This past weekend Brett Tackaberry and I went to the Ottawa Convention Centre for NSNorth, Ottawa’s first Mac, iOS, and web development conference. The weekend in a nutshell? Amazing. Being a marketer in attendance, I was worried much of the content would dive into a black hole of Cocoa and Objective-C, but I ended up leaving the conference on Sunday feeling educated and inspired.
Some of the speakers dove into 3D imaging in Xcode, image processing with Core Image and OpenCL, and creating maps on iOS, which contained a lot of code snippets and fantastic demos. Even if you weren’t a strong developer, there were a lot of lessons to be learned at NSNorth.
1. Everything comes down to a basic, repeatable strategy.
Rob Rhyne opened up the conference on Friday evening and drew parallels between product development and the game of blackjack. What to do when you’re behind in your industry, when you’re ahead, and when to split or double down.
2. If you build garbage, it’ll end up in the landfill.
Joe Cieplinski started his talk by telling a story about a guitar he owns. This guitar was built with such heart and attention to detail, that it’s the only one he’ll ever use. In building applications (or any product for that matter) what’s under the hood matters just as much as the aesthetic, which in the development world often means creating clean code. Build a product that will stand the test of time–even if it only exists digitally.
3. Talk to your users, and do your research.
Caroline Sauve of Corel Corporation spoke on extraordinary user experience from a development angle. She drove home the point that designers aren’t the only ones on a project who need to plan for UX, and that it is a beginning-to-end consideration. Using a failed product feature experiment as an example, Caroline explained how to build features quickly, test with your strongest users, and waste as few resources as possible. Essentially: move fast and break things [link to poster].
We brought along Aski with us to show off what we’ve been working on, and of course he was a huge hit – proving that everyone is still a kid on the inside. Dan and Phil did a fantastic job of putting together the three-day conference, and we’re already looking forward to NSNorth 2014.
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