Showing posts with label Google I/O. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Google I/O. Show all posts

Monday, May 20, 2013

Android Protips 3: Making Apps Work Like Magic (and more!) at Google I/O 2013

This year at Google I/O, I had the opportunity to present two sessions: Android Protips 3: Making Apps Work Like Magic and What's New in Google Play Services, as well as moderating the Android Fireside Chat, and interviewing Hugo Barra and Hiroshi Lockheimer.

Presenting on stage in a packed room in front of over 1,000 Android developers is one of the highlights of my year. The lead up to Google I/O involves weeks of late nights and seemingly endless practice and reviews, but the positive reaction from the attendees (and online viewers) makes it worth it.

My first session was the third part of my Android Protips trilogy: Making Apps Work Like Magic. During the keynote Larry Page talked about building things that don't exist - that theme was central to my session. It's easy to get caught up in the details, looking to what others are doing and figuring out how to get just that little bit further ahead of our competition. But in an industry where progress moves so quickly that what we grew up with as scifi becomes reality by the time we're adults, real success means breaking out of that cycle - thinking bigger - and instead of developing apps for the future, defining the future itself.



You can check out the slides - with speaker notes - in this gallery:



Or you can download the deck as a PDF. The code snippets are posted at Android Protips 3: Making Apps Work Like Magic - The Code Snippets for your copy/paste pleasure.

As in the past couple of years, I presented entirely using an Android tablet (the Transformer Prime with HDMI out). The interstitial animations where created by a very good friend of mine -- Pandamusk, with additional music provided by Joel Alford "Bliss".

I also had the pleasure of presenting What's New in Google Play Services with Rich Hyndman.

We offer a brief introduction to Google Play services, how to install and use them, and what was added for Google I/O 2013. We give an overview of each of the new services without digging too deep - so if you're new to Google Play services, or just want to get an idea of which of the deep-dive sessions you should check out, check it out.



I always enjoy the candor and insight the engineering and design leads share during the Android Fireside Chat, and have to admit that it was a little intimidating interviewing that many people, who are so much smarter than me, all at once. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out though, and thought they gave some great answers that help explain where Android is and where it's going.



As a bonus, I also had the chance to interview Android VP of Engineering Hiroshi Lockheimer and Android VP of Product Management Hugo Barra as part of the Google Developers Live clips.



As always, I/O was an exhilirating and it was exhausting. All the videos for all the sessions will soon be available on YouTube and the I/O session pages. Hopefully you find them interesting, educational, and useful - and go out and start building things that don't exist!

Monday, May 16, 2011

Android Protips: Where to Download the Slides and Code Snippets

For those of you who want to take a closer look at my Android Protips session for Google I/O, you can now enjoy the video, slides, and code snippets in whichever format you prefer:
One of the nice things about SlideShare is that it lets you embed slideshows into your blog post:


I plan to do a series of more blog posts that dig into some of the topics I cover in the presentation in more detail. Where do you guys think I should start?

Android Protips at I/O: The Session Video (and How I Presented It)

[Update 16/May: Reposted after Blogger outage]
[Update 2: Working links to the sessions slides are available from here]

Another Google I/O, another jam-packed Android session room. This year they nearly doubled the room capacity for the main Android track making space for 1,000 seats. That still wasn't enough though - once again people were sitting on the floor and lining up to get in.

Android Protips: Advanced Topics for Expert Android Developers

After delivering my Android Best Practices for Beginners for the better part of last year, I was really excited to take things up a notch and deliver some real advanced content. To push things one step further, I presented my session using a pair of Xoom tablets. More on that after the video.



The awesome video content was created for me by an old friend of mine (he's still young, but we've been friends since high school) pandamusk - thanks panda!

How did you do that?

There were a lot of questions on Twitter asking:
  1. What app did I use to do the presentation using an Android tablet
  2. How did I live tweet my own presentation in real time?
  3. How did I not re-tweet everything when the tablet rebooted?
I'm an engineer so (of course) I took this as an excuse opportunity to write an app that does the former and built in functionality to do the latter (and come on — you think I didn't consider the case of having to restart? Please.)

How does it work?

One app, running on two tablets, both running Android 3.1 (with USB hostmode support) connected via Bluetooth.

Tablet one was wired up with HDMI out and a USB-connected clicker let me transition between slides. I added a "finger paint" View with a transparent background on top of the ImageView that displayed each slide which let me do the real-time annotations.


A second device (out of sight on the lectern) showed me my "Speaker View": My speaker notes, the current / next slide preview, my pre-written live tweets, and a countdown timer.


The two devices were paired and connected over Bluetooth, with the speaker view tablet set up as a slave to the presentation device. Whenever the display tablet transitioned slides, it transmitted the current slide to the speaker view tablet. It works the other way around too, so I can transition slides on the speaker view and have the live view update accordingly.

The tweeting happened on the speaker view tablet based on slide transitions (with a button for me to disable it if — for example — I had to restart half way through). I connected this one to a wired ethernet connection using a USB to ethernet dongle to avoid the notorious conference wifi syndrome.

I've got a bunch of ideas I'd like to incorporate (particularly around remote viewing), but ran out of time before I/O to get them implemented.

Can I Get the App? Can I See the Source?

Yes and yes. I need to make a few improvements before I release it on the Android Market and I need to refactor and tidy the code before I open source it. In the mean time I'll do a couple more posts the go into more detail on how each of the components work. Stay tuned.

Wednesday, June 02, 2010

Google I/O Session Videos Available Now!

I had the honour of presenting the first Android session of Google I/O 2010, and it was clear very early on that Android was going to be a popular topic.

The room started filling about half-way through the day one keynote. By the time David Glazer was wrapping up, there were no empty seats. By the time I got started there were around 1,000 people packed into the 700 seat session room and the fire marshal had shut (and guarded!) the doors to stop anyone else from joining us.

A Beginner's Guide to Android

I was supposed to present "A Beginner's Guide to Android". I chose to interpret this title liberally, and quickly segued into "Android Best Practices for Beginners".



If you want to play along at home, you can download the slides.

Regular readers should recognize many of these tips as being remarkably similar to the suggestions I make during my Android App Surgeries.

Standing Room Only SOLD OUT!

The door guards never left. With people setting up camp once they found a seat, there were times when speakers found it difficult to gain entrance. With people locked out of each session, it's great that the video and slides for all the Android I/O sessions are now available.


There were some really great Android presentations this year. During my session I called out Justin's "Casting a wide net: how to target all Android devices", and "Android UI Design Patterns". Personally, I'm keen to find out more about the Android Cloud to Device Messaging Service and pick up some tips on building faster Android apps.

The Other, Other Sessions

All the I/O session videos will be made available over the next week or two.

As well as Android, you can already see the sessions for App Engine, GWT, and Enterprise. Chrome, Social, Geo, and Wave will all be available by next Monday.