Categories
Current Events Tampa Bay

Try out my Apple Watch app for Synapse Summit 2020!

If you have one of these... [Photo of Apple Watch]

...and you’re attending this... [Photo of keynote speech at Synapse Summit]

...then you’ll want this app! [Screenshots of “Big Event 2020” Apple Watch app]

If you read this blog regularly, you might have heard that I’ve got a personal initiative to complete 20 projects in 2020. Here’s the latest one of those projects: an Apple Watch app that shows you the Day 1 and Day 2 schedules of the Synapse Summit 2020 conference, which takes place this Tuesday and Wednesday.

What’s this app all about?

This app — which goes by the name Big Event 2020 — is as about as simple as it gets. (It had to be simple — I had to start and complete it on Saturday afternoon.)

When you launch it, you’re taken to the main screen, shown below:

Screenshot of the home screen of “Big Event 2020”, showing buttons labeled “Day 1 - Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2020”, “Day 2 - Wednesday, Feb. 12, 2020”, and “About this app”

Tapping the Day 1 or Day 2 button takes you to a screen listing that day’s events:

Screenshot of “Day 1” screen showing a list of Day 1’s events.

Tapping on an event takes you to a screen with the description of that event:

Screenshot showing details of an event.

The app’s completely independent — the schedule’s built into the app, and it doesn’t connect to any networks. It doesn’t collect any personal information, doesn’t show you any ads, and won’t cost you anything.

If you have an Apple Watch, this app simply puts the schedule for Synapse Summit 2020 on your wrist and always within easy reach. Think of it as my way of contributing to the big event of Tampa Bay’s booming tech/entrepreneur scene.

How do you get this app?

Open the App Store app on your Apple Watch:

Tap the Search button:

You’ll be presented with two ways to search for apps:

These ways are:

  1. Dictation: You can speak the search term.
  2. Scribble: You can write the search term with your finger.

If you really want to feel like you’re living in the high-tech future, go with the first option. Tap Dictation:

Speak the words “Big event twenty twenty” into the watch. The words will appear at the top of the screen as you speak them. Tap Done when the words Big event 2020 appear at the top of the screen.

You’ll be presented with a list of matching results. Big Event 2020 should be the first one:

Tap on the Big Event 2020 result, which will take you to its screen:

Tap on the icon to download and install the app on your watch. When the process is complete, the icon will be replaced by a button labeled OPEN:

Tap the OPEN button to launch the app. You can also launch the app by tapping the icon on the Home screen.

How do you get an app like this for your event?

Drop me a line at joey@joeydevilla.com, and let’s talk!

Categories
Current Events Tampa Bay

What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech/entrepreneur/nerd scene (Week of Monday, February 10, 2020)

It’s going to be a busy week in Tampa Bay, with the Synapse Summit taking place at the start of the week. Even if it weren’t happening, there’d still be lots to do — the scene here is growing in leaps and bounds. Make sure you get out there, catch an event that interests you, learn something, and make connections and friends!

Here’s what’s happening in Tampa Bay this week!

This weekly list is posted as a voluntary service to the Tampa tech community. With the notable exceptions of Tampa iOS Meetup and Coders, Creatives and Craft Beer — both of which I run — most of this information comes from Meetup.com, EventBrite, and other local event announcement sites. I can’t guarantee the accuracy of the dates and times listed here; if you want to be absolutely sure that the event you’re interested in is actually taking place, please contact the organizers!

Monday, February 10

Tuesday, February 11

Wednesday, February 12

Thursday, February 13

Friday, February 14

Saturday, February 15

Sunday, February 16

Do you have an upcoming event that you’d like to see on this list?

If you know of an upcoming event that you think should appear on this list, please let me know!

Join the mailing list!

If you’d like to get this list in your email inbox every week, enter your email address below. You’ll only be emailed once a week, and the email will contain this list, plus links to any interesting news, upcoming events, and tech articles.

