January Meetup

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.

December Meetup

@ Brutopia

1219 Crescent Street, Montréal, QC

This month we have two exciting presentations, and lots-o-beer!

Our usual location (Notman House) is unable to accommodate us so this month we are going to be happily hosted by Brutopia, a popular brew pub located downtown at Metro Guy-Concordia.

Note, we will start at 6pm (presentations start at 18h15) to accommodate the happy hour crowd.

• 18h00: Arrival and socializing
• 18h15: Contrôler ses écouteurs Bluetooth avec sa montre
• 18h45: Testing Android with Computer Vision
• 19h30: Beer and food, @Brutopia

Contrôler ses écouteurs Bluetooth avec sa montre

Avec Boris Dubois

Contrôler ses écouteurs Bluetooth avec sa montre : débuter avec des interactions simples sur Android Wear en respectant les design guidelines.

Testing Android with Computer Vision

How to setup and tweak Sikuli tests for Android

With Farah Abbasi & Gina Chiodo

In this talk we will show you can test image heavy, and/or legacy/hybrid android apps using OpenCV (computer vision) and Sikuli. Sikuli is a framework which automates anything you see on the screen. It uses image recognition to identify and control GUI components. It is useful when there is no easy access to a GUI’s internal or source code, or writing tests crosses layers of technologies ie in a Cordova/HTML5 app running in a webview.

Une startup locale à la recherche de talent.

Bonjour à tous, des amis du club sont à la recherche de développeurs mobile, faites passer le mot.

APPCOM est à la recherche de développeurs mobile IOS et/ou Android!

Tu aimerais t’ajouter à une équipe de feu?

Nous sommes une entreprise spécialisée en développement de solutions novatrices dans le domaine du mobile et du web. Notre équipe se compose de passionné(e)s qui repoussent constamment leurs limites au cœur de projets intéressants et motivants. On aimerait en trouver d’autres comme ça!

Compétences complémentaires avantageuses :

• Connaissances Web Front-End
• Connaissances Web Back-End
• Connaissances des outils Git

Convaincu(e)?
Pour toute information, tu peux contacter Jean-Christophe par téléphone ou courriel.

Jean-Christophe Duchaine

514-466-0553

ANDROID DevFest HACKATHON!

** SCHEDULE CHANGE **

We will now start at 18h on Friday.

We’ll give you some sample code, food and lots of coffee, just bring your enthusiasm to learn!

(And your laptop… and preferably with AndroidStudio installed… maybe you should get that nice emulator too, alongside a git client … 😉

The DevFest is an annual event held by GDG (Google Developer Groups) around the world. Come join one of the most active GDG in Canada. Our mission is to mentor and welcome new and experienced Android developers and Android developers en devenir.

At the hackathon we will have a couple of extra devices on hand so that you can build

• an Android Wear app,
• an Android TV app
• a Google Cardboard app,
• or anything that strikes your fancy that you can do with an Android device.

Tickets here: http://gdgandroidmontrealdevfest2014.eventbrite.ca

Android DevFest Montreal 2014

We will even have a few prizes (TBA). Join 60+ hackers on October 24-26, 2014 at Notman House, 11 Sherbrooke West, Montreal.

Schedule

Friday 24 Oct

• ** SCHEDULE CHANGE **
• 6:00pm Meet & Greet + beer
• 6:30pm Presentation Session about the event, Agenda, purpose etc..
• 7:00pm Teams pitch ideas

Sat 25 Oct :

• 9:00am Opening = welcoming breakfast – meet & greet
• 9:30am to 10am Presentation about hacking for Android Wear & Android TV
• 10:00am to 6:00pm hacking (12-1pm : LUNCH)
• Evening/Overnight schedule To Be Determined/Confirmed with Notman House

Sunday 26 Oct

• 9:00am Hacking
• 3:30pm Publish Demo Videos on YouTube
• 4:00pm Project Presentations
• 5:00pm Judging + Beer

Partners

About

Hoping to learn more about the DevFest? Check out our website. You can also follow us on Twitter and Google +.

