Bangalore Android Developers Meetup # 11 : Liveblog

And the meetup comes to an end.

App Demo

India TV Guide

India TV Guide is your one-stop app for listings of all the Indian TV Channels. Find the programmes and schedule info you want to watch. List your favourite channels. Set Alerts and yes, you can sync it with your google calender too. Long press on a programme to share it with your friends.

Download it from https://market.android.com/details?id=com.techjini.tvguide.android.activity

Delivery Status by Mango Technologies

Download it from https://market.android.com/details?id=com.mango.packagetracker

Zomato by Pramod Rao

Zomato android app lets you search menus across 18,000 restaurants in India. Spanning 10 cities - Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata, Pune, Chennai, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Ahmedabad & Chandigarh - Zomato also lets you check ratings, reviews and pictures of all restaurants in your city. Zomato on your Android is location aware - it recommends you the best restaurants around your current location. Get the app here https://market.android.com/details?id=com.application.zomato

smsBlocker by CEO of Optinno

$795 M worth of time is wasted in India alone. 

smsBlocker mobile app by Pune based startup-Optinno, addresses this problem heads on. It is powered with unique intelligence to identify if an SMS is a spam and block it automatically if detected so. This app works so well that in less than a year it has been downloaded by over 140000 users from over 110 countries & also won 5 coveted awards for being unique, innovative & highly useful.

Download it from https://market.android.com/details?id=com.smsBlocker

Introduction to C2DM by Amrit

12:10 PM

Why C2DM?

• Current Architecture of Apps
• Flacky Network Connections
• Background polling hits battery, Mem, CPU, Complicated Code
• App need not run
• Efficient
• Lower cost and better tracking

Minimum Req

1. Android 2.2+
2. Android Marketplace
3. Google Account
4. HTTPS application server that should be
   Able to communicate with the client
   Able to fire of HTTP rew to C2DM server

Alternative Infrastructures

• Limited Connectivity
• Security Requirements
• Guaranteed Delivery
• SLA on delivery
• Notification quota

11:55 AM

• No guaranteed delivery
• Notify about new data, not the data itself
• Not suitable for Critical Use Cases
• App need not run all the time
• Google User Account required
• No GUI component
• Limit to the no of msgs
• Still in beta

11:42 AM

• C2DM : Cloud to Device Messaging, which allows Devs to send events (sometimes data, not recommended ) to their Apps running on Android Devices
• Supported from Android 2.2+
• Simple and lightweight mechanism
• Handles queueing of messages and delivery to the target App running on the target device
• Not designed to sent a lot of data to the client

Behind the scenes

It uses OpenFire, CakePHP, PostGre, PostGIS

Client side is asmack etc

more details are at http://www.appucino.com/

Thanks to Mahesh for the presentation.

Integrating Appucino

5 steps will do it

1. Import jar
2. add declarations to manifest
3. decide when the panel appears and how the scoring to be integrated
4. 2 lines in onCreates + onStarts
5. when to show the gamebar

Appucino

This takes care of the social layer by adding only a few lines of code, allows to maintain leaderboards, find new people nearby who use the same apps, and also cross pollination of the apps.

Games2Win Learnings

1. Audience on web convert to iOS
2. Adoption is not good on Android : discoverability is an issue?
3. eCPMs are not good on mobile
4. Use the interface paradigm the device offers
5. Single Click, never ending games do have repeat plays
6. Update strategies
7. Ad network

Games2Win Checklist

1. Virality : can it spread?
2. Involvement : does it engage?
3. Community : does it involve my social sphere?
4. Task Orientation
5. Originality : anyone else out there?
6. Revenue Stream : has it been thought out?
7. Yo Yo : Cross Pollination 

Appucino
Whats imp for Games?

1. The idea (Game mechanic)
2. Production (Story board, game design, art, programming)
3. Distribution(Publishing, Virality, partnerships)
4. Revenues(Analytics, Targets, eCPMs, ARPU)

10:48 AM
The intro session is over. We will soon move onto the 1st session, Appucino, from Games2Win, presented by Mahesh.

10:36 AM
Intro session on, hence radio silence!

10:32 AM
Few more people are in. Amrit has already started talking about DevFest.

10:22 AM
People are still trickling in.

