As passionate Android developer I was very happy to be given the opportunity to attend this conference. Thank you Schibsted Tech Polska! 🙂
At this year’s edition, there were 4 simultaneous talks almost each time, so unfortunately I missed a lot.
Android is a world phone
The day started with breakfast. After that the first talks, given by Touchlab representatives who organized the event, began.
Then the keynote took place. It was entitled “Android is a world phone”. And I have to admit – I’d been expecting something different from the keynote. We were presented with numbers and charts of how is Android going to spread around poor countries in the near future. It was very similar to the part of this year’s Google I/O keynote but then it was just a part of an interesting talk, yet it was not a whole talk itself.
LeakCanary to the rescue
Fortunately, the next talk was given by Square member – Pierre-Yves Ricau and was about a very useful and a pretty new library – LeakCanary. Good presentation but I kinda counted on some more tips on reading the LeakCanary reports. Maybe next time! Pierre is a skilled presenter though! He already uploaded his slides here.
Tumblr style animations
Then I went to listen to some of the Tumblr’s devs about animations. There is no better team to talk about that. If you don’t believe me just try the Tumblr android app. The talk was interesting but not very technical. Zack Sultan and Kevin Grant presented several concepts and tips on meaningful animations. Must see for any decent Android developer. Good presentation, well teamed up gentlemen! Here are the slides!
Jake Wharton with Retrofit2
The most anticipated talk came next. Jake Wharton himself was introducing Retrofit2 library. There are several changes that users were requesting for months. For me the most important one is the dynamics url, where the base URL is no longer a must-have. Also you’ll be able to get serialized body response. Jake announced that he will publish the usable beta of the library right after the talk, what he did on the Retrofit website. I encourage you guys to use it as, the author said, he will have little sympathy for the dev requests after the library is finished 🙂 His slides are already available.
Mobile payments
Sam Edwards gave a very educative talk about mobile payments opportunities, like an alternative to Google Wallet. Those are NFC payments though, not in-app payments of Google Play. Unfortunately I can’t find his slides yet. I’ll update the post as soon I get my hands on them.
Touch interaction? Not a piece of cake
Philippe Breault gave an awesome, very technical presentation about touch interaction on Android. The thing is that pretty basic techniques like placing a button inside a scroll view aren’t quite easy, as you can’t scroll starting dragging over the button. Philippe showed us how to solve that, and several other issues. Still no slides available though, so stay tuned!
Continuous Integration according to Stephen D’Amico
The next talk was covering continuous integration. I kinda feel that I need to educate myself on that in the near future, so the talk was a a great opportunity for me to learn some new stuff. Stephen D’Amico listed some of the systems you could use and compared their most basics features. Then he went on to presenting a detailed walk-trought of establishing the Jenkins setup. Gotta try this one. You could do that too, as the slides are available! I hope I could also see some Travis next time 🙂
Super simple backend for mobile or web applications
If you need a simple backend for your app but you’re not a skilled backend developer or you just need a simple solution, then you should definitely try Firebase.
The company was one of the sponsors and they speaker gave 2 talks about the service. I attended the first one, which introduced Firebase to those who hadn’t used it yet. The new API gives some cool possibilities, like data binding and real time refreshing. This was actually the first of several data binding talks on the conference. Very hot topic now! Slides are here, but you probably should go straight to the website and the docs. This presentation featured life coding, so you’ll probably have to wait for the video of it. Cheers to Mike for being brave enough to do a live coding on stage. Barely any crashes! 😉
That’s the end of Day One. We had some party afterwards but that would be a material for a whole different story…
Stay tuned for Day Two!