Have questions about the GDG DevFest 2014? Contact Us!

EcoHackMTL 2014

C’est le temps d’acheter votre billet pour le hackathon écoHackMTL2014! Cette année nous avons plus de 3000 $ en prix, un lieu exceptionnel, et tout dont vous aurez besoin pour un « hack » hors pair. Le tarif réduit se termine le 6 octobre. Voici tous les détails :

Hackathon écoHackMTL 2014
Samedi 18 octobre 2014 – 8 h 30 à 18 h – LB Atrium, Université Concordia
Billet EventBrite

Vous êtes invités à hacker Montréal pour la rendre plus verte et plus durable! Pour participer, vous pouvez apporter votre aide à un des projets existants, créer votre propre projet ou répondre à un défi.

Le billet comprend la participation au hackathon et le délicieux lunch servi sur place. Il y aura également des collations et du café pendant la journée.

Profitez d’un tarif réduit de 15 $ en prenant votre billet avant le 6 octobre 2014! Après cette date, le tarif sera de 20 $.

De super prix pour les gagnants
Cette année, grâce à l’appui de nos commanditaires, nous vous offrons des bourses très intéressantes et plus encore!

Prix systèmes alimentaires – 1000 $ + 10 heures de mentorat
Pour le projet avec le plus grand potentiel pour l’amélioration de la durabilité du système alimentaire montréalais.

Prix Start-Up verte – 1000 $ + 7 heures de mentorat de Montréal NewTech + billets pour participer au International Start-up Festival en 2015
Pour le projet qui a le plus de possibilité de commercialisation (peut-être à but lucratif ou non).

Prix évolution – 500 $
Ce prix est spécialement pour les équipes qui ont participé à écoHackMTL en 2013 et qui ont continué à faire évoluer leur projet.

Prix des participants – 500 $
Le projet gagnant sera choisi le 18 octobre par les participants de écoHackMTL.

Prix du public – 500 $
Le projet gagnant sera déterminé à l’issue d’un période de vote public de 1 semaine lancé sur le SparkBoard écoHackMTL à la fin du hackathon.
En savoir plus sur les prix et les modalités

September Meetup

Overview

Our next meetup will be taking place Thursday September 25th, on the 3rd floor at Notman House

Our two speakers this month are Anas Ambri who will introduce us to Groovy on Android, and Simon Guerout who will cover the Android Account Manager.

• 18h00 Welcome / upcoming events
• 18h30 Groovy on Android
• 19h30 Android Account Manager
• 20h30~21h Wrap up

Food and Drinks sponsored by PasswordBox!

I’m happy to report that my employer, PasswordBox, will be sponsoring pizza and drinks for this month’s Meetup.

In turn, we want Montreal area mobile developers to know we’re in full hiring mode here at PasswordBox. Business is booming, and obviously we’re looking for top-notch Android developers, but I invite you to look at the full list of available positions on our website: https://www.passwordbox.com/careers

Send your inquiries/CVs to etienne.caron@passwordbox.com

Presentations

Groovy for Android

by Anas Ambri

About me: An apprentice in the growing domain of software development, with a meticulous interest into solving problems (with software), an appreciation for open-source solutions, and an annoying tendency to have an opinion about almost everything.

About the topic: Since the advent of Swift on iOS, many Android developers have been looking into a similar higher level construct to develop apps on their favorite platform. Today we will talk about some of the current options, and focus mostly on Groovy. Finally, we will show how we used Groovy at Guestful to develop our app, as well as the lessons learned. Spoiler: the app was actually delivered. Duration: ~20 min + questions

Android Account Manager

by Simon GUEROUT, of Sidereo Solutions

Gestionnaire de comptes d’Android

Pendant cette présentation, je vais vous présenter un cas d’usage du gestionnaire de comptes d’Android.
Il n’est pas rare pour une application d’être connectée à un service.
Ce lien peut être fait en utilisant le gestionnaire de comptes pour simplifier la gestion de la synchronisation des données avec le service.
Dans le cas d’usage que je vais présenter, nous allons voir comment utiliser ce gestionnaire non pas pour un seul service, mais pour une multitude de sources de données.

