October Meetup Update

Small correction to tonight’s agenda. Since the Kit Kat® Android™ OS release isn’t actually out, we’ll be doing a quick intro and demo of the Gradle build system, the Dagger injection lib, the Otto event bus lib and the ButterKnife view “injection” library.

October Meetup

Hello everyone, our next meetup will be taking place on 30th of October, 2013 at 18h30, in Notman House as usual.

We have a great guest this month, Macy Kuang, with a presentation on Google Glass. We’ll also have Etienne and Boris who will be doing quick ~20m introductions to the Gradle Build System and the new Android™ KitKat® Release.

Google Glass Development

by Macy Kuang

BIO:

Macy Kuang is the Founder of Miaomiao Games. She has worked on titles such as Modern Combat, Asphalt and Fashion Icon while at GameLoft. In addition to programming, Macy has been on the organizing committee for AndroidTO, the annual Android conference, and a regular contributor to the Google Developer Group, Toronto. Macy participated in the Google Glass Foundry in New York in February 2013 and is now a Google Glass Pioneer, working with developer versions of the hardware and associated APIs.

Presentation:

Google Glass has been on developers hands for over half a year, and this presentation will cover the fundamentals of the technology Including how it works, what its current capabilities and limitations are, and how to develop for it. The Google Glass hardware takes into account some unique considerations not commonly seen in most mass-market devices, including bone conduction for speech and audio transmission, gesture ‘wake-up’ and On-Head Detection. Along the lines of the development process for Google Glass, this session will address various implementations, leading with applications created by Glass Pioneers at the Google Glass Foundry (the Google Glass Developer Hackathon held in New York and San Francisco). Demonstration of existing apps on Google Glass will cover pros and cons emerging as Google Glass use cases transition from novelty and gimmick to practical utility.

Android™ KitKat® Release

Boris Dubois

Bio:

Développeur Android @ La Presse

Presentation:

We’ll look into what’s new for the platform.

Gradle Build System

Etienne Caron

Bio:

Android Lead Developer @ PasswordBox.com

Presentation:

A quick working demo aiming to show what’s now possible when building a project. Focused on using Gradle at the command line.

DevFest 2013 – Presentation Videos are up!

GDG Montreal Android is happy to announce the presentation videos from our DevFest 2013 Sunday Hack-Fair are finally up! We had two awards, a Public’s Choice Award and a Jury Attributed Grand Prize.

I can honestly say that the judges had a pretty hard time selecting a winner, we had quite a few good projects on display.

Our Jury’s choice award went to Avery Smith who presented his app HairPiq.

Hairpiq aims to bring barber posters into the mobile space. Users can take snaps of their favorite styles, Barbers can build portfolios of their best work. Throw social networking into the mix, and jury found the app’s potential very interesting.

Next, the public choice award went to RestoNet, by Jean Bagdoo.

Restonet acquires the City of Montreal’s public restaurant inspection data and displays it to the user in a set of 4 listview’s based on chronology, amount of fine, number of fines, and alphabetical order. Each listview row is clickable to display a detailed view of the offense, giving restaurant name, owner date , judgement date, fine, and more. (Soon to be available on the Play store.)

Our other presentations included:

ETS Mobile by the mobile apps development student club from ETS.

Gnito, an app that tries to bridge the gap between social networks and unify your online identity.

Map Marker, an app to help you simply drop markers at will on a Google map.

Wedding Guestbook, an app that allows guests at a wedding to record video messages for the happy couple.

You’ll find all the HackFair presentations on the following YouTube links:

• HairPiq
• RestoNet
• ETS Mobile
• Gnito
• Map Marker
• Wedding Guestbook App

Important note – Sunday Hack-Fair

Please note, we’re changing the schedule for tomorrow’s HackFair, we will only be starting the procedings at 10h00 AM, not at 8h00 AM.

Thank you

DevFest 2013 – Session 1

Intro to Android Development

We’re a bit late, we’ll be starting at around 10h30-11h

• Presentation Deck: http://goo.gl/jRjh3N
• Participant Worksheets:
  • Lab 1.1: http://goo.gl/bvCxzo
  • Lab 2.1: http://goo.gl/kY6grs
  • Lab 3.1: http://goo.gl/3QqBEM

Android Hack Night #2 – DevFest Preparations

[Tickets https://gdg-montreal-android-august2013.eventbrite.ca/]

Meetup – Wednesday August 28th 2013

Hello everyone, a new GDG Android meetup is upon us! As you might know, we’re preparing for our DevFest 2013 event, taking place on September 21-22. Google has confirmed they’ll be sponsoring the catering for the week-end as well as providing prizes to HackFair participants.

