McKibbin’s 1426 Bishop St, Montréal, (QC)

The Meetup this month will take place at the top floor of McKibbin’s, a nice venue with decent acoustics i.e. Where we can hear ourselves talk 😉

• 18h00: Socializing
• 18h15: Welcome, announcements, present your startup, etc.
• 18h45: Managing a task scheduling queue by John Brohan
• 19h30: Custom Views and the Hierarchy Viewer by Etienne Caron and François Légaré
• 20h00: Food and Drinks (room reserved until 20h50)

Welcome & Announcements

We’d like to discuss the following with the group:

• Going back to regularly scheduled Meetups
  • Proposed: last Wednesday of each month.
• Winter-Spring goals:
  • Workshops
    • Design Workshop
    • App Development
    • Play Store Publishing
  • Upcoming Subjects [proposals for monthly themes]
    • Full stack development
    • Server-side talks (REST/DropWizard/Heroku/Google Cloud/Docker)
    • Entrepreneurship
    • Tools of the Trade
  • Meetup Outreach / Event Mentorship
  • Call for speakers & mentors / Subject proposals
• Announcing upcoming events:
  • Intro to Android @ APPLETS MOBILE CHALLENGE, February 6th (Note: this event targets students.)
  • Intro to Android Talk @ Concordia, week of February 2nd

Managing a task scheduling queue

by John Brohan

“An App for Grandma” operates continuously and autonomously, it requires no input from the user (typically an elderly person unwilling to press any buttons).

The “TimeActionQueue” schedules many different kinds of events:

• Show the next picture in a gallery in nn seconds
• Process a GCM broadcast message to download a photo
• Start a Skype session
• Send an email to remind friend to send more photos every 10 days
• Manage the steps to setup and refresh Google Cloud Messaging
• Display the time in the Action Bar to 5 minute precision…….

Things you need in a TimeActionQueue:

• Create an action
• Add a new time action
• Add unique and Poll
• Does not need a destroy (discuss)

Debugging aid for coping lots of enums by getting the names of enums into the debug log.

Question getting from static functions to non-static methods in an Activity?

Custom Views and the Hierarchy Viewer

by Etienne Caron and François Légaré

Recent studies have consistently shown that latencies in the order of a 100 milliseconds can have fairly big impacts on usage patterns. Worse yet, the effects of latency exposure tend to linger on. Once your users are exposed to it, it can take weeks before they go back to their original usage pattern!

This highlights how important it is to optimize your UI. Thankfully you have multiple tools on Android that can help you achieve this.

In this session, we’ll look at the Hierarchy Viewer and how to use it (and some other onboard debugging tools) to create truly responsive UI and UX.

We’ll also take a look at the basics of Custom View creation, and how to define custom-made XML attributes to leverage the Android Interface editor.