It was just a few days before the speaker proposal submit deadline that I found out about the AnDevCon Anroid Developer Conference and luckily my proposal got accepted. In the last those three days I met an incredible amount of people, put a lot of faces to contacts I already know or know of via twitter, blogs and more and also learned a whole lot of new stuff. Not to mention that it was very inspiring on a technical level and beyond and there are now a lot of more things on my todo and want to look at list 😉
Day 1- CommonsGuy, MotoDev Team and Community Fireside Chat
Day one of the conference was filled with full day work shops and I elected to check out Mark Murphy for real. I do have a warescription and think that it is totally worth having it. In additions Mark is always helpful on stackoverflow or the android mailinglists. So it was time to check him out face to face in a live performance and Mark did not disappoint. Great material and a quirky presentation style kept me engaged and thaught me a bit here and there as well as confirmed that I was on the right track most of the time. In the same workshop I had a chance to get presentations about MOTODEV Studio and fragementation and tablet related things from Eric Cloninger and Peter van der Linden. Both had lots of good info to show and I will just have to give the Motorola tools another try and use it here and there instead of my beloved IntelliJ IDEA.
I had ample opportunity to play with the Motorola Xoom and despite of all the naysayers I love the device. I would not mind it being bit lighter but otherwise it looks like a great coffee table, around the house and travel device. I was happy to see that all my testing efforts with the emulator paid off and my app works like a charm.A general bug I found is that rotating the device 180 degree with a camera view seems to rotate the view fine, but menu bar seems to be confused and ends upside down on the top of the screen. (see the bug I created). One problem I do see with tablets in general at this stage is that the one user – one device paradigm does not hold true anymore and I am not sure I want to set up an account that can download paid apps when my boys could just be playing around with the device and start downloading apps. But I am sure Google and Co are aware of that and are working on something 😉
Oh and while mentioning Google lets talk about the fireside chat I organized. In my opinion it was a huge success. There were upwards of 20 people atttending including many user group leaders including the always active and involved Van Riper, who is the head honcho for the GTUGs world wide nowadays. He was able to share some great tips and insight regarding user group leadership in general and GTUGs specifically, which was definitely appreciated by the rest of the attendees.
Day 2 Morning – More Motorola, Xoom and Honeycomb
Starting again with coding tips for Android 3.0 and adapting to the larger screen real estate using fragments (love the name and how it turns around fragmentation) I saw some easy tips that I hope to apply together with using the static compatiblity library allowing fragements usage down to Android 1.6. I look forward to working on that in the coming weeks.
In the keynote by Christy Wyatt from Motorola I saw many numbers I was already aware of rehashed to bring up an impressive story about the rebirth of Motorola with the rise of Android. It even included the latest number that puts Android on top of the smartphone market in the US. An interesting statement by Christy was that Motorola is the only device manufacturer with a Android only strategy on the medium to high end devices. It was great to hear Christy’s and Motorola’s committment to supporting the wider android community by improving tooling, codebase and more. They seem to understand that working together, even with your competitiors, will be beneficial for all of us. She also committed to working in the open and with the open source community, so I look forward to more contribution to ADT and things like unlockable devices from Motorola. Maybe the MotoDev App Validator could be next. It has some cool features we could use in the Maven Android Plugin 😉
After the keynote I got enlightened about aspects of Android internal workings and I certainly learned quite a bit in that great presentation by the Gargenta brothers. Their online material is already great, but a live presentation is even better. And all that was just the morning. Check out my next post for what happened in the afternoon and the next day.
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