MOTODEV Blog

Hi, everyone!

I’m a user experience designer on Motorola’s Android team and new to the MOTODEV community. I’ve worked on a number of the MOTOBLUR apps and it’s been a lot of fun. (A lot of hard work, too…) The Android platform is great and it’s exciting to see both the platform mature and Motorola’s unique & innovative spin on mobile user experience.

One of my favorite organizations is Mobile Monday with its global community of mobile designers, developers, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and aficionados. The “MoMo Chicago” chapter has relaunched this year after a brief hiatus.

If you’re in Chicago this coming Monday, 9/21, stop by the downtown Motorola offices for the September Mobile Monday Chicago event. Motorola is sponsoring the event and Peter Pfanner, head of the mobile device organization for the Americas, will speak on mobile device design. Peter’s group is responsible for the industrial design of a long line of successful and iconic devices including the RAZR and PEBL, as well as the newly announced CLIQ.

This just in: Peter will be joined by Michiel Knoppert, the actual designer of the CLIQ. Cool!

To learn more about the Mobile Monday event in Chicago, visit their web site:

http://www.momochicago.com

To register for the event, please RSVP online. Registration is free.

http://momochicago092109.eventbrite.com

I’m also the Events Chair for MoMo Chicago, so if you’re interested in speaking, please let me know. Similarly, if you’re keen to learn more about a specific topic, technology, or company, let me know and we’ll see what we can do!

Thank you! I look forward to seeing you there!

Hola amigos de MOTODEV!,

Once again, the Chicago Androids (Developers and Enthusiast Group) met to learn and network with other developers and Android  enthusiast from the Chicago area.  The meeting took place 12th August, at the Google offices in Downtown Chicago, and we were hosted by the Chicago Google Technologies Users Group (Chicago GTUG). 

Between the two groups we ended up having over 7+ talks hosted in two parallel tracks covering topics around GWT and Android.  Although the final agenda ended up looking slightly different, here is a detail run-down of what we covered. 

The Android track was as follows:

• Running Android on a Beagle Board - by Jay Williams from Motorola ( PDF / Video* )

• Backing up and Restoring your rooted G1 and Installing JagHero ( PDF / Video* )
• Media on the Android Platform  ( PDF / Video* )- by Jason Shah, author of CTA tracker and the Blackberry and Android versions of Mediafly

Jason's presentation was followed by a few words by Carson Conand, CEO of Mediafly on their work on Android.

As always, thank you Carl for recording the talks. Thank you Jay, Samir, and Jason for such wonderful presentations!  Thank you Uki D. Lucas for providing us with access to Google's facility, and organising the bulk of the event!

Our next meeting will likely happen Sept. 17th at the UIC Innovation Center.  Stay on top of what we are doing by signing to our google group at: http://groups.google.com/group/chicago-androids

You can also find me at twitter.com/ohrock

Cheers and see you soon!

*At the time this post went up, the videos from the event had not been uploaded yet.  Keep an eye on Carl's blip.tv page as they will show up any time now.

Roberto C. Serrano

Hey MOTODEV fans,

Another month another meetup - Android User Group Meetup, London! The meeting was held on 23rd July, 2009.  The members made a conscious decision to let meetup's have no "lectures" but just demos of what example apps or just talk what they wanted. There were 3 talks:

Kevin McDonagh - "Motion Sensors and Orientation in Android"

Kevin started with introducing the concepts of Orientation and Sensor like Azimuth, Pitch and Roll. He told them how to monitor the Orientation and Sensor changes by registering to SensorEventListener and OrientationEventListener. He then demoed a simple test application showing the feature.

Follow Kevin on Twitter - @kevinmcdonagh.

Makoto Inoue - "Cross Platform Frameworks - Rhodes & PhoneGap"

Makoto introduced his background as not being too much of a mobile developer but still wanted to develop for mobile with his existing skillset - mainly html, css, ruby etc. He found Rhodes and PhoneGap which were similar frameworks which help developers develop applications in simple html, css, ruby etc and then create a deployable package(apk file) which could then be installed. The application developed gives a native look and feel as well.

