MacTech Conference 2013: Sessions

Edward R. Marczak, MacTech Magazine
Conference Sessions Chair and IT Track Sessions Chair

Ed is the Executive Editor of MacTech Magazine, the author of several books, and Worldwide Mac Operations Dude at Google. As MacTech Conference’s Sessions Chair, Ed heads up the sessions, and lab content.

Neil Ticktin, MacTech Magazine

Neil not only plays host for all MacTech events, but aids the session chairs for all MacTech events (17 events in 2013). Neil has been the Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of MacTech Magazine since 1992. With both a technical and business background, Neil has authored hundreds of articles including most of MacTech’s well known benchmarking articles on productivity applications, virtualization, and performance products.

Ars Technica Editor-at-Large, Jacqui Cheng will give the keynote at MacTech Conference 2013, which will be held November 6-8, 2013 at the Manhattan Beach Marriott in Los Angeles, California.

Solidify the knowledge you’ve gained during MacTech Conference by participating in the Take Control TechUp, an event that will quiz conference attendees on the topics covered in a wide variety of sessions. This interactive session will pit you against your fellow-conference goers to see who best remembers the technical content from our expert-level talks. (with Adam Engst)

Solidify the knowledge you’ve gained during MacTech Conference by participating in the Take Control TechUp, an event that will quiz conference attendees on the topics covered in a wide variety of sessions. This interactive session will pit you against your fellow-conference goers to see who best remembers the technical content from our expert-level talks. (with Tonya Engst)

Apple often organizes its product lines so that users can choose between “Good,” “Better,” and “Best” options. One is practical, one is aspirational, and the middle one is a compromise at worst and a fusion at best. Their announcements in October underscored this philosophy in a new and unexpected way, with a simple alignment of iPad hardware and major rewrite of applications that redefined their roadmap. “Good, Better Best” isn’t a core philosophy but it’s a useful concept. How can “Good, Better, Best” improve your own project plans? And how can it inform your plans for life itself?.

This workshop will be dedicated to creating and maintaining documentation for both users and for the technicians/developers themselves. The goal would be to cover a range of tools that can be used for creating documentation both written and video. I envision a quick demo of some of the tools. Some discussion on best practices using perception and cognition science as a background.

How playing to your key talents and expertise and understanding how the brain works visually can help you to craft a presentation that will be memorable long after you’ve finished speaking.

Hear from the CEO and CTO what the NewStarship project is all about, and how you may get involved if you are so inclined.

The “fundamentals” of computing are things like binary, meaning “on” and “off”; the components of a system, such as RAM, ROM, CPU, and I/O devices; operating systems, and the differences between them; skill at typing and use of software. On these, developers build programs, using languages and algorithms that tie these supposed basics together in new and (hopefully) better ways. The most effective developers are experts in how and why their code works, but CPU architectures, assembly language, Application Binary Interfaces, and the role of a kernel in running an OS are just some of the things many developers know little or nothing about. This talk aims to introduce as many of these “internals” as possible, in the hope of helping both new and experienced developers understand better the operation of the machines they command.

What separates great user interfaces from the merely decent, and how to move your interface from one to the other.

Learn the different ways of making ebooks compatible with iBooks. We will focus on the three different ways to make an ebook bring the most out of the story you want to tell, from flowing text to rich fixed layouts, you will learn how to bring everything together down to the nitty gritty. Want to take advantage of iBooks specific features like engaging multitouch interaction? Stick around for the second part of the talk where you will be able to download assets to build an iBook from scratch with iBooks Author in an interactive workshop.

The way our apps communicate with services across the wire has a tremendous impact in the final user experience. This talk will coverwhat it takes to bring the best experience to end users by properly consuming web APIs. We will talk about creating and consuming a web service, following best practices in API design and we will explore different possibilities on how to design API clients. We’ll take a look at major concerns like networking, parsing, caching, and error handling, while emphasizing testing and driving the design of our clients with TDD. We’ll discuss best practices, tools and tricks to get the best from an API and bring it to our users.

Did you know Google ships 25+ iOS apps? This talk will focus on doing iOS development at Google and the techniques we use to design, develop and ship high quality software on the “other” mobile platform using Google Maps as a bit of a case study.

Development is important. Without development, there’s no app. So now it’s finished, and you release it in the App Store and go shopping for a private island to buy with all your App Store money, right? Oh, honey. No. You need to worry about the description of the app and which screenshots to put in the store. You need to use your contacts and the contact forms of others to get the word out. You need to go on podcasts, take out ads, hustle hustle hustle. And suppose that all works, and the users come. They will press button combinations and install on hardware you didn’t realize was possible in this universe or any other. Do you have anyone ready to handle the email or phone calls or tweets or Facebook posts? If that’s you, how much time does that leave for the inevitable bug fixes? This will be a discussion about all the things I hear from developers about how they forgot or didn’t realize all the stuff that went intoan app besides building it.