10:10 AM
At the venue. Chairs are still being pulled in.https://market.android.com/details?id=com.smsBlocker

Bangalore Android Developers Meetup 10 : Live Event

01:08 PM
eduPort by Synqroid
App provides many video lectures from multiple sources. Click here for Market.

12:51 PM
SnapTax by Intuit.
Used for filing tax in the US. Add a tax form, snap a photo of the W2, OCR it on the server. Review, pay and e-file. Click here for market.

12:37 PM
Yummy Trains by Pranav
Yet another Crowdsourcing app that lists the famous food from each location and is available in the station.
Its on market, click here. You can put suggestions. And you can search using train no to see the stations and the suggestions.

12:11 PM
As expected, 10 min break ended after 20 mins. Raghavendra is ready to take us thru his app demo. Beware, he is gonna suck you all in with his wit.
His App is called Power Cut!

His App is crowdsourcing to map where power cuts in India. He says its a social project to help out people.
He got help from Varun.
App can register powercut, show reports, show news about it. It can also do push alerts!
More info is at http://powercuts.in/

Code repository : http://www.assembla.com/, http://bootstraptoday.com/
For icons : http://android-ui-utils.googlecode.com/hg/asset-studio/dist/index.html
The app is still to be put into market.


11:51 AM
Ravi's session comes to an end. Break for 10 mins. Next on plate are the app demos.


11:45 AM
Few Bar jokes apart, Ravi showed how to make slider bars vertical, from the default horizontal, Create AsyncTask class for HTTPRequest, and won't have to worry about the threadpool, as its already there.
Ravi's gonna share the slide, so please hold on for the URLs and the pics.

11:26 AM
Ravi takes over, says his topic name is not "Know Thy Code" but is "Know framework Code"
The code he will be taking thru are Applications, Application Framework, and Libs. But most of it will be the framework.

A link will be shared to download the framework in TAR, and extract the code to put it in eclipse. Now you can navigate to these extracted code in eclipse when you are working on your app.


11:25 AM
There is going to be a hackathon for Tablets. People interested should contact Amrit.


11:13 AM
Zero budget marketing is about Value to users, viral loops, Company Blog etc and NOT FB pages, Tweets, SEO, Adwords etc.

Raman's session comes to an end.


11:00 AM
Viral loops work for the promotion of the app, without the creator's effort. Viral loops have to be part of the Apps DNA. e.g. 4Square.
Lots of discussion about going viral. The backfire (Color), The intentional (Zynga), The unintentional (Angry Birds)


10:53 AM
Two BIG Questions

1. Will Females like it? (its the slide, I Swear!)
2. What bottlenecks that existing or competitor apps have are eased?

10:45 AM
The next thing in line is UX.
App Design guidelines

1. Useful and to the point
2. Intuitive
3. Avoid existing Obstacles and and ease bottlenecks
4. Easily Accessible
5. Credible and Trustworthy
6. Predictable
7. Self Learning

10:30 AM
Key Question : "What VALUE will our app offer to our users?"
What is NOT value?

• Real Time Details
• Cool Graphics
• Cloud Computing
• Hi Fi Algo etc

Morphological Analysis - Procedure to shortlist features


10:21 AM
Session 1 by Raman Suprajarama - "Product Management while building Android App"
The PM Model

1. Before building App - Appmeter Test
2. Building App - App Design
3. After building App - Launch

Now comes up a slide while small fonts and large amount of info, and I am not gonna type it for you.

10:20 AM
So here we go. Intro by Amrit.

10:13 AM
People started trickling in. And the organizers chatting in the hallway.

So BAUG is back to its usual self, and the meetup is also back to the usual place, ThoughtWorks.

Bangalore Android Developers Meetup 9 (Tabs!) : Live Event

01:01PM
We are almost at the end of the session, with people playing with the Xoom.


12:39PM
Native Apps
Though Native app support is evolving, its still not there, and to develop in Eclipse, you will need Sequoyah. However, things can work with a breeze if you happen to use the Motodev Studio.


The Motodev Studio can be downloaded free of Cost from here.
A demo of Motodev Studio is on.