The evening’s agenda is as follow:

• Official registration of projects for the DevFest.
• Registration for DevFest speakers and volunteers.
• Hands-on, one-on-one mentoring for DevFest projects.

The page for the Montréal Android DevFest is now up here. It will consist of CodeLabs for people who want to learn about Android, and a HackFair on Sunday, a venue for developers to show off their independent projects.

DevFest – Let the Hacking commence!

HackFair – Building teams and Call for projects

You have a killer idea you’d like to build for the fair? Come officially register your concept, and if you’re looking for people to help you realize your vision, pitch to the group to find new teamates.

Meetup Sponsors

Google

As mentioned above, DevFest is being sponsored by Google. Build your web application or mobile backend on Google App Engine or Google Compute Engine? GDG members and attendees of the wednesday meetup will be offered a $2,000 credit!

JetBrains

Once again, I’m 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.

Proud to useJava IDE with unparalleled java code
analyzer (600+ built-in inspections)

Android Hack Night #1 – *The Road to DevFest*

[Tickets: http://gdg-montreal-android-july2013.eventbrite.ca/]

Wednesday July 31st 2013

Hello everyone, a new GDG Android meetup is upon us! As you might know, we’re starting up preparations for our DevFest 2013 event, taking place on September 21-22.

The DevFest will consists of CodeLabs where we hope to introduce people of all levels to key aspects of programming on Android. The actual content of the labs is yet to be determined, but the hope is to have something for every level, perhaps with the idea of showing people how to go from (simple) concept project all the way to the Play store.

The second part of the DevFest will be a HackFair, to take place Sunday PM. Think science fair, where participants expose their projects to the public, potentially with small prizes to be won. (Draws, popular vote, judges, etc.)

The interesting part about the HackFair is that we start the projects now, unlike the hackathon format, people are allowed and encouraged to work on their project in the months before the HackFair.

Let the Hacking commence!

For the meetups leading to the event, we’ll be holding Hack Nights. For this first hack night, we’re asking people to bring a laptop, and get ready to do some coding. For this first hack night, the agenda is as follows:

• Setting up your Android work environment.
  • Android Studio
  • GitHub / SourceTree
  • Genymotion
• Your first App
  • Hello activity
• Android Design Patterns
  • The Action Bar
  • Swipe Views
  • Navigation Drawer (if time allows)

Presentors: Bertand Orlowiez and Etienne Caron

Show and Tell – OUYA

All work and no play make for a dull evening, so our thanks to Mathieu Mea who will be demoing the OUYA, the new 100$ Android game console.

HackFair – Building teams and Call for projects

We’ll close the evening with a call for projects. You have a killer idea you’d like to build for the fair? You have 5 minutes (max) to pitch it to the group, then we’ll try to form teams to realize those ideas.

New Sponsors : JetBrains

And just in time for Hack-Night, I’m 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.

Proud to useJava IDE with unparalleled java code
analyzer (600+ built-in inspections)

DevFest’s tentative schedule is as follows:

If you’re interested in volunteering or would like to sponsor the event, you can always find our latest contact information on our Google Plus Page.

Saturday Sept. 21

• CodeLab #1 : TBA (Beginner)
• CodeLab #2 : TBA (Intermediary)

Sunday Sept. 22

• Codelab #3 : TBA (Intermediary/Advanced)
• HackFair: Project presentations (Pecha-Kucha style, 20 slides of 20 seconds each)
• HackFair: Tables with teams showing off their project to public for rest of day.
• HackFair: Judging and Prizes

# Speaker Notes

Quick and easy source code management (5-10min)

Using SourceTree makes using git less of a chore. Very positive if you’re trying to bring team recruits who are used to SVN up-to-speed on git.

We’ll be demoing it’s use in our code example in a few minutes.

GitHub is the classic choice for free hosting if you don’t mind publishing your bright new idea to the world.

If you’re a bit more shy (What happens at StartupWeekend stays at StartupWeekend?) and would like to keep your big idea private, just use BitBucket.

It’s free for up to 5 users and supports Git or Mercurial. It also has nice collaboration features. (Good for post-hackathon follow up.)

