Tag Archives: Android

Lotsa mobile this week in Ann Arbor

The Ann Arbor Computer Society holds its September meeting on Wednesday, September 7. Ann Marie Manzitti will be presenting, “2D Gaming on Android – An introduction to libgdx”. The meeting will be held at SRT Solutions, 206 S. Fifth Avenue, Suite 200 in downtown Ann Arbor (at the corner of Fifth Ave and Washington). It starts at 6 pm, and is free and open to the public.

If iPad development is more your thing, go to the Thursday September 8 meeting of the Ann Arbor CocoaHeads, where Chris Adamson will speak on CoreMIDI. CoreMIDI implements the MIDI signaling protocol for virtual and physical musical instruments, and integrates with Core Audio. See what happens when we connect a Rock Band 3 keyboard, a MIDI cable, and an iPad with the Camera Connection Kit. The meeting will be held at SRT Solutions (see address above). Free pizza (compliments of Arbor Moon Software) at 6:30, with the main meeting starting at 7.

Mobile Development for CodeMash at SRT Solutions

4 developers, 4 platforms, 1 objective: provide the latest CodeMash information on your mobile device.  Whatever device that is.

Jay Wren (iPhone), Dan Hibbitts (Android), Mike Woelmer (Windows Mobile), and Patrick Steele (Blackberry) have been working together on an application targeted the various mobile phone platforms.  Their intent was to provide not only scheduling but also abstracts, bios and up-to-date schedule information.  You can also use MobiMash to save your favorite sessions, watch #codemash tweets, and to rate sessions 1-5 (information goes to CodeMash organizers). 

Stats are provided on www.mobimash.org showing the page loads from each platform. Many thanks to Charlie Sears and Dennis Burton for their work on the mobimash site.

Android and iPhone apps are available for download right now.  The Blackberry and Windows Mobile versions will be released very soon.  And look for an update to the iPhone app, as soon as Apple gives it the green light.

See Mike Woelmer's blog for more info and screen shots: http://srtsolutions.com/blogs/mikewoelmer/archive/2010/01/06/introducing-mobimash.aspx

Come to the SRT Solutions MobiMash vendor session (Friday: 3 pm-3:25 pm) to hear about the development of the various apps, including how Jay Wren used MonoTouch to develop his iPhone app, and the unique development challenges/rewards of the individual platforms.  Or, stop by the SRT booth. 

As for me, I'll be waiting anxiously for the Blackberry version!

 

 


Android to be 100% open-sourced

I read an interesting blog post on Ed Burnette's Dev Connection this morning.  Google says that Android (the libraries, the core platform components) will be open-sourced 100%.  Ed talked to several Google employees last week at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco.  You can read Ed's entire article at his blog (linked above).

I think that an open sourced Android is great news, not only for the Android community but for the Java community as a whole.  Android is Google's flavor of Java, customized for what developers really need on a phone.  So, my understanding is that it's a subset that has some other essentials added in.  It doesn't run on the Java VM, but rather its own virtual machine: Dalvik

JavaFX Mobile, on the other hand, is Sun's revamped platform for mobile devices. JavaFX Mobile runs on the Java VM, not Dalvik.  It will be interesting to see if any of the work that Google has done on the mobile platform will make its way into JavaFX Mobile.  Already, the communities are working together. In fact, at JavaOne a few weeks ago, a JavaFX Mobile app was demonstrated on Android.  Nice!

 

The Java Posse Roundup: the view from 9000 feet

I'm here in Crested Butte, for the 2nd Java Posse Roundup (my second time as well).  It's been great, and much different than last year.  That's cool because the theme was "Don't Repeat Yourself".  Here's my overview.  I'll post more detail later.

This is an open spaces conference, which means that the conference participants (about 35 people, including the Posse) are defining the content and shaping the character. This year, we're doing sessions from about 8:30 am until about 12:30 pm, then breaking for lunch/afternoon activities.  The 160" base on Mt Crested Butte is amazing.  Some people have been downhill skiing, others snowboarding.  Groups have gone out snowmobiling.  I've even spirited some people away (Dick Wall and Joel Neely and Mike Levin) to nordic skiing, which is fabulous here.  And, of course, some people spend the time working, collaborating with other attendees, or simply relaxing.  In the evenings, after dinner, we've been getting together for lightning talks (5 mins), which have been video-recorded and will be released on YouTube.  I'll post the link when they are available.  But this year, we found that the collaboration aspect of the conference was really growing, and many of us have wanted to have some "workshop" experiences. So, we've conspired to add in some workshop and hacking sessions in the early evening, either over dinner or just before lightning talks.  Joel and I hung back one afternoon and collaborated on some Scala code, and then presented a session comparing Java and Scala during one of those early evening sessions (before lightning talks).  The flexibility to do this speaks loudly for the benefits of open spaces. At more traditional events, people might still hole up in a hotel room and work on code together, but only they would benefit from that experience.  The other attendees likely wouldn't even know of their experience and certainly wouldn't get to listen to a talk about it.

 I don't think that I have attended a single Java specific talk this year.  They've been scheduled, and others are attending those, but I've been more interested in some other talks, like "Startups: Mistakes not to Make", "Hiring and Retaining Technologists", "Brainstorming New Structures for Organizing Companies that serve Programmers Better", "Component Based Systems", "Organizing Community Based Conferences", and "Why is Agile Hard".  But I'm getting some technical mojo out of workshops and hacking sessions.  We spent some time with Dick Wall on Android and that was quite interesting.  Chet Haase did a lightning talk on "Filthy Rich Clients with Flex", which motivated me to strong arm him into doing a more indepth session on that.  A bunch of us sat around for several hours last night hacking some Scala, and we had a lot of fun.  And, of course, there were more lightning talks last night and they were awesome as well.

 So, I'm off for the final day.  Some people will be leaving early today, but I think that they're missing out by not staying for the evening.  Sessions end at 12:30 or so, but we'll be doing dinner together and an informal gathering this evening as well.  Last year, that evolved into "Check out this cool thing on YouTube", but since we're in the mode of "Don't Repeat Yourself", I bet we'll come up with something different tonight.  And I'm taking a group out x-c skiing this afternoon!  Off to breakfast … at Camp4Coffee.

 

Android in Crested Butte …

Last year, at the Java Posse Roundup in Crested Butte, a few of us got together the day before the conference for a pre-event.  We talked about Django and TurboGears. It was quite interesting, and people filtered in throughout the evening, as they arrived in town.  So I figured we needed something similar this year and had been sort of thinking about what might be a good topic, but hadn't really given it much thought until TODAY, when one of the attendees (waving at Mike Levin in the Swamp) mentioned that he and Robert Cooper had been talking about Android quite a bit and were looking forward to seeing what they could do with it.  No sense them having all of the fun, all by themselves.

So, for this year's Roundup (March 4-7), a few of us are going to get together the day before the conference starts to see what we can do with Android.   Should be fun.  I already have all of the development tools on my laptop, from CodeMash. I'm looking forward to it, and several of the attendees have already emailed me saying that they are as well!   Fun!

 
 

Both Android and Guice at CodeMash!

I'm happy to report that Dick Wall will be speaking on Android as well as Guice at CodeMash.  These should be highly technical talks.  Dick is co-host of the popular Java Posse (http://javaposse.com) podcast and a developer advocate on the Google Developer Programs team.

Dick has already submitted a sample Android application to the Android Developers Blog.  He has also written articles on Testing with Guice and Squeezing More Guice from your Testing with EasyMock.

I'm definitely looking forward to these talks!