Join the Tampa Bay Tech Events list and always be informed of what’s coming up in Tampa Bay!


Categories
Editorial

Looking at Ben Evans’ “Tech in 2020” slides, part 1: Always bet on the toy

If you read only one piece of tech punditry today, make sure it’s Benedict Evans’ slide deck, Tech in 2020: Standing on the shoulders of giants. Evans is a partner at Andreesen Horowitz (a.k.a. a16z), and it’s his job to try and figure out where tech is going next. Despite being 128 slides long, the deck is a quick read thanks to Evans’ concise slide-making style. More importantly: There’s a lot of useful information in them! I’m going to spend this week highlighting some key lessons from this deck.

Today’s lesson: Always bet on the toy.

The S-curve is a recurring image in Evans’ slide deck. S-curves describe a process that starts off slowly, picks up speed in the middle, and slows down near the end. It describes a non-linear growth process that you’ll see everywhere, in both natural and artificial systems.

Evans observes that the adoption of new technologies tends to follow an S-curve. In the beginning, a new technology’s adoption is slow, as it’s considered too silly or toy-like to actually be useful. Then it hits a tipping point where it becomes the hot new thing, and adoption ramps up quickly. Finally, the market for the technology becomes saturated, growth slows, it becomes “old news”, and people ask “What’s next?”.

Consider desktop computing. When it got started in the late 1970s and early 1980s, desktop computers were derided as toys. The fact that the IBM PC was developed by IBM’s Entry-Level Systems division indicates that they thought of the PC was something to tide their lightweight customers over until they were ready for a real computer. We know what happened in the end: people in offices found all sorts of uses for PCs, they became ubiquitous, and now they’re boring.

On slide 7, Evans points out that the history of computing technology has been a series of S-curves, with each S-curve spanning a period of about 15 years. The image above shows slide 7, with annotations that I added to spell out the overall trend. With each technology, the following happens:

  • Size, cost and power consumption decrease
  • Ubiquity, use cases, and power increase

With that in mind, Evans presents four major categories of what could be “The Next Big Thing”, which are:

  1. Frontier tech
    • Quantum computing
    • New battery chemistry
    • Neural interfaces
    • Autonomy
    • AR optics
  2. Important but narrow
    • Drones
    • IoT
    • Voice
    • Wearables
    • Robotics
    • eSports
    • 3D printing
    • VR
    • Micro-satellites
  3. Structural learning
    • Crypto?
    • 3G / 4G / 5G
    • Cloud, still
  4. The next platform?
    • AR glasses?

Note that all of these technologies are easily dismissable as “toys”, “silly”, or “not yet ready for the real world” — for now. If you want to be ready for the upcoming 15-year S-curve, make sure that you’re keeping an eye on trends in these areas, or similar topics.

Categories
Current Events Tampa Bay

What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech/entrepreneur/nerd scene (Week of Monday, February 3, 2020)

Welcome to the second month of 2020!

January has come and gone, and it’s been a busy month for me. Among other things, I’ve been working on an update to the book on iOS programming that I co-authored, gave a presentation with Anitra on iOS usability, met with a number of people who’ve moved to the Tampa Bay area and whom you’ll hear about soon, held the first Coders, Creatives, and Craft Beer meetup of the year, got an offer to head up a high-profile tech event this summer, cheered on friends at the LaunchCode graduation ceremony, wrote my first Apple Watch app, attended a brand-new meetup — and those are just my extracurriculars!

After having been there since September, I suppose I should stop referring to the mobile developer position at Lilypad as “the new gig,” and it’s both fun and challenging. While I’ve always been able to fit programming into the jobs I’ve had for the previous dozen years — CTO, developer evangelist, marketer, project manager, and product owner — it’s nice to be able to get my hands dirty in the nitty-gritty of the code and directly turning ideas into working software that’s out there, being used by people to get their job done. It’s also great working with a very product-oriented team in a company that’s undergoing a big transformation and on an upward trajectory.

