App for Developer Conferences (Sessions, Speaker, …)
2019-10-21 can take some time until all is published to the stores !!!!
QtWS 2019 Conference App is now available at the stores.
Android 5.0 or greater for Phones and Tablets from Google Play Store:
iOS 11.0 or greater for iPhone or iPads from Apple App Store:
Sourcecode at Github: https://github.com/ekke/c2gQtWS_x
Schedule:
Speakers:
Session Detail
Room:
Venue
QtWS2019 in Tokyo:
xxx
QtWS 2018 Conference App is now available at the stores.
Hint: Training Day Sessions are missed yet, but will follow soon. You’ll get them automatically from built-in Update Service.
Android 4.3 or greater for Phones and Tablets from Google Play Store:
iOS 10.0 or greater for iPhone or iPads from Apple App Store:
Sourcecode at Github: https://github.com/ekke/c2gQtWS_x
Schedule:
Speakers:
Session Detail
Room:
xxx
eclipsecon Europe 2016, Ludwigsburg, Germany
(can take up to 24 hours)
Android 4.3 or greater for Phones and Tablets from Google Play Store:
or download the APK from here if you prefer sideloading:
iOS 8.2 or greater for iPhone or iPads from Apple App Store:
just approved 2016-10-25 16:27 – can take a moment to be visible in App Store
Amazon Fire OS or BlackBerry10 on Amazon App Store:
Sorry – not enough time yet to also develop a native BlackBerry 10 App – hopefully for the next conference. Native BlackBerry 10 Cascades App loads faster and runs smoother on BlackBerry 10.
Also working on Windows 10 Mobile – runs in development mode on Lumia and others – haven’t finished the work to upload release to windows store yet.
You probably know that last years I always developed the BlackBerry 10 App for Eclipse Conferences. This year first I did it for Android and iOS using Qt 5.7 and brandnew Qt Quick Controls 2. Used Qt Quick Controls 2 and Google Material Style. To make my work easier, Entities (Session, Speaker, Track, Room, Conference, …) are generated using a Xtext / Xtend DSL. Started this DSL 2 years ago for BlackBerry 10 Cascades / Qt 4.8 and now I’m able also to generate code for Qt 5.7 / Qt Quick Controls 2. Hopefully at the end of year mobaDSL will be available Open Source.
Want to know more about HowTo develop Apps using Qt 5.7 for Android, iOS and Windows 10 ? The Sourcecode of my Qt World Summit Conference App is available at Github: https://github.com/ekke/c2gQtWS_x
Here some screenshots of eclipsecon Europe Conference App.
Schedule
Speakers
Session Detail
Drawer
xxx
Android 4.3 or greater for Phones and Tablets from Google Play Store:
iOS 8.2 or greater for iPhone or iPads from Apple App Store:
Amazon Fire OS or BlackBerry10 on Amazon App Store:
Windows Store:
Sourcecode at Github: https://github.com/ekke/c2gQtWS_x
Schedule:
Speakers:
Session Detail
Floorplan on PixelC Tablet:
xxx
This is part 8 of a series of apps helping you to understand Qt 5.7 for x-platform development on Android and iOS. This app is not a Demo App – it’s a real life APP I developed for QtCon 2016 in Berlin. Please read the blogs about my other Examples to understand the concepts and patterns I’m using:
The App is available at Google Play Store for Android Devices and from Apple Apptore for iPhones. Also work has started to provide a Windows 10 Mobile App.
You don’t have a Google Account and want to side-load the App ? Here’s the APK – Download – Link.
This blog will give you some insights and explain some parts of the code.
I’ll also speak at Qt World Summit about my experiences while developing this app and show what happens behind the scenes.
Here’s a short overview what I’m using to create the UI of my Qt 5.7 – QtQuickControls2 Business Apps:
There are also StackViews on top of a single Page from SwipeView:
Conference Schedule is a SwipeView, each Day is a Page with ListView for all Sessions of the Day. From the List you can open SessionDetailPage (pushing on Stack) and so on.
Main Navigation is done by a Drawer.
Now Google Material Style also supports Bottom Navigation I added a Bottom Navigation Bar to make it easier to navigate. To get the Drawer opened you must swipe from the left site or tap on the Menu Button on Top Left. The Menu Button on Top Left isn’t always visible: if pushing Pages on a Stack, the Button is replaced by a Back Arrow to navigate back – so in this case you must use the gesture from left side. Not so easy if you have a large display size or like to use your phone with one hand. The Bottom Navigation Bar enables you to go through the Pages faster without moving fingers a long distance.
There are buttons for Home, Schedule, Speaker and Tracks inside the Bottom Navigation Bar. You can reach these Buttons easy. There’s also a Menu Button (Hamburger) at Bottom Left position. This Button is always visible, which means you can easy switch between different parts of the App even if there are some Pages on the Stack.
