For the first time today I attended a . This year’s event in Germany took place in Munich, at the MOC. Here are some of my take home thoughts from the conference.
First of all, except for the internet connection, which was awful (somebody needs to work on this interference between WiFi networks, maybe it’s time to switch to 5 GHz…), the event was perfectly organized with good catering, a balanced programme and much inspiration.
It all started at 7 in the morning. I arrived at the event earlier (exactly at the official start of the registration because the confirmation mail from Google said that the first 200 would get a special gift) and, to my big surprise, there were quite many people already there. Nevertheless, I somehow managed to get at the front of the queue (yeah, that’s the bulgarian style 
) and to get the gift which turned out to be a and a T-Shirt. Well, we were expecting a Samsung Galaxy Tab, but…
Anyway, the keynote started at exactly 9 and was a quick overview on the topics which will be covered by Google engineers and developers and Prof. Broy from the TU München (my university was a co-host of this year’s event). The most interesting points of the keynote were: the information that 2000 people registered for this event in only two days and only 1100 were chosen to attend, luckily I was among them; the hands on demos of HTML5 capabilities, the SpringRoo demonstration which now works with Google’s App Engine; and, of course, the Android presentation by the amazing Reto Meier.
The rest of the day was organized in 6 different panels: Android, Chrome and HTML5, Cloud Computing, Monetization/Social Web, Tech Talks and presentations by the TU München & it’s Center for Digital Technology Management.
Being Epic: Best Practice for Building Android Apps
The first talk I attended was held by Reto Meier, a Developer Advocate for Android. Reto has an unique and appealing style in his talks – he manages to inspire you by just a few words and you can clearly see that he knows perfectly what he is talking about. He gave some useful tips how to create an epic android app, which everybody loves. The main learnings can be summarized as:
- Don’t just accept good. Aim for more. (Hey, read by )
- Try to make something unique, not to repeat everybody else.
- Think out of the box, do not settle with what’s there, but invent new paradigms.
- Make use of as much hardware capabilities as you can, but still do not just run on undocumented APIs, because they may change rapidly. Nevertheless, keep them in mind when designing an app.
- Respect your users and accept they are not perfect, and they do not know how to use your app the way you want, they use it the way they think it should be. Users have different perceptions of an application, which may be completely different from one other. Do not try to fight them, instead try to find a solution that works for them, too. If you can’t – you are doing something wrong.
- Do not try to fight the system. You do not have to use it in a way that is not intended. This will most probably not bring success.
- Think big! Don’t be scared to innovate.
Excellence in the Android User Experience
This talk by Roman Nurik was primarily on do’s and don’ts with app development for Android. Practical tips for what’s good and what not in the UI Design. Slides are still not available, but will surely be soon at .
Next up was the lunch.
Practical HTML5
My . Malte Ubl and Jeremy Orlow gave as a superb overview on HTML5 with many examples and demos. Some of the examples were from and . Among the presented tools is which was used for this amazing thing: . The other presentation was on a 2D video which was transformed in real time in a 3D. . But, man, was that impressive!
Google Storage, Big Query, and Prediction APIs
Another highlight. Patrick Chanezon demoed some nice Google APIs. Talk slides are Patrick entertained us uploading his daughters drawings on Google Storage, predicting personal tags on delicious with Prediction API and querying them with BigQuery. He referred ‘s examples on . Overall, the talk made you want to try and experiment with different datasets and gave me some very pretty ideas. Might be trying some of these in future. Nice thing is I’ve got an . And that’s cool!
Writing HTML5 apps with Google App Engine, Google Closure Library and Clojure
I expected much more of this talk by Stefan Richter from freiheit.com . They are doing some pretty amazing stuff with Clojure on the App Engine, but the was simply disappointing. I did not expect slides with full sentences, no mention whatsoever of how this achieved and some code examples which are not really self-explanatory. Probably I expected a more 101 talk here and that’s why I didn’t like it that much. Nevertheless, the guys are doing some really exciting innovations – I am particularly interested in the operation-based versioning technique they are using (not only because I did cope with similar problems for my from a slightly different perspective, but still with the same result).
HTML5 or Native for Mobile Development?
Now, that was a wonderfully designed talk. Reto Meier and Michael Mahemoff were “arguing” which technique is better, coming at the end to the logical answer – none, or better both. Overall an entertaining presentation with nothing new but with very interesting pro and contra arguments.
After this last session there was a free beer and a world record of Blinkerandroid with 81 Android phones displaying a matrix. Just search and you will know more about this. There was surely more that could be done during that day and I hear there were also other very good talks, but one cannot be everywhere and the gives a good overview of what happened.
Overall, a wonderful day with inspiration, bright ideas and enlightenment. Makes me definitely want to try out more of the things I saw. Now I just need to get the time for it.
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