Droidcon India 2012

India's largest Android Conference

##About Droidcon
Droidcon is a two day international conference that’s all about Android. It brings together luminaries from all aspects of the Android ecosystem - solo app developers, visual and interaction designers, software startups, enterprise software leaders, robotics and arduino wizards, kernel and ROM hackers, OEMs and platform providers, and technology enthusiasts.

##Tickets
Tickets are available from droidcon.doattend.com.

##Proposal Selection Process
The proposal funnel below will enable you to submit a session and vote on proposed sessions. It is a good practice introduce yourself and share details about your work as well as the subject of your talk while proposing a session.

Each community member can vote for or against a talk. A vote from each member of the Program Committee is equivalent to two community votes. Both types of votes will be considered for final speaker selection.

It’s useful to keep a few guidelines in mind while submitting proposals:

  1. Describe how to use something that is available under a liberal open source license. Participants can use this without having to pay you anything.

  2. Tell a story of how you did something. If it involves commercial tools, please explain why they made sense.

  3. Buy a slot to pitch whatever commercial tool you are backing.

Making a funnel submission does not guarantee final selection. While selected speakers will get a free ticket to both days of the event, proposers whose talks are not on the final schedule will be able to purchase tickets at the Early Geek price of Rs. 1800.

Sessions at this year’s Droidcon are 30 minutes each, including transition time. You have 20 minutes to present and 5 minutes for Q&A, with the remaining 5 minutes for the next presenter to begin setting up while you answer the last set of questions.

If you have material that will need more than 30 minutes, consider:

  1. Skipping the first part of your presentation and making it more advanced level, or
  2. Splitting it into two proposals. The Program Committee will work with you to schedule your (selected) sessions back-to-back for continuity.

##Sections

The main overarching themes for this years Droidcon are grouped into five sections.

###App Demos
Level: Intermediate

  1. 15 minute demo of app you’ve built (yourself or as part of a team)

  2. 30 minute deep dive into one specific unique problem you dealt with and how you solved it. Problem can be technical or UX.

  3. 15 minute Q&A

One spot will be reserved for a featured hacknight demo (or a short demo of all apps)

###Workshops
Level: Beginner

  1. 15 minutes of concepts via slides

  2. 30 minutes of show and tell

  3. 15 minutes of interactive guidance with audience

Topics should address specific areas - for instance a) Using Fragments, b) Building basic animations, c) Using WebView, d) Offline Storage & Cache.
Prior registration is required, all attendees must bring laptops with SDK & tools preinstalled.
Speakers must ensure sessions can be run without Wi-Fi access if needed.

###Specialized Topics
Level: Intermediate

  1. NFC / Android Beam

  2. Sensors

  3. Arduino

  4. DLNA & Media / Google TV

  5. Gaming

  6. Multi-modal Apps

  7. Enterprise App Development

  8. UX Patterns & Challenges

  9. Designing apps for the Indian market

###Platforms, Tools & Libraries
Level: Beginner/Intermediate
Usage of open source platforms, tools & libraries like Eclipse, PhoneGap, Kirin, jQuery Mobile, etc. Proprietary tools need to be sponsored sessions.

###General Topics
Level: Beginner/Intermediate

  1. Using Fragments

  2. Whats new in Jelly Bean

  3. Designing for different form factors

  4. Tackling Fragmentation

  5. Marketing & Monetizing Android Apps

The Program Committee may recommend that some proposals under General Topics be considered under the Workshops or Specialized Topics section depending on the nature of the content.

Hosted by

droidconIN is an annual conference on Android, part of the worldwide series of events. more

Indraneel Bommisetty

@indra83

Hacking Android for Fun and Profit

Submitted Oct 16, 2012

Motivate developers to find out of box (technical )ideas that take your app to the next level. Start looking at the bugs and deficiencies in the platform as a challenge and as an opportunity to be creative.

*Note: all ‘hacks’ use standard Android API; NO rooting of device.

Outline

Over the years as an Android developer, I had implemented many out of the box ideas which had let my apps push the barrier. Android had, has and always will have bugs and limitations. These cause major headaches and barriers. But often, creative solutions can be found to get around them. Here I will present a few such hacks.

  1. Is it portrait or landscape?
    While developing the Layar app, we had to face a nasty bug in the first Android devices that basically ruled out using the camera in Portrait mode. We build a work around by overriding the View lifecycle onDraw() method. More details into the implementation and the many other challenges we had to face before we could push this hack.

  2. Proxy is your friend.
    While building an app for GCon - an external harddrive with wifi - we wanted to stream videos and audio from the device. But the content on the GCon device was authenticated and Android mediaplayer doesn’t support sending headers( thereby cookies) until API 14. We had to use a StreamProxy to overcome.

  3. No text selection in WebView?!
    The WebView in Android doesn’t support customizing text selection. For our book reader app, text selection and highlighting was a must-have feature. I will give high level overview of how we hacked around the limitations to implement text selection for WebView.

Wrap up: Pushing hacks is not easy, but can be done. And its fun!

Speaker bio

I have been into Android development since the launch of the SDK, initially as a hobbyist and as a professional developer since last 3.5 years. I have built many apps with installs totaling 10s of millions, most popular being Layar. During this experience, I had some opportunities of pushing hacks into production and I have always wanted to share the experience.

Recently started working on Divi, with the goal of bringing tablets to education.

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Hosted by

droidconIN is an annual conference on Android, part of the worldwide series of events. more