During this presentation, I will talk about a use case of the Android Account Manager.
It is not rare for an application to be connected to a service.
This link can be managed using the Android Account Manager, in order to simplify the data sync with the service.
In the use case I will be presenting, we will see how I used the Account Manager to connect not only to a single service, but to different sources of data.

August Meetup

Overview

Hello everyone, hope you all enjoyed your summer so far!

Our next meetup will be taking place Wednesday August 20th, on the 3rd floor at Notman House. (Same awesome space where we held our Android Wear hackathon early this summer.)

We have 2 great talks scheduled, and a small recap / show and tell session for the various toys we managed to bring back from Google I/O. As always you’re welcome to drop by to introduce yourself and your projects to the community.

• 17h30: Google I/O Recap
• 18h30: Recognizing Speech on Android
• 19h30: Byte-Code Weaving on Android
• 20h30: Beer and food, @Ye Olde Orchard Pub

You can get your tickets on our Eventbrite.

Presentations

Google I/O 2014 Recap

Small informal presentation reviewing what was announced at Google I/O, with small hands-on + Q&A session for:

• Android Wear
• Android TV
• Google Cardboard

Recognizing Speech on Android

by Gina Cook – Android Developer for iLanguage Lab

In this talk I’ll show you how to use speech recognition in your own Android apps. The talk will have something for both beginner and advanced Android devs, namely I will show two ways to do speech recognition: the easy way (using the built-in RecognizerIntent for the user’s language) and the hard way (building a recognizer which wraps existing open source libraries if the built-in RecognizerIntent can’t handle the user’s language). While I was in Batumi my friends and I built an app so that Kartuli users (code) (slides) could train their Androids to recognize SMS messages and web searches. Recognizing Kartuli is one of the cases where you can’t use the built-in recognizer. Kartuli spoken by only 4 million people in the country of Georgia: that is roughly the population of Montreal and surrounding areas. The talk will start with a demo of our Kartuli trainer app to set the context for the talk, and then dig into the code and Android concepts under the demo.

• How to use the default system recognizer’s results in your own Android projects,
• How to use the NDK in your projects,
• How to use PocketSphinx (a lightweight recognizer library written in C) on Android

Byte-Code Weaving on Android

by Stéphane Nicolas – Senior Android Developer for Groupon Canada

During the last few years, we have all assisted or participated to a small
revolution on Android : the emergence of annotation processing. Many
popular libs now rely on annotation processing during build to pre-compute
a lot of stuff that will boost them at runtime. Let’s think about Dagger,
ButterKnife, Hugo, RoboGuice, BoundBox, Memento, IcePick, etc.

All those libs use annotation processing to generate data as Java source
files that are executed at runtime. Nevertheless, writing annotation
processors is far from obvious as they are based on the annotation
processing API that is very difficult to understand.

But there is an alternative : byte code weaving. This technique is popular
in the Java World for a large variety of applications : from creating mocks
(easymock/mockito) to data persistence (Eclipse Link, EBeans, etc.), or
Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP).

So, why don’t we use post-compilation processing on Android too ?

This sessions offers an overview of different byte code weaving techniques
and will examine whether they can be applied to Android. We will see how
post compilation byte code weaving can be used during Android apps’ builds
when using either Gradle or Maven.

Finally, we will present 2 libraries : AfterBurner & Mimic. They are based
on javassist, and aim to make byte code manipulation easy for Android. We
will go through simple use cases that will show us how to eliminate all
boiler plate when using our favorite libraries and boost apps using post
compilation byte code weaving. Byte code weaving could even be used to
normalize new and simpler programming techniques for Android that could get
standardized via Android Specification Requests.