The Bottom Navigation Bar is only visible in Portrait Mode – in Landscape it would eat too much space from available height.
Now there are two Hamburger Menus in Portrait and perhaps you don’t like to have the Menu Button at the bottom ?
No problem – you can customize this. GoTo Settings and select the way you like to navigate.
I implemented these options to demonstrate how easy it is to customize your QuickControls2 Apps.
BTW: Coming from BlackBerry 10 Cascades ? Then you already know about the Menu Button at Bottom left. So using Bottom Navigation with Menu Button there could also help to get same Navigation Workflow on different platforms. Will help you if developing Enterprise Business Apps as I’m doing.
Sometimes you pushed some Pages on top of a StackView. per ex. Schedule -> Session Detail -> Speaker Detail -> Room Info.
To push Pages on stack you tapped on Buttons to navigate “forward” to the next detail you’r interested in.
To go back to the Schedule – Sessions List you must tap on the Back Button multiple times. On Android you can also use the OS Back Button at Bottom Left, but on iOS you always have to move your finger to Top Left Back Button.
To speed up this kind of Navigation I implemented “Speed Stack Navigation”: the FAB (Floating Action Button) is used to navigate back: with one Tap you jump back to the last used List below. The FAB is always at Bottom Right position so always reachable even with one-hand-use.
Here’s an example from Session Details Page:
From Settings page you can also customize the Colors and dark / light theme:
here are screenshots using a dark theme:
—
There are many StackViews, SwipeViews, Pages, ListViews …
To provide a performant App it’s a good think to think about dynamic creation of Components. QtCon Conference App uses many Loaders. A Loader is only a placeholder and you must set the ‘active’ property to start Object creation.
Inspired by BlackBerry 10 Cascades TabbedPane delegateActivationPolicy I have implemented different Activation Policies:
Immediately means that the Loader is active from beginning and will remain until the end. This is used for HomePage – the first page a user will see.
Lazy means the first time a user wants to see this Page, the Loader will become active and then wil remain.
When Active means the Loader will only be active as long as the Page is in use. Closing the page will set the Loader to inactive and the Controls will be destroyed.
But that’s not the complete story – to speed up the Startup Time I’m doing it this way:
C++ classes like DataManager, DataServer, DataUtil are only created at startup – no init() is done – so it’s really fast.
In QML no Drawer and Bottom Navigation is created, because I don’t set a model. The initial Item of the root StackView (used by Drawer) is a special Page only containing a Busy Indicator:
As soon as this initial Page is created I start a Timer with 300 ms delay and from the Timer I’m calling all the C++ init() methods, all the data was read from cache and if all is done I’m setting the Drawer model. Now the Pages with Immediate – Activation – Policy are created and I’m swapping the initial Page and the Home Page is visible to the user.
In most cases the Busy Indicator will only be visible for some ms.
For this App I’m using a JSON File Cache.
A Conference App displays Sessions, Speaker, Rooms and this kind of data was read from Cache and QObject* are created – so the complete data was in-memory for fast access.
This data wasn’t changed from normal app – use. The only data a user enters is setting favorite Sessions to create the Personal Schedule. To avoid saving all the Sessions, I’m using an extra Class to store the ID’s of Sessions marked as Favorite. Caching this as JSON will only write a File with some Bytes.
At startup I’m looping through the Favorites and set a Property for these Sessions, so in Lists and Pages I’m getting the Favorite info directly from Session Class. This Property is a transient Property for Sessions.
Closing the App or sending to background I’m looping through the Sessions and create the Favorites. Then this small file was written to cache.
Using QObject* DataBinding to QML UI is easy – most difficult part is creating all the code for Q_PROPERTY. This is done by a Code Generator – all these C++ Classes you’ll find under src/gen. This Code Generator is based on Eclipse Xtext and I’m generating different Code for BlackBerry10 / Qt 4.8 and Qt 5.7 Android/iOS. The CodeGenerator will be Open Source – expect this by the end of 2016.
Caching and Data Binding is a complex story – will blog in an extra article about this.
Find some more Screenshots from the Conference App below.
Some Screenshots are outdated – per ex. the Icons to swap between Personal Schedule and Conference Schedule were changed because of Beta testers Feedback.
Stay tuned for more blog articles and videos explaining patterns and concepts.
There’s an Option Menu available at Startpage. All these Options are also part of the Drawer, but to help users first time using a Drawer I placed this Options Menu to get easy access to Help and Settings.
QtCon Conference App works in Portrait and Landscape. There are some situations where rotating back from Landscape to Portrait doesn’t work as expected. Will report this and more via Bugreports.
