To celebrate the Londroid group reaching over 1000 members a hack was organised and held in the crypt at Clerkenwell
Despite having had a busy but productive week I went along with the hopes of some sort of inspiration would hit me at the event itself, that could possibly lead to something productive being produced. Thankfully even if this had not been the case the event would have been worth attending just to talk with and meet some of the people there and share some experiences of developing on Android and mobile in general.
My initial idea was to produce something utilising the LovefilmAPI to start streaming movies instantly on the tablet, one advantage of having flash is if there was a direct link to the stream files it could be started instantly, my searching at 10pm didn’t lead to anything that would solve this problem.
After a few drinks a far more “hack friendly” (read stupid) idea was born, Lolcatz, which basically would be a simple game where balls of yarn would be introduced into a central play area and 2-4 players would control a pair of cats in an attempt to grab them all for themselves, the thought being that tablets open up an opportunity for multiplayer games on a single device that can be more engaging than something you could achieve on smaller devices
Using the Corona SDK it was possible to get a very rough proof of concept in the time left and still manage to grab a couple of hours sleep, providing much amusement whilst we literally threw it together, in particular when the cats arms were not made static so “blew” off the minute they connected with a ball of yarn
Its been added to my list of hacks to polish up and stick into the store, but it will need some time to do that so watch this space for its release on both Android and iOS phones and tablets
I was lucky enough to be able to personally grab one of the in demand tickets for GoogleIO back in February; the event sold out in 58 minutes so these were obviously heavily in demand. The question for those of us outside Northern America is is the event worth attending? Thankfully a short answer: without a doubt even without hardware freebies. Personally whilst these freebies are very welcome and I will certainly be writing apps for the honeycomb tablet as now I no longer have to use the emulator, which on even a fairly high-end laptop is about impossible, I think they distract from the event which for me is the opportunity to learn, meet new people in a similar field and get a sneak preview into the future, rather than new hardware product launches.
Being in mobile I spent most of the time in San Francisco attending sessions and side events to do with Android the main two being the Adobe Android Mixer and the Android track at IO itself
Android Mixer
Held in Adobes offices we were handed a perfect T-Shirt to enrage any Apple fanboy
There were 5 organised talks from
Adobe, on their Flex framework
Sony Ericsson, on developing for xperia, however this was really a basic Android tips session
The keynote introduced some impressive stats for Android developers on the growth and traction that Android is gathering
36 OEMS
312 Devices
Passed 100 million activations
112 countries shipping Android based devices
200k apps in Market
4.5 billion app downloads
One negative is that the announced new service Google Music, like Google TV, is US only due to I assume legal issues with EU law on copyright and fair use
The sessions I found most useful from the 2 days were as follows:- (thankfully where these clashed or the room was full I was able to watch the videos which are already available)
How to NFC whilst it seems like it will always be the year of NFC on mobile, I remember having a great conversation with Stuart and Elliot at motodev, the day the original iPhone came out that NFC would be big next year. I am still a believer and really looking forward to the opportunities it will bring as more Android handsets and maybe iOS bring support in
Ignite This format really works and was a great close to the day
As recommended to me by Mac, the session on how Pacman was built is well worth watching
On the conference organisation itself
+ Far more room for the Android talks, which were still crowded even though held in rooms which were at least double if not triple the size they were previously were still overcrowded (I really wanted to attend the ADK session but was late after a great lunch time chat with Carl, Kenton and Tor)
+ Registration was painless
+ The main after party on day one with all the crazy tech and rides (the less said about the bikes welded to a merry go round and my two broken toes however the better)
+ The smaller after party on Thursday at Thirsty Bear
+ Catering was brilliant but lunch had long lines.
- WIFI basically failed, which for those of us not wanting to pay roaming charges whilst abroad was very irritating. Despite the signs asking people not to run MiFis it seems many did and soaked up all available spectrum. This was of even more annoyance for the people who were in the sandbox trying to run demos of connected applications such as the UK company Lightbox
If you are a developer and get the chance to go next year even with Flights from UK + hotel cost making this ~£1000 event, the knowledge gained and people met is easily worth that alone any freebies should be for developers who will make use of them (I for example will probably do little to advance ChromeOS with the free netbook, hopefully offset though by what I will do with the free tablet!)
One of the great advantages and potential minefield of Android, is the simple fact that an application does not need to be in the Android Market as Spotify have clearly illustrated
Clearly this is aimed at the Finish owners of Android handsets where there is no Android Market.
The downsides of this ad hoc distribution is that an application could potentially be malicious and just alter the users dialler to re route calls through a premium number, (similar things happened back in the days of dialup with peoples machines getting compromised by malware)
However the pros for the consumer and third party developer are much like the internet and that seems to manage quite well despite the threat off malicious software getting installed on an end users device
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