Developers’ conference centred on Apple takes root in Dublin

The organisers of the Úll conference, Paul Campbell and Dermot Daly, have confirmed that the Apple-centric developers' event will go ahead again next year after an extremely well-received conference last weekend.

"Many people have said the improvement year on year has been very significant, and we're aiming to keep that momentum going next year," said Daly. "It might be very different next year – we tend to do things very secretly, to keep an air of mystique about it. We have some really wacky ideas."

Daly, founder of Dublin iOS development company Tapadoo, and Campbell, of software firm HyperTiny, have said that while plans are still in their early stages, they expect the 2014 conference to build on the success of this year's event.

About 180 people attended the three-day conference, which was based largely in the Mansion House, with a range of talks and sessions from major figures in the world of Apple design and development. Attendees came not just from Ireland but also from across Europe and North America and as far afield as Dubai.

This was just the second year of the conference, but Daly and Campbell have quickly managed to establish Úll as a significant event among the Apple community of developers and designers.

"This is the right conference in the right city," said keynote speaker John Gruber, writer of the highly influential Apple blog Daring Fireball. In a live podcast recording on Sunday, Gruber and his guest, writer and former Apple software engineer Michael Lopp, compared the Úll conference to the early days of the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, a major event in the technology calendar.

Confirmed speakers for next year's conference include Scottish developer and writer Matt Gemmell, user-experience designer Jennifer Brook and Canadian blogger and guitarist Jim Dalrymple, all of whom appeared last weekend.

Other highlights at this year's conference included presentations by Finnish analyst Horace Dediu, former Apple software engineer and creator of the WebKit browser technology Don Melton, senior Pixar engineer Michael Johnson, designer Jamie Newberry, technology journalist Matthew Panzarino and Canadian design consultant Stephanie Rieger.

Úll was the culmination of a week of technology – and entrepreneur-focused events in the Mansion House, which included Brio, a two-day event examining the future of entrepreneurship organised by Campbell and US developer Adam Brault.

Tickets for next year’s conference can be purchased via Tito.io, impressively designed ticketing and event software created by Campbell’s firm which launched in public beta last week. Tito.io is also the ticketing platform used by the Web Summit, which announced some of its 2013 speaker line-up earlier this week.

Tickets for next year's Úll conference can be purchased at 2014.ull.ie.