Conference Schedule is a SwipeView with pages for each Conference Day. The List of Sessions of a Day can be long, so there’s a ‘GoTo’ Button to jump to a specific Time Slot.
TimePicker is a customized UI Control I created with some help from Mitch Curtis.
Use this TimePicker to jump to Sessions starting at a specific time:
Personal Schedule (lists only marked Sessions). Easy toggling between Personal and Conference Schedule
Session Details:
Room Floorplan – you can Zoom-In / Zoom-Out or Fit-To-Window:
List of Speakers:
GoTo Speaker where Name starts with a specific Letter:
Speaker details
List of Tracks – in the meantime Tracks are colored to match UI from Web Browser.
Sessions per Track
Venue Info
Venue Rooms List. Tap on a Room to see all Sessions or on the Thumbnail to see the Floorplan.
Sessions per Room
Help Page
About Page
This Application is Open Source and available at Github: https://github.com/ekke/c2gQtCon
As a good Open Source Project Citizen I always report Bugs and Requests.
Here are some of the Bugs I ran into while developing this APP:
TBD
I’m waiting for Feedback from QtCon in Berlin to see what could be done better.
Next Conference App will be for Qt World Summit 2016 in San Francisco.
My personal wishlist for upcoming Qt Conference Apps:
Stay tuned for more Apps – next one will be for Qt World Summit 2016 in San Francisco.
…
This year first time ever I’ll attend Qt World Summit in Berlin and so I also in my spare time wrote a conference app.
Conference2Go Qt World Summit can be downloaded here
There was only a very short timeframe, a new API and also a complete rewrite from scratch, so if you know some of my other Conference2Go apps, this first version misses some things: Calendar- , Notebook-, Foursquare – Integration, Search for Sessions / Speaker, birds-eye-view of all sessions, Shortcuts for keyboard devices and full Classic Trackpad support. I’ll add this later.
Conference2Go Qt World Summit gives you:
Sessions and Trainings are segmented by Conference Day and grouped by Time.
Scheduled Items (Break, Lunch, Party, …) have a light background
Keynotes and Lightning Talks have own Icon, Session Tracks are colored.
Sessions marked as Favorite have an orange flag.
Tap on a Room / Floor and open in MediaPlayer to zoom in / out
All Screens support Portrait and Landscape
Video and more info will follow – here are some screenshots:
See you in Berlin and have fun with the app. If there’s something wrong or missing please send feedback from ekkes-corner Tab inside the app.
You followed my article series HowTo Support BlackBerry Passport as a native Cascades Developer ?
You learned all about the new things:
I finally created three short Videos to demo how this is looking and working in a real-life application.
A little Utility APP – only one Screen, some animations and settings.
ekkes EXPRESS charts allow to easy create a business chart diagram on-the-fly and to save this as an Image.
Primary use-case of this app is to be integrated like a PlugIn into BlackBerry EXPRESS – a cool app to create nice looking presentations directly from your phone.
This Video demonstrates what it means to have such a big screen from Passport together with touch enabled keyboard.
As you can see OS 10.3 gives your apps a new fresh UI and allows easier navigation through complex apps.
I really recommend not simply to update your app – you have to rethink UI and Navigation !
Have Fun with 10.3.
Any questions ? Please public at Cascades Forums or via Twitter.
Next week first time ever the new IoT Conference opens the doors in Berlin.
And here’s the BlackBerry 10 Conference App:
Conference2Go IoT
Please download from BlackBerry World for FREE: http://appworld.blackberry.com/webstore/content/59937605
Here are some screenshots from BlackBerry Passport:
and here from Z30:
Have Fun !
Next week MobileTechCon 2014 starts in Berlin. As usual I developed a BlackBerry 10 Conference App
If you already have the app installed from previous MTC conferences you’ll be notified about the Update – if you’re a new user, simply open BlackBerry World and search for ‘Conference2Go’ where you’ll find all my conference apps. http://appworld.blackberry.com/webstore/content/35145887
There’s also an app ‘Conference2Go IoT’ for the IoT Conference happening at the same time.
The App contains the Sessions, Speakers and Tracks, allows to checkIn at Foursquare see location on map and more.
This time new is first support of new BlackBerry Passport device – I’m working on a redesign for BlackBerry OS 10.3.
Here are some screenshots from BlackBerry Passport:
and here some screenshots from Z30:
have fun !
Only some days left and german developer conference JAX 2014 starts in Mainz. I’ll be speaking there about M2M, IoT, MQTT and besides all the RaspBerry of course a BlackBerry 10 Device will be part of the show: this time controlling a Flying Shark and collecting Data from a Truck.
Again I developed the native BlackBerry 10 App ‘Conference2Go JAX’ – you can download here at BlackBerry World for FREE:
Here are some screenshots of the app.
Hope to see you in Mainz.
business apps 