iOSDevUK is a conference for iOS developers that takes place at the Aberystwyth university campus in Wales (You get to be a student again).  It is a 4 day event which features talks on the latest iOS frameworks, best practices and ends with a 10 hour hackathon.  Sadly Andrew (iOS developer from Priority) and I could not attend the Hackathon.

The event was less hands on than previous developer events like iOSConf which was a shame but we still got to learn about some of the latest iOS 11 frameworks like:

ARKit

This is Apple’s augmented reality framework which looks really impressive.  We have been waiting for Apple to do something in the AR space since they brought Metaio in 2015.  With the new iPhones having 2 back facing cameras to allow the device to detect depth, the mapping of virtual objects to real life objects has become very accurate.  In the workshop we saw how to place space invaders ships in the real world.

CoreML

CoreML is Apple’s machine learning framework which allows you to take your algorithms from other platforms and use them on your iOS device.  You can’t actually generate your model on the device but you can import it from many different tools (Caffe, SciKit, Kera) and it will run on the device hardware accelerated. The main aim of this talk was to clarify what CoreML’s abilities were as there was a lot of confusion when Apple announced it

FileProviders

So with iOS 11, you’re going to get a file system, like you do in Windows etc.  This workshop showed how you could make your own cloud service like Dropbox and integrate it into iOS11.  This was one of the only talks in ObjectiveC rather than Swift.

ServerSide Swift

This talk went over 3 apps that the company had made using ServerSide Swift which included a SlackBot, a CI tool and an Alexa tool, however the presenter did say that server side swift was far from production ready which was a little bit of a let down.  They suggested the best way to get started with it was to use Docker.

There were a few talks on Design patterns and where to use which ones like VIPER, MVVM, MVP etc.  VIPER seems to becoming popular if your iOS app is very big.  

There were a few talks on the whole pipeline of testing and releasing builds using Unittest, UI test, Jenkin’s, Fastlane and GitHub issues however it was only a overview and not actually how to go about setting it up