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In the previous post, I introduced the first five slides I chose from DroidCon NYC 2015. Here is the second part with the remaining ones.
6. Have you seen Cloud Spin?
Bulletproof Android wasn't the only talk that taught us Matrix techniques. In this case, Bret McGowen and Ray Tsang showed us how to use phone cameras to record movies like the Wachowski brothers in The Matrix. To be more specific, do you remember that scene where Trinity jumps to kick a bad guy and when she's in the air, the camera freezes and rotates 180-degrees? Well, if you have 19 Android devices, you can do it too. The camera part, at least...
So, the slide I've chosen from this talk is the engineer schematics of this project called Cloud Spin demo.
Since this talk also has a stand, I'll leave a bonus with this slide, which is myself playing with the spins, but remember, security has to be the number one priority, so guys and gals be sure not to try this at home alone.
7. Tools of the trade
Talking about tools, Sebastiano Poggi brought a very comprehensive and useful list of tools when writing Android code. The slide I picked from this talk is an obvious one but many times forgotten. So, besides the existence of this tag, it's very common to read "real" text on layouts even when it's for testing purposes.
Sebastiano's reminder, if you want to see how a text looks like in a layout, just use tool:text tag instead of android:text.
8. How the Main Thread works
More on tools, Michael Bailey from American Express gave a great talk about threads on Android. If you have written code on Android you know how challenging it might be to deal with main thread, background threads and communication mechanisms, so this talk really sheds light on this subject and also gives a list of resources and tools. In fact, the slide I picked from this talk is a screenshot showing Android Trace View, a tool that shows an application stack over time, which might be very helpful to detect code that's blocking the main thread.
9. What’s New in Android UI Engineering
Back to UI and Layouts, Roman Nurik, Nick Butcher and Chris Banes came with amazing new stuff on Android UI. One of them is the new PercentRelativeLayout. So, if you used to waste a lot of time trying to build responsive UI with LinearLayout, use the new PercentRelativeLayout, and not only will it be easier, but it has a better performance, as well.
10. Common slides on different talks
There were two slides that got repeated in several talks. The first one worth mentioning was Israel Ferrer's meme "Let me explain you", this became part of the folk of the conference and beyond, so here is the story. Israel was meant to give a talk during Droidcon NYC 2015 but he couldn't make it and he told the organizers in advance, so all the speakers added a slide with an Israel's photo and his favorite phrase: let me explain you.
The second most common slide during the event was perhaps a sign that this is a great moment to be an Android Developer because most of the companies for whom the speakers work are hiring. In fact, the president of the United States, Frank Underwood himself, was doing this job.
11. Be a Good Citizen: Develop Maintainable Apps
The last slide is from Annyce Davis’ talk about good practices on developing android applications. During the talk, she describes good criteria to choose what to use or not on an Android project. She also talks about testing and very briefly about an application architecture. And this is the slide I chose.
“Have you seen this before?”, Annyce asks. "Here we have a snippet from an Activity which contains an animation, chromecast support, fragments and it goes on and on. This code violates the single responsibility principle".
That's it. I've written many classes that violate the single responsibility principle and that's why I felt so bad about it. Ok, I read about Uncle Bob’s clean architecture and some others’ too and I knew there's something really important to work on but I didn’t know the name until I heard Annyce and remembered the single responsibility principle.
This slide leads us to an open discussion, which, if I am lucky enough, I will tell about in next posts. It will be started off by the question: how can we build applications using classes or activities or components which follow a single responsibility principle?
Do you know the answer? I'll be very glad to know.
References
Have you seen Cloud Spin? - Blog Post.
Tools of the trade - Blog Post.
How the Main Thread works - Android Studio TraceView.
Droidcon NYC 2015 was a great conference with an outstanding program. More than once, it was not easy to choose which session to attend; likewise to choose a slide from a talk but I took the challenge and here is my list. I don't intend to look for the best ones, the mere discussion of the meaning of best could take up several paragraphs, but rather the ones that represent a concept that I can apply to my daily projects or that slide that stuck in my mind after the talk was over.
