Humor4u

Join me and many other developers at Droidcon London at the end of October. "Why Droidcon London?," you ask? Great question, thanks for asking! The answer is simple. But because I wanted to write more than six sentences to justify taking up your time reading this, I'm going to take longer to explain. For one thing, there will be developers. Everywhere. Hanging from the rooftop, dangling from the balcony, occupying every seat - nothing but developers, developers, developers. None of these business-blogger types, no management consultants (well,  very few anyway ) peddling their wares; just developers. So the people you talk to are exactly the people you want to connect with; other programmers learning the same stuff to solve the same problems that you have. Also, there are always great technical talks. Developers aren't just in the seats and hanging from the fluorescents; they're up on stage talking about the stuff they know. In many conferences, the people on sta...

This is meant to be a living archive of Android presentations, articles, videos, whatever that I've presented, co-presented, written, been a witness to, or simply enjoyed and learned from. People ask for this stuff occasionally ("Where can I learn more about performance tuning on Android?" or "Where can I see more videos of Romain? He's so dreamy, with that almost-real French accent!"), so I thought it would be worth recording the links somewhere where I can add new ones over time as stuff comes online (and delete old ones as they become obsolete). I'll attempt to categorize things, but there is overlap on these topics. So the studious developer will, of course, watch and read everything. Twice. The links are presented in rough reverse-chronological order in each section. Some talks date way back to 2010, but they're still relevant today (the advantage of APIs that don't go away...). General Android Development Android Developers Backstage (Tor ...

All of the talks from Devoxx 2013 are now freely available on the parleys.com website. This includes all of the talks that I did with Romain Guy on Android: Filthy Rich [Android] Clients What's New in Android Android Performance Workshop Part 1 Android Performance Workshop Part 2 There's also an interview about the new features in KitKat. Then there's this somewhat less relevant Patterns, Shmatterns talk I did about software design patterns. All of the slides from the Android talks are posted  on Romain's blog .

I've written this article about preparing and giving presentations:

All of the videos have been posted from the various sessions I was in this year. Here they are, along with links to the slides. What's new in Android A presentation with  +Dan Sandler  that provides a quick overview of some of the larger features and new APIs in the L Developer Preview release and other new bits in the recent Androidosphere. There's also a really good deep-dive into Notifications, since Dan's the non-local expert on the subject. Slides (PDF) Material science This session, presented with  +Adam Powell , provides an overview of the engineering side of the Material design system. Many of the other sessions at Google I/O this year discussed the design side; this presentation covers the technical details of the APIs and the capabilities exposed by the framework for Android developers. Slides (PDF) Material witness I was happy to be joined once again by former Android developer and UI Toolkit team lead  +Romain Guy  for this talk on some of the new Ma...

Most people that know me know that I can't say enough about process. In this presentation at Devoxx 2012, I tried to change that. If the embed below isn't working for you, you can watch the talk on the parleys.com site .

The videos and slides are now posted for the presentations that I did with Romain Guy at Google I/O a couple of weeks ago. What's New in Android : A developer's overview of some of the new features available in Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, including a deep dive into the enhanced Notifications capabilities (this part by Daniel Sandler, one of the engineers responsible). For Butter or Worse : A very geeky look into how hardware accelerated rendering works on Android, what we did to make things smoother and faster in the latest release, and what Android developers can do to make their applications faster and smoother as well. These videos were posted within a day of the talks, but the slides took a bit longer (possibly explained by the rush up to IO followed by everyone collapsing in fatuge when it was over). There are tons of other great talks from the conference that are posted as well, both in the Google Developers channel on YouTube and (with slides) on the IO site itself . Enjo...

Last month, Romain and I once again braved Bay Area rush hour traffic and gave a couple of talks at the SF Android user group. Those talks were recorded and are now posted online: An Introduction to Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) This talk overviews some of the user and developer features of the new Android 4.0 release, through slides and demos. We also got side-swiped by a massive Q&A phase in the middle; always interesting to see what's on peoples's minds (and maybe even answer those questions sometimes). Sticky GUIs This talk discusses some principles, approaches, and techniques in graphics, animation, layouts, and performance that may help you create better and more usable UI applications. (The ICS recording has interesting audio. It reminds me of early efforts at "stereo" with the Chet instrument coming out of your left speaker and the Romain instrument coming out of your right speaker. But the recordings are very good otherwise. And maybe it's better ...

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...

I'm starting to prepare presentations for the ~8 hours of talks that Romain and I are giving at Devoxx in a couple of weeks. "Preparing" generally entails mostly worrying, followed by a mad rush of writing slides and code at night, on the long flight, after beers, between talks, and sometimes during the talks. It's a busy time of year. I realized that the organizers of Devoxx had recently released all of the recorded talks from last year into the wild (read: they're free on parleys.com ), so it seemed worth linking to them in case anyone wanted to see what we had to say last time around. I'll give a plug for the conference and the Parleys site here. If there were an ad banner, it'd go here. Not because I'm paid (I would make a poor ad salesman, apparently), but because I think that both the conference and the parleys site rock. The organizers do a great job of putting it all together, and the recordings and presentation of the talks on parleys.com...

Here are the slides from our presentations at AnDevCon : Android 3.0: Honeycomb and Get It . This presentation, with Romain Guy , was an overview of some of the highlights in the 3.0 release, for users and for developers. Androidimation: Animation in Android . This presentation discussed how to use the animation APIs in Android, including the animation classes in the SDK before 3.0 and the new animation system in 3.0. Enjoy.