I hope your January was as productive and fun as mine. If you’re looking to kickstart your after-work time — and possibly your career — be sure to check out the tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events taking place right here in the Tampa Bay area! It’s things after-work events, networking, and learning that metros that once had moribund tech scenes have transformed themselves into tech powerhouses. I saw this during my time in Toronto, and I see the same elements coalescing here in Tampa Bay. It’s up to us to #MakeItTampaBay!

Monday, February 3

Tuesday, February 4

Wednesday, February 5

Thursday, February 6

Friday, February 7

Saturday, February 8

Sunday, February 9

Do you have an upcoming event that you’d like to see on this list?

If you know of an upcoming event that you think should appear on this list, please let me know!

Join the mailing list!

If you’d like to get this list in your email inbox every week, enter your email address below. You’ll only be emailed once a week, and the email will contain this list, plus links to any interesting news, upcoming events, and tech articles.

Join the Tampa Bay Tech Events list and always be informed of what’s coming up in Tampa Bay!


Categories
Current Events Design Programming Tampa Bay

Our presentation at the Tampa Bay UX Group meetup: “iPhone Accessibility: What’s New?” (January 30, 2020)

Last night, Anitra and I gave Tampa Bay UX Group’s first presentation of 2020: An overview of the accessibility features in iOS 13, the latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system.

A good crowd — including a handful of people new to the Tampa Bay area — were in attendance at the event, which took place at Kforce, who have a very nice meetup space. I’ll have to talk to them about using their space for Tampa iOS Meetup:

Anitra and I tag-teamed for our presentation. She presented from the ux/ui specialist point of view, while I presented from the programmer/implementer angle:

Photo by Beth Galambos. Tap to see at full size.

Here are the slides from our presentation:

We started with a couple of definitions of accessibility:

  • The ISO 9241-20 definition: “The usability of a product, service, environment, or facility by people within the widest range of capabilities.”
  • A more general definition, and a good way of approaching the topic: Accessibility is making your apps usable by all people.

We then provided a set of personas, around which we based the demos:

  1. Jacob, a 32 year-old paralegal who has been blind since birth. As a paralegal, he’s college-educated and writes case law summaries. He lives with a roommate. He’s tech-savvy and an early adopter with the latest gear.
  2. Emily, a 24 year-old college student with cerebral palsy. She finds it difficult to use her hands and has occasional difficulty speaking clearly. She wants to be independent and lives in a small, independent living facility.
  3. Trevor, an 18 year-old student with autism spectrum disorder who is uncomfortable with change. He loves videogames, but strongly prefers ones with which he is familiar. In fact, he prefers having an established routine.
  4. Steven, a 39 year-old graphic artist who is deaf. He is annoyed by accessibility issues, which include video without captions and other systems that require hearing.

Our first demo was of VoiceOver, the gesture-based screen reader. We demonstrated its ability to not only read text on screen, but to facilitate navigation for people who have no or low vision, as well as to describe images — even if no “alt text” is provided. If you’re curious about using VoiceOver, you should check out this quick video guide:

Our second demo was of Voice Control, the new voice command system, which is separate from Siri. It offers an impressive amount of control over your device using only your voice; I was even able to demonstrate playing Wine Crush, a Candy Crush-style app that I wrote from Aspirations Winery, using only my voice. To find out more about Voice Control, see this promotional video from Apple:

We also wanted to show that accessibility can be aided using iOS features that weren’t specifically made for that purpose. We demonstrated this with an app that allows users to click on buttons using a head-tracking user interface based on the face-tracking capability built into Apple’s augmented reality framework:

I’ll post of video of this demo in action soon, but if you’d like to try it out for yourself, you can find it on GitHub: it’s the HeadGazeLib project.