In this session, I’ll introduce Xojo, a development environment that can create apps that not only run natively on OS X and on the web. This opens up a whole new range of possibilities for consistent cross-platform development. It also gives us a way to interact with users using devices we may not have experience with.

Engagement metrics aside, how are you engaging your users at an emotional level? How much thinking goes into the personality and tone of your product? What about writing the error messages, alerts, calls-to-action, descriptions or release notes? Whether you have a playful concept or big brand product yet to be built, or a product that’s been out for a while, Jaimee wants to share some very important considerations in design thinking and copywriting to help your products become more fun, delightful and emotionally engaging experiences for your users.

Many programming projects require text to be tokenized and parsed. In the past this was done manually, but now there are a variety of automatic tokenizers and parsers that can greatly simplify this task. This talk focuses on Ragel, a lightweight tokenizer that can easily be integrated with Xcode and Objective-C. Ragel uses a grammar that is very similar to regular expressions to specify the grammar you want to tokenize. Ragel converts your grammar specification into a finite state machine that directly interfaces with C functions or Objective-C methods. Unlike more complex automatic parsing tools, Ragel is extremely lightweight (does not even require linking with a framework), is fully compatible with Unicode text (can be configured to tokenize input from NSString objects), and generates code that has no license restrictions (Ragel itself is licensed under GPL). Ragel has been in continuous development for over 12 years, and has a an active user community. If your Mac or iOS application needs parse text, consider using Ragel as the core of your parser.

No matter how hard developers try, we will never be able to add more hours to the day. This is why automation is key to running a successful indie business. Automation is more than just writing some ruby scripts. Its also about brining on staff to help with things that you don’t need to do. Its about implementing systems that will make you become more efficient.

This optional, full-day workshop takes place the day prior to MacTech Conference 2013 and is available at a discount for conference attendees. See https://www.mactech.com/conference/2013/workshops for more information on this workshop. 

This optional, full-day workshop takes place the day prior to MacTech Conference 2013 and is available at a discount for conference attendees. See https://www.mactech.com/conference/2013/workshops or more information on this workshop. 

Passbook is one of the most underrated features of iOS 6. In this session, we will explore how to create and maintain interactive, auto-updating, user-specific passes from basic design to server-side endpoints. From event tickets to geo-localized coupons, learn how you can create engaging passes as successfully as the NSNorth conference. There might even be a live demo with audience participation (network and Demo Gods permitting).

The Sprite Kit framework allows the development of high-performance 2D games. It combines everything you need to animate sprites, simulate physics and create visually stunning particles. While third-party libraries like Cocos2D have provided similar features, Sprite Kit tightly integrates everything into a single, easy-to-use API. In this session, we will examine Sprite Kit’s features and demonstrate using Sprite Kit to achieve many common features in games (animating a sprite, adding physics, detecting collisions and adding particles). We will also look at Apple’s support for Sprite Kit in Xcode. Finally, we will discuss the similarity and differences between Sprite Kit and other technologies.

Using Open Source code in your project has become an essential part of development. Finding good Open Source projects can be difficult. Including that code can get messy. This is where CocoaPods comes in. CocoaPods manages library dependencies for iOS and OS X. This session will introduce CocoaPods, walk through a simple integration, and provide some best practices, tips, and tricks to help you make the most out of it.

An introduction to the methods and practices used in reverse engineering. This talk will give you a foundation in the philosophy behind this difficult process, and detail several approaches to getting started with reverse engineering on OS X and iOS.

Xsan to the desktop – thanks to: Xsan being part of OS X, Promise SAN Links, Thunderbolt, Promise X30 and FibreChannel to the desktop. I’ll show pictures, screenshots, video’s of the work and performance. I’ll talk about the architecture and design that went into the solution. I’ll also encourage the idea of using Xsan for everyday shared storage and not just for video.

Right now storage is on the verge of being transformed from how we traditionally view our server environments into something completely different. Traditionally we have connected storage to servers directly, but with the advent of technologies such as virtualization, faster network infrastructure, and faster storage that is changing quickly. SSD’s, 10Gbe, large drive capacities are all driving this change. I would talk about how services are being migrated from servers with directly attached storage to a shared storage environment with multiple servers talking to it and sharing it out and how this changes costs and planning for your business or school.