Follow Makoto on Twitter - @makoto_inoue

The slides can be found at http://www.slideshare.net/inouemak/rhodes-and-phone-gap or below:

Carl the dynamic host of London Android meetup presented about Content Providers and how applications can make use of them to share data. He compare the usage of Content Providers with REST services.

The slides can be found at - http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=ddkfmkfh_30cp3m6bv8

Post meet, there was an active networking among the developers as well as possible business tie-ups for the future. The developers were showing their developed apps and taking tips/suggestions for improvement, discussing famous apps like bar code reader etc. Forgot to mention - pizzas and beer were served for all the attendees. The details of the next meetup and pictures of the current meetup can be obtained from - http://www.meetup.com/android. See you soon!

Cheers,

Karan

P.S. Thanks to Carl for the photo at the top of this blog post.

Hola de nuevo! I just wanted to give you a recap on the events that we've had over the last couple months and concluded during this weekend's Chicago Barcamp, which took place at the UIC's Innovation Center on July 12-13.

Android 101 App. development series Highlights:

• June 6th at IIT downtown campus, in conjunction with Chicago LUG. During this time we covered the following:
  
  • Intalling the Android SDK  (by Neal Buckendahl)
  • Intro. to the Android Environment
  • Intro to the Android OS.
  • Intro to the building blocks of an Android App.
  • Video of the event:  http://carlfk.blip.tv/file/2213225/   (Is a three part click, so follow the links on the right side after part 1)

• June 23rd at Shully's House on , and we looked at the following:
  
  • We had a deeper look into the application's manifest
  • Layouts, Widgets, and Events
  • Video of the event:  http://blip.tv/file/2280779
     (Same as the one before, three part clip here)
• July 11th and 12th, during Chicago Barcamp we covered:
  
  • Intents.   (Video:  http://carlfk.blip.tv/file/2348100/)
  • Data persistence, Preferences, SQLite, and content providers  (by James
    Wylder - video: http://carlfk.blip.tv/file/2348152/ )
  • Maps and Map Integration (by Mark Murphy)
  • Uploading and App to the Android Market.  Video: http://carlfk.blip.tv/file/2353007/

Unfortunately, the recording for Mark Murphy's "Maps and Map Integration" presentation was lost. The presentation itself was wonderful and it got a really good response by many people in the audience. The Chicago Androids would like to thank Mark for his wonderful dedication, and for providing prices for the code-sprint as well.  Mark is an Android published author, and renown community contributor.  You can find his work at http://commonsware.com/



By the way, besides the above mentioned recordings, most of the the presentation's materials for the series (Part 1 to 5, and persistence) can be found here.

Code-Sprint Highlights:
We started the Code-sprint around 6PM on Saturday and the first thing was to decide what to do.  We decided to go with the RunWithMe project, (to createa
GPS enable jogging music companion ) .  The main feature is to allow you to create playlists associated to geographical coordinates, so that you can here
your Rocky music on your home stretch.  In the future we might look at such things as timers, pedometer, record course, time, etc.

We started by dividing the work in sections, setting up the site for the app:  code.google.com/p/runwithme/ , and some of the guys stared by looking at how to read music of the sdcard, how to create an layout with and adaptive array that will allow you to select the music that you want to play, etc.  Some of us call the day off around 8PM.

Apparently nighttime ended up being quite a ruckus and everyone had a lot of fun, but not much got done.


 

The following morning more of us got together and kept on working in the app, looking at the underlaying structure, organizing it, etc. 

These are the individuals that participated in the code-sprint and got a free 6 month subscription to www.commonware.com:  Steve K., Martin C, Nemanja S., Atul A., Heflin R., Steven F., Jason S, and James W.

