Android App Development 101

Excellent talk! 5 stars…

Agree with Chris and Chad… I wish Ken could have skipped al the basic Android stuff and dove right in. I brought my laptop to do stuff, but it turned out there was nothing to do. Ken’s talk was way to introductory for me (sorry Ken, good talk, but expected much more hands-on tips and tricks I could take home). Love the Marakana site by the way, so keep that up!

Misleading description. It was not a “hands-on workshop,” it was a lecture that took almost half the session before one line of code was written. The session objectives of learning how to design an application and create the UI were not reached—we basically got to “hello world” by the end of the session. For the three hour workshop, should focus more: is it a lecture for people who have never heard of Android before to learn how Android is different from other systems? Or should it actually get down and dirty with the code, jumping right in and using the time as efficiently as possible to create a simple working app?

Presenter was very knowledgable and had excellent presentation skills, but the session failed to deliver what was described in the program overview. Three hours is not enough time to cover Android in any detail, so it’s futile (and frustrating) to even try… but the presenter spent way too much time bouncing from detail to detail, instead of using the limited time available to teach useful higher-level concepts that could be treated thoroughly. Next time, assume a higher baseline level of knowledge going in (attendee prereq: read any one of the half-dozen quality “Intro to Android” books), and THEN use the time to tell new Android developers what they really need to know to go to the next level. Don’t waste class time time on Eclipse basics, SDK installs, reading the Dev Guide, explaining the resource model, creating simple layouts, etc. And if you spend more than 6 minutes on the basic building blocks and activity lifecycle you’re using 4 minutes more than you need to.

I wish Ken could skip the introductory part of the presentation but cover more advanced topics. So I give 4 stars out of 5.

Ken was awesome. Just wish he had more time.

One additional detail about the recording of the Android Open presentations: video of the keynotes will be available to all, but the archive with workshops and breakout sessions will only be available to All-Access and Online Access passholders. Please visit Registration if you have questions about what your pass includes.

My understanding is that the conference will not be providing laptops. If you want to bring your own laptop to try to follow along, you’ll need to have it set up with an Android development environment. The Marakana web site has setup instructions for configuring a development system.

With only 3 hours scheduled, the workshop will be very fast paced. Although you can try to follow along in “real time” as I create a simple example application live, you might find it distracting to code while listening to the presentation. However, we’re recording the session and I’m recording a screencast of everything I’m doing on my system, and we’ll provide links to these after the workshop. So another approach to consider would be to watch and listen during the workshop itself, and then go through the recorded version afterwards at your own pace.

Will laptops be provided? Or must we bring our own?