I would venture that many of us started out as a technician working for someone else. At some point we jumped ship with a few clients and set out to “do things better”. Soon we realized there was so much more to running a business then just being a great tech. In this round table session we are going to talk about the things we have learned about running our businesses, Please come ready to share your ideas and dig for a few gold nuggets for your own bag of tricks. Some of the topics we’ll address are Accounting, managing client impressions, Marketing, Business planning, employee’s, retirement, insurance, vacations, phone systems, web pages, and all the other things we have learned as we transitioned from Technician to business person.

With an easy-to-learn language and integrated GUI support, LiveCode has become the go-to solution for a wide range of tools from decision support, training, data management, dashboards, and more.Now that LiveCode is open source, many organizations are discovering the benefits of being able to rapidly deploy applications across the enterprise, serving users running Mac, Windows, and even mobile devices running iOS and Android.This session will provide an overview of the strengths and weaknesses of LiveCode, focusing on areas where it can be particularly useful for devops, with an introduction to its scripting language and object model so you can hit the ground running using it within your own organization.

Come learn about strategies for managing and deploying iOS. I’ll cover the different models (institutional, personal, layered) for deploying to users, and the use of Apple Configurator. In addition, for management strategies, I’ll talk about the value and features offered by MDM products and the various approaches and benefits you can enjoy as a result of using them. Finally, from a soft point of view, a case study of my deployment of 900 iPads for students across K-12 and the methods used to accomplish it.

How will IPv6 impact our network? How will IPv6 impact our servers? How will it impact our desktops? What about NAT? What about firewalls? How does IPv6 impact my desktops and their interaction with my servers…and vice-versa? And what about DNS? There will be math.

Security: Making Mavericks Work for You!

A hands-on lab, bringing system administrators from the basics of Python through building a useful utility to take away.(with Greg Neagle)

When new software appears, Mac admins need test Macs that match their standard configuration in order to verify that the new software doesn’t adversely affect anything in their environment. VMware’s addition of NetBoot support to VMware Fusion means that NetBoot can be leveraged to get virtual Macs set up quickly for testing use. This session will cover how to leverage VMware Fusion, NetBoot and other tools to rapidly build OS X virtual machines to desired specifications, as well as how to migrate VMware Fusion-built OS X and OS X Server VMs to VMware’s ESXi hypervisor.

When dealing with wireless LAN, planning and design are vital to success. Planning, best practices, deployment, tools of the trade and techniques are the key. But, it’s also about how to analyze, track down problems, and how to deal with problems as you find them. Jeanette’s deep knowledge as a WiFi engineer will allow you gain insight, and understanding about wireless that most people never get a chance to hear. 

Determining why one machine or application installation acts differently than another can be maddening. You’ve verified the hardware is working correctly – why won’t the software behave? This session will cover fundamental diagnostic procedures for OS X using Apple’s built-in tools in addition to third-party utilities. With our growing enterprise community, knowledge of these simple methods can help us save time and work together more efficiently to better serve our customer base.

Most of us, we hack systems. We make impossibly complex computer networks, work with massive storage arrays, insanely complex directory structures, but what about the people we work for? IT isn’t just about the technical side, it’s about the human side, and if you’re working against the human factors, no amount of technical know-how, arm-twisting and generalized control regime will get you what you want

A hands-on lab, bringing system administrators from the basics of Python through building a useful utility to take away.(with Matt Schnittker)

This optional, full-day workshop takes place the day prior to MacTech Conference 2013 and is available at a discount for conference attendees. See https://www.mactech.com/conference/2013/workshops for more information on this workshop.

This optional, full-day workshop takes place the day prior to MacTech Conference 2013 and is available at a discount for conference attendees. See https://www.mactech.com/conference/2013/workshops for more information on this workshop.

This optional, half-day workshop takes place the day prior to MacTech Conference 2013 is included with your MacTech Conference registration. See https://www.mactech.com/conference/2013/microsoft-office-accreditation for more information.

From the design house to the enterprise, our community of Apple admins continues to change. With an annual release cycle of the operating system and new features arriving with every point release, the skills we need to survive change in quarters now, not decades. This session will be an overview of where that Mac Admin community is today and may even (gasp) include a little prognostication of what’s to come. We’ll look at the MacTech sessions and how they interweave with the culture of our community. We’ll review the good, the bad, the ugly and the just plain delusional aspects of what’s happening in the industry and how those moves impact us and some of the areas where we’re still shielded given the unique elements of our platform.”

Apple is continually changing the rules for Apple IDs, iTunes accounts, and more. Learn the latest rules, how devices are treated, migrating to new hardware, dealing with multiple IDs, and iCloud. Find out right way for working with Apple IDs in an enterprise environment for deployment and imaging. Learn the restrictions for merging Apple IDs and how to combine them.