The international book tour for Flex 4 Fun began last November in Antwerp, Belgium (the home of diamonds, chocolate, and GUI toolkit programming books). It was a gray a rainy day, which is unusual for Antwerp except for the months between September and June. The tour began as all such things do: parties dripping with scantily-clad programming celebrities, mobs of teeming fans fighting for autographs and shreds of clothing, and all-night hacking orgies. It was unforgettable, it was a blur of over-caffeinated memory, it was ... just another book tour. The tour came to an abrupt end. I can't confirm that it was because of overcrowded venues and rabid crowds that overwhelmed Interpol forces. I can only say that I had to leave the town anonymously, quickly, and with only 10 pounds of chocolate as a memory of the experience. Or... I gave a talk on Flex 4 Fun at Devoxx . The presentation gave an overview of some of the graphics and animation features in Flex 4, and worked through an exa...

Here are slides for two of the approximately 871 talks that Romain Guy and I gave at Devoxx last month (and again at the SF Android User Group meeting a couple of days ago). Videos of all of the Devoxx sessions are already posted on the excellent Parleys site for a small subscription fee, and should be made freely available sometime in the next few months. You probably want to check out those videos for the complete details. But in case you were at the talks, are sick of listening to us speak, or simply want to peruse the slideware, here you go... Android Graphics and Animation Android UI Development: Tips, Tricks and Techniques

I'm back from the annual Devoxx conference, a fun and thoroughly exhausting week in Antwerp spent presenting, attending, and generally hanging out. It's always a great time, despite the weather and the overall grayscale cityscape. This picture from the show was taken during one of my sessions when I was either talking about a GUI frame or saying hello to my Hawaiian friends. I presented in several sessions, including 4 sessions with Romain Guy about Android and UI programming and one on topics from my book, Flex 4 Fun . I spent most of the week either on stage or writing slides and demos to present on stage. There's nothing like procrastination to keep you busy at the last minute. For anyone that missed the presentations, see below about their availability on parleys.com . We may also post the slides someday, although it's always better to get the full deal (slides+audio+video). Also, I intend to post a couple of the demos I showed in the Android talks (the Flex demos...

I'll be joining Jacob Surber from Adobe this week to speak to the local Flex user group, SilvaFUG (which I think stands for "Silicon Valley Flex User Group." Or maybe it's "Silver and Fugly"). We'll be in San Francisco on Tuesday evening (the 12th) and San Jose on Thursday evening (the 14th). The topic is "Fun with Flex Skinning." I'll start off with an overview of the visual aspects of Flex 4 (which, by bizarre coincidence, are exactly the topics covered by Flex 4 Fun . Funny how that worked out). Then I'll walk through an extended example of skinning a simple component to show how these visual elements are used to enable easy development of very custom-looking components. I promise there will be much more code than bullet-points. Jacob will then go into more detail about skinning, including possible workflows and tools for design and development of custom components. More information about the events can be found on the SilvaFUG si...

Romain Guy and I gave a presentation last year at Devoxx (an excellent developer conference in Antwerp, Belgium (a city with mildly miserable weather at that time of year)) called Animation Rules! A recording of this session was just posted on parleys.com . I've embedded it here for your viewing pleasure: You could also check it out on the Parleys site directly ; parleys is an excellent Flex application, and has a desktop AIR client for offline viewing of the various sessions. The Devoxx conference posts the session recordings one by one throughout the year. But you can also subscribe to parleys to get all of the sessions immediately. There are many great sessions at the conference, and the fee is quite low (49 Euros for 6 months), so consider becoming a subscriber to get it all. Enjoy...

Effects in Flex 4 , the talk I gave earlier this week at Adobe MAX , is now available from Adobe TV . This is pretty awesome; I've never known talk recording to be published so soon after the actual event (in this case, actually published while the event was still going on). The talk covers the overall architecture of the new effects in Flex 4, covering all of the new effects classes and also (my favorite part) the underlying details of how it all works, using the Animate class, the underlying Animation class, and all of the low-level helper classes. Lots of nitty-gritty details for those that care (and those that don't). If you saw my FlashCamp talk that I posted last June, you'll recognize some of the information and demos, but this talk goes into a lot more detail on the architecture and underlying details since I had more time to do so. For the code-hungry folks in the audience, I showed many demos throughout the talk to illustrate how the concepts and classes actuall...

Sun has posted the PDF for the presentation that I did at JavaOne this year with Romain Guy , Move Your Users: Animation Principles for Great User Experiences (you'll have to join the Sun Developer Network to access that URL, but it's easy and free). The demos were a big part of the presentation, of course (as was Romain doing a running jump off the stage and blowing the microphone), and those aren't in the slides. But most of the demos either already exist online (we showed a few from Filthy Rich Clients ) or (in the case of the Flex demos) will be shown here as I post blogs and videos that talk about those applications in detail. Enjoy...

I gave a quick talk at a recent Flashcamp at the SF Adobe building. If you want a (very) quick overview of the Flex 4 effects architecture and some examples of how to use the various new effects, check out the verbosely-named Using Effects and Animation in Flex 4 . Actually, there were a lot of great, quick talks that evening by other folks on the Flex, AIR, and tools teams: you'll probably want to grab some popcorn and watch more: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flash/videos/#flashcamp In face, that same page has other video tutorials on Flex, Flash Builder, and Flash Catalyst. What the heck, just watch them all. You don't have work to do today, do you? http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flash/videos/