1. Android is the World Phone
Corey Latislaw begins the first conference keynote showing why Android is the most popular operating system in the world and how rapidly it is growing, and goes on to focus on the meaning and the challenges of this.
There are many good ideas, initiatives and sentences to quote from this talk such as "Mobile devices are changing the world one person and app at a time" or "I am passionate about Android because it is accessible to the world over not just the richest in our society." But the slide I take from this talk is the one that shows that being the world phone is not just a business discussion but also has a deep impact on many software requirements, including connectivity.
"Unlimited Data is a Lie". This is a strong sentence to say out loud to an audience of mobile developers. However, context is crucial here. Corey isn't complaining about carrier providers but what developers can do to overcome to this issue.
2. Creating Offline Mobile Apps that Always Work
William Hoang gave a talk and a tutorial explaining exactly how to solve the issue Corey Latislaw pointed out, so my second pick is not exactly a slide but a Github page. A well documented line of code is worth a thousand pictures, right?
During the tutorial we added offline support to a simple todo list application. I was surprised how simple CoachDB was and I definitely added it to my set of tools.
3. Think Like an Animator
There were a good number of talks about User Interface during Droidconf NYC 2015 and if one of them comes with a trailer, you can expect something really exceptional. Truth is Zack Sultan and Kevin Grant's talk was amazing.
One of the things I liked most about this talk was the comparison between animation techniques in the movie industry and its evolution with the current state of animation on mobile platforms.
Using animation as a user experience tool is definitely not a new idea; however, bringing already existing knowledge to the table can make a huge contribution to better understanding how and even why we add animations to our user interfaces.
So, the third slide is about the book The Illusion of Life by Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas.
I won't tell you any more about this talk to avoid spoilers. I'll just point out that if you have a chance to watch it, don't miss it.
4. A Pirate’s Guidelines for Android
After a talk about animation where Walt Disney was one of the main characters, I am sure the next thing that comes to mind is Pirates, otherwise let's assume it was a creative way to link both talks because discussing Lisa Neigut's creative talk really needs a touch of imagination. Every developer has at some time wondered "How Do I start an Android App?" Lisa answers this question by bringing deep lessons already known on Pirate culture and it couldn't be a better source of wisdom because developers and pirates are, after all, code people. Back to my slide choices. My pick from this talk is the one that said: "Fragments are not simple. Don't use fragments".
Even if I read Pierre-Yves Ricau's "Advocating Against Android Fragments" and the whole discussion on that post, I must confess that this slide really created a new existential problem for me and I kept wondering whether this may not be the price of all the wisdom that came with the talk.
5. Bulletproof Android
So far I have always thought that 'reading the matrix' was a Hollywood invented skill but Godfrey Nolan proved that it's not fiction. He showed us how we can learn this and other superpowers. The slide from this talk is about something I am sure you always felt was possible but which you would never get to do: Decompile an Android application.
So far I have always thought that 'reading the matrix' was a Hollywood invented skill but Godfrey proved that it's not fiction. He showed us how we can learn this and other superpowers. The slide from this talk is about something I am sure you always felt was possible but which you would never get to do: Decompile an Android application.
I am sure this is not a fair choice of slide because decompiling an application was just an introductory slide to the talk and most of the talk was about the risks of having certain information on source code. But considering that the first thing I did when I got home was to decompile a couple of applications available on the market just to learn from them, I've chosen this slide. Fortunately, Godfrey's written a number of books that will allow me to catch up on all the security stuff he talked about, such as Bulletproof Android, Android Best Practices, Decompiling Android and Decompiling Java.
To be continued
If you want to know what the next 6 ones are, stay tuned. In the meantime, feel free to share which your favorite one was.
Updates
Oct 27th: I just published part 2. Read it here.
References
Android is the World Phone
Creating Offline Mobile Apps that Always Work - Tutorial
Think Like an Animator's trailer - Stop motion capture
A Pirate’s Guidelines for Android - Sketchnotes by Siena Aguayo
Droidcon NYC was pretty good this year. I took three times as many photos as I did last time, and some weird Google computer took a GIF of me, so I guess that's nice.