12:20PM
Testing Apps
After some socializing, we are back to sessions, the testing side of the story.
There preferred took is JUnit. Logcat, DDMS, TraceView are the Devs best friend.
Strictmode API also helps build quality, as it catches the Disk and Network access in the UI thread, helping remove the ANRs.
MonkeyRunner generates pseudo random events. Good for stress testing.


Motodev Studio sports mem analyzer, App Validator, Integrated Emulator which improve the productivity even more. Its MonkeyRunner is more customizable too.


11:55AM
Android 3.1, API Level 12
Resizable widgets are here.
New Input devices and motion events are supported. Such as Mouse, Joystick, gamepads etc.
USB API is also new. Android now supports USB host support. The device should also support.
Official MTP support is also available via android.mtp.*.



11:44AM
There is discussion how to track the devices as no method is foolproof. Some devices do not have IMEI, MAC Addresses are not consistent, Android_IDs are not unique, factory reset kills almost everything!


Some best practices now, such as revisiting the images, permissions, font sizes, minSdkVersion, one apk rather than multiple.


11:12AM
Animations
There are 2 types of animations, such as View Animations and Property Animation which is introduced in 3.0.


Sensors
There are only 30 apps which use Gyroscope. There are no apps which use the barometer. (BTW, what to do with it anyway?)
Want no rotation? use android:screenOrientation="nosensor".


Touch Screens
From API Level 9, Android supports 10 finger tracking multitouch, and to use it, the hadrware has to support it too. Xoom does it.


Telephony
Telephony feature is not supported, but does support the radio for 4G/LTE networks. 


11:03AM
Views
There are new views introduced in 3.0, such as android.widget.popupMenu etc.


Hardware Accelation
HA is built in for a subset of 2D graphics (Canvas API). HA can be defined in the manifest by setting android:hardwareAccelerated="true" for the entire app or the activity.
This can also be done thru code by doing
Window win = getWindow();
win.setFlags(WindowManager.layoutparams.FLAG_HARDWARE_ACCELERATED, WindowManager.layoutparams.FLAG_HARDWARE_ACCELERATED);


Texture Compression
Very much dependent on Chipsets. (Works in all API level though)
ETC1 on all devices with OpenGL ES 2.0, but no alpha.
PVRTC for Power VR from Imaginion
ATTIC etc.


10:45AM
Fragments
Allows an app to be divided into subcomponents, those can be individually managed and combined in various ways such as creating a multi-pane UI.
The APIs are 
android.app.Fragment, android.app.ListFragment (like list activity), android.app.DialogFragment (A floating one). There is android.app.FragmentManager is there to interact with the fragment (findFragmentById). There is also a android.app.FragmentTransaction to do operate on fragments (add, remove, replace, visibility etc).


10:33AM
Holographic Theme
MinSdkVersion has to be 11 to have it inheritted. 
You can dim the system bar by
View v  = findViewById(R.id.viewid);
v.setSystemUiVisibility(View.SYSTEM_BAR_HIDDEN);
v.setSystemUiVisibility(View.SYSTEM_BAR_VISIBLE);


There is no Menu button. So if a menu interaction is required, the overflow button in Action bar is to be used.
The Icon can also be made actionable. Action bar can have action items listed rather than in the overflow menu, both with icons and text and both being optional.
You can get the action bar ref by doing a
ActionBar aBar = getActionBar();
aBar.setNavigationMode(ActionBar.NAVIGATION_MODE_TABS);
The action bar can be hidden buy setting the theme to @android:style/Theme.NoTitleBar
Menu button can come up if hte apps minSdkVersion is < 11.


10:28AM
There are only 1000 apps targetted at Tabs, and they have better sales than the iPad apps.


Intro of Moto Xoom on. 10.1" Screen, WXGA 160 dpi, 23GB storage, nVidia Tegra, gyroscope, WiFi, BT, HDMi etc.


3 Hardware buttons, Vol up, Vol down and power. There is a system bar to make up for the other buttons.


10:24AM
Sreehari to start now, has 11 yrs of exp, 4 yrs in Motodev.

10:20AM
Some more people trickling in. Hope to start the event in another 10 mins.

10:12AM
Around 20 people in the meetup now. A round of Angry Birds going on near the screen, in  a Xoom.

After a few initial hiccups, I am up for the liveblogging! MS gonna give the WiFi access in a while, until then, sit back and have a deferred live!