That was pretty exciting. A free, big, enlightening event about the “Google Stuff”…
Ok, ok. Who spoke with me here knows that it was NOT so enlightening: most of the knowledge they brought from USA is and was already available on the web. But that’s probably not the point. The point is, I believe, to share. Share the culture, the vision and… the APIs.
I went there for mainly two topics: Android and AppEngine. About Android, the presenter, Mike Jennings, was very funny (and you will see him as the second presenter in the video below) and a “great character”. But his knowledge of the Platform was pretty basic. I believe he sort of Project Manager or something like that.
Plus, in the second part they invited to do a “technical talk about the SDK” a guy, Carl-Gustaf Harroch. He is developing an application that involves a bit of LBS (Location Based Services) and some Google Maps. Ok nice, but he straggled quite soon with our questions about… almost everything of the SDK. And, yes, I was quite bastard with my own questions.
Come one: how can you do a talk like that without even knowing “enough” what is the meaning of the Tags within the AndroidManifest.xml? He was even quite young and not very confident, and he was unable to introduce the basic concepts before talking about more complex and in deep stuff.
At the end, quite disappointing session, I must say. Probably, I knew more about it .
The USB freebie
About AppEngine, I went to a “CodeLab”: a session where you are supposed to code. And I did, focusing more on my own Python code. They were available for help and questions, either about the application they proposed to build, or about your own. “In chair”, Mano Marks: confident. Probably too confident. But, at the end, he was helpful, even if an answer or two where quite “upsetting” (I mean: if I ask a question about something you don’t know, and I tell you that you are wrong, don’t be arrogant and confident; wait and see my proof!!!).
There are some pretty cool apps, with a very clean and nice UI: demonstration of the power and flexibility of the Android Graphical Widgets Framework. Take a look at them in the official gallery.
About the news itself, I invite you to spend 2 minutes to read directly from the words of Eric Chu on the official blog.
Said that, what is not defined yet (just the screenshot you see here) is Security. Better, what exactly they have in mind? Just put on the Market WHATEVER the developer will come with and leave to the final user the burden of reading, understanding and accepting/rejecting the application. Based on just some words written on a little screen? Words that sounds like C3PO?
When I first met Jason Chen, a Google Android Developer Advocate who did the Android Code Day here in London, that «this idea was not going to work!». And all the other mobile developers agreed with me. And I still believe that sort of “Test&Approve” infrastructure is needed.
And one of the newest, but very noisy, guy out there is doing a decent job on that .
But I can be wrong. Or Google showed just “half of the cake”.
Title: Keynote for Google I/O 2008: Client, Connectivity, and the Cloud. Abstract: Featuring Vic Gundotra, Allen Hurff (MySpace), Steve Horowitz, Kevin Gibbs, Mark Lucovsky, Bruce Johnson, David Glazer, Nat Brown (iLike).
I’m at minute 23 and it looks very very interesting and relevant (for every developer in any field).
So, sit tight, grab a coke/beer/cigarette/juice/whatever-you-like and… listen carefully.
Last 2/3 months I used a bit of my free time studying Android the so called “Google OS”, that is the result of the Open Handset Alliance.
In this relatively short amount of time I had the possibility to collect information from the official sources, as well as from very interesting and active forums (like this one and this one). I had also the possibility to meet other experts during the Android Code Day event (here a summary what we did there). It was a very good place to ask important business related questions: I should say that the Google Developer Advocate Jason Chen was very keen to answer my tricky questions .
Spending other words on this here is quite pointless: half of the web speaks about it (while the other half speaks about iPhone ). But I would like to share part of the result of this study:
A Presentation: “Into the Android” [PDF | HTML+Flash]
Video #1: MWC - Android running on different ARM-based devices [mp4]
Source code of the Application I developed for study (actually, is just the Tutorial that comes with the SDK with much more internal documentation ): VSNotepad.tar.gz.
The presentation explains different details of the Development process using the code of this application as an example.
The video are also on Youtube and embedded here after the jump. Continue…
.
No, I’m not Dead. I’m just “very Busy” guys 
My 
Latest Comments