Philip Kronawetter, student of Electronics and Computer Engineering, submitted a program to Apple – and was rewarded with an invitation to the WWDC conference.

Philip Kronawetter, student of Electronics and Computer Engineering, submitted a program to Apple – and was rewarded with an invitation to the WWDC conference.
WWDC is Apple’s largest conference and the place where thousands of app developers meet and network with thousands of engineers of the US technology giant based in California. The annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) will take place from 3 to 7 June 2019 at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose and is aimed in particular at software developers for the Apple operating systems iOS, macOS, watchOS or tvOS.

Students are also welcome guests at the conference. Up to 350 scholarships were available for the Worldwide Developers Conference 2019 – and Philip Kronawetter secured one of them. He is a graduate of the Bachelor’s course in Electronics and Computer Engineering and is currently studying for the Master’s degree in Electronics and Computer Engineering at FH JOANNEUM. The scholarship includes a free ticket, lodging for the conference and one year of membership in the Apple Developer Program, which allows those enrolled to develop, test and distribute apps.

From playground to California

Philip Kronawetter applied for a scholarship for the Worldwide Developers Conference 2019 and had to go through a formal application process. Applicants had to submit a program (officially called “playground”) which runs on the iPad app “Swift Playgrounds”. This app was originally designed to learn the programming language Swift. Philip Kronawetter submitted a playground for simulating digital circuits at gate level. The gate level is a network of gates that can be used for technically implementing basic logic functions.

On the left-hand side, the user can describe an integrated circuit, which is graphically displayed on the right-hand side when running the playground. The blue buttons allow the user to interact with the circuit during the runtime of the simulation and to switch the relevant signals on and off. In addition to the flip-flop circuit (two stable output signal states), the playground also features adding circuits for adding voltages.

Bachelor’s course as an initial spark

Philip Kronawetter was inspired by a laboratory practical during the Bachelor’s course in Electronics and Computer Engineering, in which he developed a simpler form of this circuit simulator. We hope that Philip Kronawetter will have a great time at the Apple playground in California and that he will bring home many useful ideas from the Worldwide Developers Conference 2019. Apple users can live stream the conference on the WWDC app for iPhone, iPad and Apple TV as well as through the Apple Developer website.