We had a lots of fun, learned quite a few new things about Android development, etc. and around 3PM Sunday we decided that it would be great to make the project an ongoing opportunity and a excuse to have people coming together, hack on Android, and learn in a practical way about all the topics we covered in the series.  The project was not completed, but we are going to work on it in future sessions that will be open to anyone interested on Android development.  Join us and don't miss out the fun!  We will be sending an announcement out with more details to our group's mailing list.  

Final thoughts

I can only say how thankful I am to all the people that helped with the series (Neal, James, and Mark), all of those who attended, and the Barcamp organizers for providing us with food, refreshments, and a location to make this happen.  

In particular, I want to thank Carl Karsten and Cosmin Stejerean, for "almost" recording every session in the series.  I've heard from many people how thankful they are at being able to follow up the series from afar, so: thank you, because you make that happen!

Chicago Androids will be meeting for more runwithme sessions soon, and during August we will have our next formal session.  We are already working on it, so stay tune for details on when, what, and where.  Until then, join the discussion and stay tune via http://tinyurl.com/chicagoandroids

Thank you!

HI! It's me again...just wanted to give you a quick recap of the Silicon Valley Android MeetUp that took place on June 16th at the Sunnyvale Motorola office.

The organizer, Austin Teames, just returning from his honeymoon, miraculously brought together 3 speakers and over 70 attendees (as you can see in the photos below). 

Here are some highlights per speaker presentation:

• Rick Pierson - Director Business Development, Mobility Group, for ABBYY discussed OCR applications for mobile phones 
  • create native device install or cloud provided OCR services from a mobile device
  • for example - if you have a highly sensitive document you would rather do it on a native app rather than sending it to the cloud and return back the data - this shows the need for 2 types of OCR apps
  • provide an SDK that you can develop these OCR apps with and is downloadable from their website
•  Jeff Haynie - CEO, for Appcelerator talked about Titanium Mobile - an integrated platform for creating, testing, and commercializing
  native mobile & desktop applications using web technologies.
  • is in private beta and tweet @jhaynie to get access
  • any 3rd party Java script library works with Titanium Mobile on Android
  • A demo was given showing adding streaming audio and video using Titanium Mobile via Java Script
• Lars Fjeldsoe-Nielsen - VP of Business Development, Skyhook Wireless discussed Location-enabling Android applications with the Skyhook XPS SDK
  • ShopSavvy, one of the most popular shopping comparison apps in the Android Market, uses their service
  • 100 million wi-fi locations in their database
  • 0.25 billion lookups a day

 Some comments from the community:

Stay tuned to MOTODEV for meet-ups around the world.  And for those in the Silicon Valley make sure to sign up for the Ning group.

Kamini

HI!! Since this is my first blog post I thought I would introduce myself - I work for Motorola on the Developer Outreach Team working on various marketing programs as well as managing communications out to developers.

I wanted to let you know about the Silicon Valley Android MeetUp that is being hosted by MOTODEV on Tuesday, June 16^th from 6:00 - 8:00 pm.  We are pairing up with Austin Teames to bring together a few companies that support Android development.  Austin is the organizer of the Android Developer Group on LinkedIn and works at Trilibis Mobile as a product manager for their mobile products.

It would be great if you could join us at the meet-up to talk about and support innovation on Android. If you come you'll get the chance to learn about how the openness of Android can be used to build some very cool, new, and awesome apps.  Anyone from the curious to hardcore developers are welcome to participate.

Register for the meet-up here - http://androidsv.ning.com//events/silicon-valley-android-meetup

Below are some details about the meet-up:

Agenda Flow:

Presenters:

Lars Fjeldsoe-Nielsen - VP of Business Development, Skyhook Wireless

Location-enabling Android applications with the Skyhook XPS SDK.

Jeff Kunz - VP of Business Development, Appcelerator
Titanium is an integrated platform for creating, testing, and commercializing native mobile & desktop applications using web technologies.

OCR applications for mobile phones - using your camera phone as a scanner, mobile data capture for industry verticals.