Android Wear Hackathon – June 2014

by GDG Montreal Android

starts at 13h00, on Thursday June 19 2014

Notman House

Overview

This is a half-day event to introduce you to the Android-Wearable platform and SDK. It’s a short afternoon Hackathon, so we’re not expecting full-fledged products to emerge, but rough prototypes, proof-of-concepts, slidedecks and UX mockups are the order of the day.

The big news is, we’ll be giving away 3 vouchers for Android Wear Devices to the best concepts, so you’ll get a chance to complete your idea and be first to market. Thanks to Google for sponsoring this event!

Hackathon Preparation

We’ve received a very handy preparation guide from the fine folks at Google, go follow the instructions and you should be in fine shape for the hackathon.

Of course, if you’re totally new to the platform, don’t forget to pre-install the following:

• Android Studio
• Genymotion

If you need help with your installation, barring any work-emergencies, Etienne or other Android-Montreal volunteers will be on site starting at 12h00. Please plan ahead. 🙂

Day Agenda

• 13h00:
  • Welcome
  • Overview of Android Wear
• 13h30:
  • Pitch for ideas
  • Form teams
• 14h30:
  • Prototyping
• 18h00:
  • Demos in front of group (Prototypes, or UX mocks/slides, etc)
• 19h00:
  • Voting and judging
  • Awards and thanks
• ~20h00:
  • Beer and food, @Ye Olde Orchard Pub

[Animateur/MC: Etienne Caron]

Meetup Sponsors

Google

As mentioned, big thanks to Google and the Google Community Managers for sponsorship and support of this event.

JetBrains

Can’t code without Once again, we’re very happy to announce that we’re being sponsored by none other than the makers of IntelliJ, JetBrains! We’ll be having a draw for 1 Free License of IntelliJ IDEA.

Register Now!

Intro to Android / Metrics and Feedback!

Hey everyone, attended our Intro to Android evening? Enjoyed it? Regular club member, but you missed this evening?

We typically report event numbers to Google community managers, this helps us get support for future events, and lets us deliver you even more awesomeness on a regular basis 🙂

To help us with metrics, please register as a member on our Chapter Page. Attended tonight’s event? Register on our Event Page, and if you’re not totally tired of all this clicking, fill out our survey.

Thanks a ton for participating everyone, and have a good week-end!

Links

Get the original GDG slides.

And links to the labs:

• Lab 1.1 http://goo.gl/bvCxzo
• Lab 2.1: http://goo.gl/kY6grs
• Lab 3.1: http://goo.gl/3QqBEM

Intro to Android / Intro to Rx

by GDG Montreal Android

starts 18h30, on Thursday May 22 2014

Notman House

Overview

First off, big hello to everyone who attended the DevArts evening at Google last month, we had a blast and hope you did as well.

Our next event will be taking place at a brand new, freshly renovated Notman House, next week. If you’re new to Android, you won’t want to miss it, because we’ll be onboarding new members with an Introduction to Android session.

Evening’s Agenda

• 18h30
• Community annoucements (All are welcome!)
• Call for Google Dev Expert submissions
• 18h45
• Intro to Android
• 20h00 Quick break
• Show and Tell: New toys! (Fancy bluetooth headset)
• New advanced APIs: Netflix’s Rx library
• 20h15
• Review of Android Intro Code lab, Q&A
• ~20h45
• Beer and food, @Ye Olde Orchard Pub

Intro to Android

Animateur/MC: Etienne Caron

We’ll be teaching the Android fundamentals, show you how to create your first Android project, compile it and run it.

You’ll learn about the Android application lifecycle, the different types of Android components (Activities, Intents, Services, etc.)

We ask attendees to prepare for the intro course by pre-installing the following:

• Android Studio
• Genymotion

If you need help with your installation, barring any work-emergencies, Etienne or other Android-Montreal volunteers will be on site starting at 17h00~17h30. Please plan ahead. 🙂

Meetup Sponsors

JetBrains

Can’t code without Once again, we’re very happy to announce that we’re being sponsored by none other than the makers of IntelliJ, JetBrains! We’ll be having a draw for 1 Free License of IntelliJ IDEA.

Register Now!