My upcoming mobile dev presentations: Audio apps for iOS, and augmented reality apps for Android

In the coming weeks, I’ll be making a couple of presentations on developing two rather different types of mobile application development, for two rather different mobile platforms, for two rather different audiences programming in two rather different languages…

Tuesday, March 28: Building a guided meditation audio app for iOS

The “relaxation tape” came into being when the first personal music players — this was when cassette tapes were the most popular medium for playing music — became popular. These were recordings that featured soothing music and a narrator with a calming voice who would guide you through a relaxation or mindfulness exercise. As technology evolved, relaxation tapes became relaxation MP3s, and you can now find relaxation and mindfulness apps in the App Store, such as Take a Break (it’s free).

Tampa iOS Meetup is my Meetup group aimed at people new to software development or new to iOS development. Rather than study just a single aspect of iOS development, each Tampa iOS Meetup session is devoted to developing a complete app, and learning various things along the way.

This coming Tuesday, we’re going to build a relaxation/mindfulness app at Tampa iOS Meetup, and in the process, you’ll learn about:

• Error handling in Swift: responding to errors gracefully rather than having the app come to a crashing halt and annoying the user.
• Playing sounds: Playing both short sound cues and effects, as well as longer recordings.
• Auto layout: Building user interfaces that adjust themselves to the screen size, from the (relatively) tiny iPhone 4S all the way to the large iPad Pro.

Join me, next Tuesday, March 28th at 6:30 p.m. at the Wolters Kluwer office (1410 N Westshore Blvd, Tampa) in Westshore for Tampa iOS Meetup’s session on building a guided meditation audio app! We’ll provide food and drink — bring your Mac laptop, and be ready to code!

To register for this event, visit the event page. Registration is free! Please register by Monday, March 27th at 12 noon so that we can determine how much food and drink we’ll need.

Wednesday, April 19: Android and Augmented Reality

Augmented reality — the overlaying of computer-generated images over a user’s view of the real world to provide an information-rich composite view — is a hot topic these days, what with enterprises getting excited about it, Gartner predicting that its mainstream adoption will happen in the next 5 to 10 years, and Apple’s apparent bet on it.

GDG Sun Coast is Tampa Bay’s Google developer group, run by Mike Traverso and Scott Thisse, and devoted to all matters related to software development for Google’s platforms. Mike’s invited me to speak at April’s GDG Sun Coast Meetup, where I’ll walk the group through building FaceSpotter, an Android app that adds cartoon-like features to people’s faces in real-time, in the style of Snapchat’s “Lenses”.

In the talk, you’ll learn about:

Join me and the rest of the GDG Sun Coasters on Wednesday, April 19th at 7:00 p.m. at Tampa Bay WaVE (500 East Kennedy Boulevard, 3rd floor, Tampa) for GDG Sun Coast’s session on building an augmented reality app! Bring your laptop, and be ready to code!

To register for this event, visit the event page. Registration is free! Please register as soon as possible, so they can plan accordingly.