Deconstructing Android Open 2011

A prelude:

I'd already written this post once...well most of it, but Blogger failed me. I thought it was auto-saving. Alas, it was not. I had about 2000 words written. It was probably a bit long, but I liked it and it was helping me to organize my thoughts. I'm going to try not to re-create that post now. I'm going to try and start fresh with a new post about Android Open. Here goes:

Day 1: Workshops
The conference started off on a very strong note.  Sunday was a day of 2-1/2 hour workshops.  The first one was a 101 style session.  I've been developing software for OCAP or (tru2way) for a number of years and recently learned how to develop software for iOS at a very beginner level.  I've even done a small amount of Symbian development in Qt. More recently, JavaScript and some other scripting languages for web application development are on my plate.  Up to this point I've mostly written systems software though. Writing an application is very different from systems programming.  But as I'd started to learn more new application development platforms I noticed a lot of similarities between them.  This workshop covered the basics of Android development and started to make it feel pretty familiar. At the same time it pointed out some of the differences from iOS. It was a very well structured workshop.

The second workshop was a bit of a mess.  It was supposed to talk about Android application design.  It was design focused, but it was more like a design 101 rather than being truly rooted in the nuances of designing a well structured and beatify Android application, we were treated to some rather rough definitions of basic design principles such as affordances, visibility and constraints.  Here's the link to the presentation.

Let me know what you think. I wasn't impressed.  However I think that if I were looking for a n introductory design talk I wouldn't have been so appalled. That said, I did learn some stuff about design that I didn't know before. I just wish that the description had more aptly described the actual contents of the workshop.

Android App Development 101 (Good)
Designing an App from Idea to Market (Not terrible, but could have been much better)

Day 2 & Day 3: Sessions, Sessions and More Sessions
In short: Some good, some bad.   The talks really shifted gears going into the actual conference and moving away from the workshop style talks from the first day.  These talks were short and focused.  Or at least the good ones were.

Here's a list of sessions I attended or have since watched on video:

• Securing Android (Meh)
• Beautiful Android (Not bad, but not great)
• From iOS to Android (Bitter about Objective C mostly, but I learned some stuff)
• Extending HTML 5 with Native Plugins: PhoneGap Plugins (Scattered presenter, but he tried)
• Getting the Magic on Android Tablets (Ugh. Terrible presenter and not well structured talk)
• Extending Development on Rooted Devices (Neat guy.  But too short and rushed to be much use)
• The Honeycomb Action Bar: Front to Back
• Fragments for All
• Design, Building and Architecture Strategy for Twin Towers: Android & iOS (OMG this was boring)

Conclusion:

I personally wouldn't attend another of the Android Open conferences in the future.  I'm a lot more interested in the deeply technical programming topics that would actually teach me how to develop on the platform.  These talks were mostly too short and superficial to be of much use in that respect.  I did however really enjoy the extra activities where I got to see what a number of startups were working on with Android.  Next time I'd want to attend something like Google IO, or another conference I'd heard about while attending Android Open called: AnDevCon (Android Developer Conference).  These seem like they'd be more my speed.