Synchronizing binaries: Bittorent Sync VS Dropbox

Dropbox is a great tool, but if you’re like me you’vee reached the limit on that a while ago. You might be paying for extra space, but chances are members on your team are not.

Bittorent sync is a nice alternative. Just install it on your Mac or PC, add a folder to be synced. BT Sync will provide you with a key to share with the rest of your team, and presto, instant, unlimited, secure file sharing. Great for those bigger binaries or that pile of .pdf and design documents that don’t belong under git.

Rapid prototyping (fluidui.com,proto.io)

To be honest, we just wanted to give the non-coders an alternative to design screens and mockups. While preparing the demo, we started having doubts as to their pertinence in a hackathon.

As it stands, paper or the back of napkins are also great sketching tools. The main issue with formal UI tools like these is they dont enforce a platform’s design language. iOS has certain UX design patterns, Android has it’s own, and neither sketching tool really reflects these in their default toolbox.

Which brings us to the meatier part of our talk.

Rapid Android dev techniques

Leveraging IntelliJ/Eclipse UI Editors

Theming

• Android Holo Color Generator
• Android Action Bar Style Generator

GitStepping

You can follow along the various steps on github.

ActionBar

Demo

• http://developer.android.com/design/patterns/actionbar.html
• http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/actionbar.html
• http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/menus.html

Hamburger

Demo

Using Genymotion for super fast feedback loops.

Pros:

• Blazingly fast, faster than real device.
• (Integration tests at x10 speeds? Yes please.)
• Perfect for product demoes on projectors
• Acts like a real device
  • Access to Play Store
  • Syncs with your google account

Caveats:

• <uses-sdk android:minSdkVersion="16"/>
• Current version has softkeyboard/hardkey bugs (overflow a problem)
• When using NDK/JNI you’ll need to make sure to provide x86 libraries

TL;DR

Quick, where’s my .apk??

• Just run (ctrl-r) with your device as a target, or:
• From your project folder on the command line (Mac/Linux with properly configur):
  • ant clean release
  • find . -name \*apk -ls points to the useable .apk.
  • adb install your.apk to install
  • adb uninstall com.your.project.packagename your.apk to uninstall

“Easy” wins when/if time permits

• BugSense
• Leveraging Google’s Android APIs (Maps, push notifications, etc.)

Also…

Chrome debugging

Pits of doom?

• Like scrum? Use post-its, avoid time consuming task managers.
• ActionBarSherlock: we love it, but if you’re lucky, by the time you have a shippable product, gingerbread will be dead. The time overhead isn’t worth it.
• RoboGuice, RoboElectric are awesome, but you don’t have the time. 🙂
• Complex

Tips and Tools for a successful Hackathon – July 13th 2013

===

Presented as part of Montréal Startup-Weekend, our session will concentrate on Android development, but should be of interest for mobile developer in general. We’ll be reviewing some of our favorite tools for rapid development. We’ll cover:

• Quick and easy source code management (SourceTree + GitHub/BitBucket)
• Rapid prototyping (proto.io, fluidui.com)
• Rapid Android dev techniques (leveraging IntelliJ’s wizards, using
  Genymotion for demos and development).
• Leveraging Google’s Android APIs (Maps, push notifications, etc.)
• What 3rd party APIs to use, and which to avoid in the short term.

Where: Concordia University, EV Building, 1515 Ste-Catherine Ouest

When: July 13 at 3PM

===

June Meetup

Eventbrite for Wednesday’s meetup are live, hope to see you all there!

http://gdg-montreal-android-june2013.eventbrite.ca

We have 2 subjects on the agenda this Wednesday

1 – Android Dongles

John Brohan, one of the founders of the original Android-Montreal, will be presenting the technology behind their Stay-in-Touch project this Wednesday:

== start quote ==

This is a presentation about “Android Dongles” which are small Android computers without a screen or battery, they use a television as a screen!
The presentation is more technical with an outline of the capabilities of these devices and then Stay-in-Touch as an example of an app that is well suited to these devices. Warning there are a few code samples, but it mostly relates to demonstrations or discussion of strategies for using these devices (mostly in this case without user input).

== end quote ==

2 – StartupWeekend.

StartupWeekend is taking place the week-end of the 11th and 12th of July.

We’ll be talking about and demoing good technologies and APIs to use at this type of event, and we might have a small surprise for people interested in participating. Also, if you’re interested in acting as a coach for the event, please come at Wednesday’s meetup and let us know.

montreal.startupweekend.org