We followed these feature demos with a couple of coding examples, where I showed how you can use SwiftUI’s accessibility features to further enhance the accessibility of your apps:

One of the coding examples from our presentation. Tap to see at full size.

And finally, we closed the presentation with links to the following resources:

We’d like to thank Krissy Scoufis and Beth Galambos for inviting us to present at the Tampa Bay UX Group meetup. They’re a great group that promotes an important — yet often neglected — part of application development, and we’re always happy to take part in their events. We’d also like to thank everyone who attended; you were a great audience with fantastic questions and comments!

More photos from the event

Joey deVilla and Anitra Pavka present to the Tampa Bay UX Group Meetup. Taken January 30, 2020 at Tampa Bay UX Group meetup at the Kforce office in Tampa.

Photo by Krissy Scoufis. Tap to see it at full size.

Joey deVilla and Anitra Pavka present to the Tampa Bay UX Group Meetup. Taken January 30, 2020 at Tampa Bay UX Group meetup at the Kforce office in Tampa.

Photo by Krissy Scoufis. Tap to see it at full size.

Joey deVilla and Anitra Pavka present to the Tampa Bay UX Group Meetup. Taken January 30, 2020 at Tampa Bay UX Group meetup at the Kforce office in Tampa.

Photo by Krissy Scoufis. Tap to see it at full size.

Close-up of the presentation screen, showing Joey deVilla demonstrating the head-tracking app. Taken January 30, 2020 at Tampa Bay UX Group meetup at the Kforce office in Tampa.

Photo by Beth Galambos. Tap to see it at full size.

Close-up of the presentation screen, showing the presentation title slide: 'iPhone accessibility: What's New? by Anitra Pavka and Joey deVilla'. Taken January 30, 2020 at Tampa Bay UX Group meetup at the Kforce office in Tampa.

Photo by Krissy Scoufis. Tap to see it at full size.

Recommended reading

You might also want to check out the other presentations we did at Tampa Bay UX Group’s meetups:

  • Building Augmented Reality Experiences: Our presentation on building AR apps for iOS devices using ARKit
  • Apple TV: Our presentation on building good interfaces for Apple TV apps. I had to attend a work event that evening, so Anitra ended up presenting this one solo.
Categories
Current Events Tampa Bay

Ignite Tampa Bay 2020: Thursday, April 16th at Palladium Theater, St. Pete!

Mark this on your calendars: Ignite Tampa Bay — the event where Tampa Bay treats itself to tapas-sized TED talks — returns on Thursday, April 16th to the Palladium Theater in St. Pete!

Ignite Tampa Bay is an evening of talks that follow the philosophy of “Enlighten us, but make it quick!” It turns the standard speaker-and-audience format on its ear by adding some interesting constraints:

  • Each speaker is limited to exactly 5 minutes for his or her presentation.
  • Each presentation is accompanies by 20 slides, no more, no less.
  • The speaker has no control over when the slides advance; they automatically advance every 15 seconds.

The five minute limit forces speakers to whittle their presentations down to the essence of their talk, and the auto-advancing slides make it necessary to practice, practice, practice.

Want to see an example of an Ignite presentation? How about mine from Ignite Tampa Bay 2015, in which I explain in five minutes why the existence of Florida Man and Florida Woman is a good thing:

If you’d like to see talks from past Ignite Tampa Bay events going all the way back to the first one in 2011, they’re gathered up on this YouTube page.

I’ve been attending Ignite Tampa Bay since moving here in 2014, and it’s never failed to be a great evening of interesting talks, chances to catch up with old friends and make new ones, and even make some new connections. As a newcomer to Tampa, Ignite Tampa Bay helped me get the lay of the land, get to know key people in the Tampa Bay tech and entrepreneur scene, and even played a part in landing a couple of jobs and other opportunities — and that’s not counting the profile boost that I got from my talk in 2015. Ignite Tampa Bay is more than a fun evening out; it’s a key part of what makes Tampa Bay a great place in which to live, work, and play.

