way as during lunch, Woz passionately told his fantastic stories and shared his vision on where computing might go in the future. Woz believes strongly in personal assistants like Siri and/or Amazon Echo.
Unfortunately we didn’t get to hear much from Miguel in this session, but Woz was an inspiration. Another thing that stood out was his dedication to educating young children to do programming. In his heart, Woz always stayed an engineer and a teacher.
Closing thoughts
We ended the conference at a closing party over at the Dragonfly restaurant. This was another great location with fantastic Japanese food.
Closing thoughts: Evolve 2016 was a fantastic conference. I’m amazed how Xamarin managed to keep the vibe of the original Evolve in 2013, and just made it bigger and more awesome. All Xamarins were very approachable and close to their community members. I found this in my bedroom after the keynote, for participating in the DevOps panel yesterday:
It says: Thank You! From Xamarin. I say: Thank YOU, Xamarin! See you next year at Evolve 2017. Let’s make this happen!
Still here? What’s that? Food posts? Ok, here are some…
Time for the Future of Apps!
The mobile chef 