Microsoft Ignite – First Impressions

Hi All, This week I'm in Auckland, New Zealand speaking at, and attending Microsoft Ignite.

I thought I'd write a quick post to talk about my first time in this historic MS event. This is the 21st(!!!) event of it's kind in NZ (formerly TechEd) and my gosh it's a polished, slick event now.

I walked into a massive room surrounded by screens and orange.

The keynote was a series of speakers all talking about various cool technologies Microsoft has. It doesn't take sherlock Holmes to realise that I'm more of an Apple guy, but anybody in their right mind should be able to recognize cool tech when they see it. There were demos of Chat bots, meeting room/whiteboard devices, machine learning and more!

Some of you might not know, but for 2 years, I was actually a part time, during study and summers, C#/.Net dev a few years ago... so a lot the tooling is quite familiar to me (and I actually like). Stay tuned for a rant about tooling in a future post.

The rest of the talks seemed super polished and I got to do my talk yesterday afternoon too. It was titled the Future of Apps and described the transition from Apps to Services with many devices being able to offer interactions with users for a given service. More on that in a future post.

I also got to try out the HoloLens... and that was seriously impressive. I did a couple of Computer Vision and Mixed Reality courses at University so it's really cool to see it in practice and so polished - it's definitely not an easy task. I'll talk more about that in a future post too*.

Anyway, Ignite is pretty darn cool. It's definitely a different crowd to what I'm used to (fewer hipsters and a bit more enterprise vendors) but once you get through that, the code and demos during the talks is awesome and I'm quite enjoying my self so far.

If you're also at the conference, feel free to come say hi - I'm @samjarman - just tweet me and we'll arrange something.

Take care,

Sam

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*Boy, I've promised so many posts. Joy...

Update: Posts are now viewable at SamJarman.co.nz/Blog

Three Reasons Why Instant Apps are Coming to iOS

Android recently introduced a concept called Instant Apps. They’re pretty cool.

Suresh Ganapathy introduces Android Instant Apps. Android Instant Apps evolves Android apps to be able to run instantly, without requiring installation. With Instant Apps, users can open your app simply by tapping on a link, even if they don't have the app installed.

Instant apps are small portions of an app that is downloaded on demand in order to display and process information in a more rich way than a website could. Say you’re browsing for shoes online, but now want to buy. With an instant app, you could jump into the app, look at a 3D model of the shoes, choose sizes and buy with Google Wallet. Neato.

Rich. Fast. Awesome Experience.

I think this is coming to iOS. And here’s my evidence:

1. Apple has a ecosystem for extensions now. We have the ability to create extensions for Siri, watchOS, tvOS, Push Notifications, today widgets and more! It’s not hard to see another one being added there for instant apps.
2. Apple is training us. Apple likes to train devs. They trained us with Size Classes so they could introduce iPad Split screen. They trained us with extensions so they could release more. They like to hint and train. I think the big hint right now is the extensions ecosystem but moreover the frameworks way of thinking about code. Small, modular code that has it’s own networking layer, security and other goodness would fit perfectly into what is required, technically, for instant apps. A few storyboards for display, an API client and some access to personal data via an app group and keychain. Done.
3. It’s the natural extension of Universal Links. Apple, once again, hinting/training us to think this way have actually shown us the mechanism of how our app will be called when it comes time to display the rich content. Being able to deep link from a website to a portion of an app you don’t even have yet would be a awesome user experience, especially if implemented properly.

In conclusion, I’m positive app extensions are coming to iOS. I think we could see this as early as iOS 11, or maybe even 12. Whenever the time, if you’re an iOS Dev, it’s time to learn some extension programming. If you’re a consumer or an onlooker, prepare for something cool. Something amazing. And something probably better than Android will ever be able to do.

User Notifications in Depth

I recently spoke for the second time at AUC's /dev/world/2016 conference. This year I spoke on User Notifications (a.k.a Push Notifications). This talk covers a conceptual overview of push, technical dive into setting up push and troubleshooting and finishes off with some (albeit rushed) Best Practices. 

If you have any best practices for push, I'd love to hear them! Tweet me - @samjarman and I'll put them in an upcoming blog post.

Thanks for watching!

Sam