With the event a couple of months away, Ignite Tampa Bay is looking for two things that it can’t operate without:

  1. Sponsors: Companies (or well-heeled individuals) who are willing to provide Ignite Tampa Bay with the money it needs to promote and run this event. Want to sponsor Ignite Tampa Bay? Visit the Sponsorship Opportunities page to find out more and email info@technovaflorida.org to get it touch with them!
  2. Speakers: People who are willing to give a talk in the Ignite format in front of an audience — and reap the rewards for doing so! Want to speak at Ignite Tampa Bay? Sign up here!

Keep an eye on this site for more details about Ignite Tampa Bay and tickets!

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

Categories
Current Events Tampa Bay

What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech/entrepreneur/nerd scene (Week of Monday, January 27, 2020)

Every week, dedicated individuals and organizations in around the Tampa Bay do more than just their “day jobs”. They get involved in events where they share their knowledge, make connections and friends, and gather together to build strong tech, entrepreneur, and nerd communities. That’s why I do this every week: I put together a list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events to make sure that they can be found and you can attend them!

Here’s what’s happening in Tampa Bay this week!

This weekly list is posted as a voluntary service to the Tampa tech community. With the notable exceptions of Tampa iOS Meetup and Coders, Creatives and Craft Beer — both of which I run — most of this information comes from Meetup.com, EventBrite, and other local event announcement sites. I can’t guarantee the accuracy of the dates and times listed here; if you want to be absolutely sure that the event you’re interested in is actually taking place, please contact the organizers!

Monday, January 27

Looking to talk about the craft of developing software over a nice drink? Monday’s Lean Beer for Software Craftspeople in Dunedin might be just what you’re looking for! Following the “Lean Coffee” structure but with beer, this gathering is a great way to meet your fellow local coders, share ideas about software development, and perhaps learn something new.

Tuesday, January 28

The Java Junkies meetup combines with Tential Tuesday for a session featuring Elastic’s Nathan Reese, who’ll talk about Elastic Maps, which combines traditional search with geoquerying to create a singularly powerful information retrieval experience. He’ll also also dive into how to deliver findings and metrics through maps and dashboards using the Kibana visualization platform.

Wednesday, January 29

Thursday, January 30

In the Tampa Bay UX Group meetup of the year, Anitra Pavka (author of O’Reilly’s HTML5 Cookbook’s “Accessibility” chapter) and Joey deVilla (mobile developer at Lilypad, organizer of Tampa iOS Meetup, and author at raywenderlich.com) will present What’s new in iPhone accessibility. This will be more than just a tour of iOS 13’s new accessibility features, but also an introduction to creating more accessible apps using Apple’s SwiftUI framework!

Friday, January 31

It’s time for another Demo Day at Suncoast Developers Guild! Demo Day is when the current cohort present their capstone project applications to an audience of local tech companies, engineers, and supporters of the tech community. This is your chance to see first-hand demonstrations of the applications and get to know their developers/graduates.

Saturday, February 1

After five years of fun and games, Grand Arena of Mind Expansion is closing its doors and selling off their goods on Saturday. While this is a sad event, it’s also an opportunity to buy just about anything in this games club: games, consoles, tables, chairs. shelves, TVs, projectors, and more — it’s all got to go! They’re asking for 50% MSRP on items sold.

Sunday, February 2

There weren’t any tech, entrepreneur, or nerd events listed at the time scheduled for Sunday at the time of writing.

 

Do you have an upcoming event that you’d like to see on this list?

If you know of an upcoming event that you think should appear on this list, please let me know!

Join the mailing list!

If you’d like to get this list in your email inbox every week, enter your email address below. You’ll only be emailed once a week, and the email will contain this list, plus links to any interesting news, upcoming events, and tech articles.

Join the Tampa Bay Tech Events list and always be informed of what’s coming up in Tampa Bay!