#DevoxxBlog: Of Slides and Such

I spent last week at Devoxx, giving several talks with Romain Guy about Android (graphics, GUIs, performance, the latest developer features ... the usual). Now that I've recovered from a total system collapse over the weekend (apparently the body does insist on getting a little sleep now and then), I thought I'd post some thoughts and also the slides from our presentations.

Thoughts

Devoxx is my favorite developer conference. It is a perfect mix of highly technical (focused on developers, not business/marketing/PR), inexpensive (at 350-700 Euros, it's quite a deal for 2-5 days of full technical content of this caliber, even at the current exchange rate of 1 Euro == $97,000.02), and personal (it's a relatively small, single venue, so you're all together there in the talks, in the lobby, in the hallways, and on the show floor). And it's in an interesting venue (Antwerp, while not balmy in November, is a far more interesting location to return to than, say, San Jose). Oh, and the beer is quite nice.

The conference is well run, the talks are professionally recorded and viewable on the excellent parleys.com website, and the beer is tasty. Parleys, and its free subscription for conference attendees, is particularly crucial since the comfortable theater seating guarantees that you'll have to catch up on at least some of the talks later.

Content

Romain and I gave several talks this year, not all of which have accompanying slides:

University: Android Awesomeness

This vaguely-titled 3-hour talk on Monday was in two parts. In the first half, Romain and I did a very quick introduction to the Android 4.0 release, then Philip Milne (another engineer on the Android framework team) followed up with a deep-dive into the GridLayout class that is new in the 4.0 release. The second half was more interactive, as we showed how we use the tools that ship with the SDK to debug performance, memory, and UI issues.

You can download the slides for this talk here: Part 1 and Part 2.

Lab: Just Desserts: Developing with the Latest Features from Honeycomb and Ice Cream Sandwich

This was a 3-hour lab on Tuesday morning in which we showed how to use some of the new features like fragments, TextureView, layers, and animations. No slides for this one; you had to be there. (I may post code projects later once I whip the code into presentable shape).

Session: Graphics Goodies

Wednesday's talk was an updated version of the Android Accelerated Rendering talk we did at Google IO.

Here are the slides.

Session: Sticky GUIs

This presentation on Thursday was a collection of techniques and principles for creating GUI applications that will make your users stick: graphics, performance, animations, GUIs; they're all important.

Here are the slides.

Android Awesomeness, Graphics Goodies, and Sticky GUIs were all recorded and will be available soon on the parleys.com website. You may get more out of the full presentations than from just the slides. In fact, I hope you do, because otherwise I don't know why we traveled that far to present them.

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