#androidnyc

[touchlabblog]

March 2014 Android Meetup - Android and Design

You know it's going to be a great meetup when the pizza runs out before the talks even start. On Wednesday night we hosted our “Android and Design” meetup at Tumblr and had a huge turnout of about 200 members. We were treated to exceptional pizza (the sausage one was bangin'), Budweiser (Tumblr's “favorite”) and a cozy space with many picturesque picnic tables.

Touch Lab president and meetup organizer Kevin Galligan started the night off with announcements. Space Apps, which Touch Lab is sponsoring, will be happening April 20-21 in New York City. It's a tech development/problem solving event that takes place in over 75 cities worldwide.

We also announced DroidconNYC. Droidcon is the largest international Android convention spanning 15 cities and counting, consisting of barcamp, hackathon and conference/workshops. Droidcon's main flagships are Berlin and London, and the team here at Touch Lab will be organizing DroidconNYC, the first one in the USA! We're looking for volunteers, sponsors, venue suggestions and contacts. If you're interested in supporting Space Apps and/or DroidconNYC, get in touch with us.

Kevin also talked about app demos. If you have an app that you'd like to demo at our next meetup, get in touch with us. We'll install your app on our device and at the end of the meetup, you'll have two minutes to demo your app to everyone. Our host at Tumblr, Chris Haseman, then gave a warm welcome to the crowd and talked about their awesome Android team (hint: they're hiring).

Dave Redding and Walter Dziemianczyk, our very own developers at Touch Lab, started the talks off with their topic, hidden patterns in Android. They gave overviews on Gaussian blur, pull to refresh and Google+ share and how they're UI/UX features that aren't in design docs but are widely used. Their talk is here.  

Kevin Grant, Android engineer at Tumblr, gave his comedic take on Android design and ways to rethink how you approach design. His talk is here. Don't you love it when your designer asks, “How hard would it be to do this?” His motto? “Say yes!”

Deniz Veli and Paul Lau then delivered a detailed talk about end-to-end Android design at Etsy. Paul showed slides of screen sizes that he designs for, and also sample markups to demonstrate how devs and designers collaborate at Etsy. Their talk is here. After Q&A and great design insight from our speakers, we mixed and mingled and moved the party to Lillie's for drinks and more conversation.

Join us next month at StackExchange for Mark Murphy's talk. We'd like to give preference to Android developers since this will fill up fast, so please get in touch with me and clarify that you're a dev if you'd like to be added!

See you next month,

Olivia

Operations, Touch Lab

Co-organizer, NY Android Developers Meetup

[touchlabblog]

February 2014 Android Meetup – Android and Devices

A very wise developer once said, “Coding is fun, but sandwiches are better.” Thanks to Google and our amazing speakers at our "Android and Devices" meetup Wednesday, we had bits of both. Early birds started arriving around 6pm and helped themselves to an impressive array of sandwiches, soda, chips and brownies.

While everyone mingled, I went around with Mike, who graciously helped me give out raffle tickets for two Spheros, robotic gaming balls that you connect and control with your phone or tablet. To kick off the meetup, Kevin welcomed the group with a warm (and as usual, comedic) intro. For our avid tweeters, he shared our new meetup Twitter account, @NYAndroidMeetup and our hashtag #androidnyc. He also introduced me! If you have questions or suggestions about meetup logistics, please let me know - we're always looking for people to present and new topics.

David Haddad, Founder/CEO of Open mHealth was our first speaker and talked about why open software architecture is needed to make sense of the array of data coming from health apps and devices. He showed a real-life example of a patient who had post-traumatic stress disorder. A health app showed his decreased texting activity to his wife and helped doctors realize that he was becoming more distant as a result of PTSD.

  Inder Singh, Founder/CEO of Kinsa Health demonstrated the Kinsa thermometer on an Android device with his marketing guru Erin Koehler. They aim to map the spread of diseases in real-time with their smart thermometer, while keeping it fun and comfortable for kids. Inder also discussed the pros of working with Android, such as being able to use the audio jack for input/out simultaneously - something you can't do on iOS.

  Izzy Johnston, Lead Android Developer at Quirky bravely took the stage without a PowerPoint presentation, but she didn't need it! She talked about Quirky's mission to bring new inventions into the market through voting from their online community and their own product design team. She also connected her Pebble watch via bluetooth and switched on a lightbulb nearby!

Last but not least, Dario Laverde, Developer Evangelist, gave his intro talk about working with the Glass API and what's in store. He also showed the array of functions that Glass is capable of, including "read my mind" and "play a game."

Our curious audience had many questions about the various devices after - I'm glad our presentations didn't run over so we had time for all of them! Izzy then helped us select two lucky winners of the Spheros. Before the night ended, we wanted to try a new thing we learned from Larry Legend from the NY iOS Developer meetup. We gave developers a chance to talk about any open source projects they're working on, connect with job leads, etc. Kevin then thanked everyone for coming, and a few energetic meetup attendees joined our Touch Lab team for drinks at 675 bar afterwards.

  Thanks to Roman at Google for coordinating, and to our speakers! Save the dates for our upcoming meetups:

March 12 at Tumblr - The topic is Design

April 16 at StackExchange with Mark Murphy, who will talk about the next billion Android users

    See you in March,

Olivia

Operations, Touch Lab

Co-organizer, NY Android Developers Meetup