In our increasingly international market, internet speeds are not created equal, so having an immediately responsive and up to date app is essential. With the recent introduction of Background Transfer Service and Background Fetch, iOS apps can perform networking requests in the background. Whether it’s downloading assets, uploading large files, opening your app with fresh data, or getting data to your watch app, this new user experience is incredibly powerful. This panel will cover how different companies are leveraging this framework, architectures for the networking stack, and how to navigate development speed bump.

• Gwendolyn Weston
• Natasha Murashev
• Boris Bügling
• Michele Titolo
  NSSpain 2015

Tips and tricks to understand how Xcode works, so you’ll never (hopefully) see a broken build again.

• Grant Paul
  NSSpain 2015

Getting started with new paradigms requires us to change thinking and make mistakes along the way. Functional programming from the eyes of a beginner, along with practical steps to gradually change how we write our code.

• Miguel Quiñones
  NSSpain 2015

Big, complex things are made out of many little, simple things—or least they should be. Simple things are easier to write, easier to debug, and easier to change. Functions are beautifully simple. Composing them lets us make big things out of small things. By thinking differently about app architecture, we can start to build our apps out of smaller, simpler things.

• Josh Abernathy
  NSSpain 2015

In my talk, I’ll present coordinators, which are a novel way to manage view controllers, enable re-use, and generally provide structure to code. Coordinators are objects that control flow in an app. Coordinators are typically initialized with a navigation controller, although they can manage other types of view controllers as well. View controllers are totally transparent to coordinators; view controllers display data as directed by their coordinator and bubble up events as delegate methods, which the coordinators respond to. This makes reusing view controllers completely trivial, since the view controller doesn’t bring any baggage along with it.

Much like views and view controllers, coordinators are found in a tree structure. The root coordinator is called the app coordinator, and contains the code for setting up the root view controller, which you might typically find in an app delegate. Swapping out app coordinators could change your app from an iPad layout to an iPhone layout.

When a coordinator begins doing too many tasks, those tasks can be pushed down into a child coordinator. Complexity can easily be managed, and it has space for growth. The using the coordinator model is a simpler way of managing iOS apps and is a great tool for slimming down large view controllers.

• Soroush Khanlou
  NSSpain 2015

Paul gives us advice on how to get into public speaking and how to create that ideal talk.

Mike takes us through how he build a simple IoT device using Firebase

Over the past few years I have led a number of iOS teams, at various different companies in London, from digital agencies to large publishing houses. As you might expect we’ve enjoyed a lot of highs, and more than a few lows. In this talk I want to reflect on some of the lows, and my part in them.

When the best of intentions goes awry, and you find yourself needing to be the best team lead you can be, what should you do first? How can you turn a toxic situation into a team building one? When teams turn on themselves, how do you pull it back? And when you’ve had an argument with another team mate that was so aggressive that your CTO had to step in, how do you end up calling that same developer a close friend?

Naming no names but my own, I plan to tell you some of the challenges I’ve faced, what I did next and what I learned along the way so that, maybe, you don’t have to walk the same road too.

• Michael May
  NSSpain 2015

Our tech panel answers iOS questions from the community.

Tomasz talks about how you can use Core Data at scale