Sponsored Links
've been at AnDevCon this week. It was great.
The place was full. It seems they had a rush of signups just the week
before and filled it up. They will be going to a larger place next
time.
Of the people I met, most were sent there by their employers. I didn't
see other small independent developers like myself that have to pay
their own way. This is not surprising given the price point. Since I
was paying my own way, I found a cheaper hotel 1.5 miles away and just
walked to the conference each day.
Some things I learned:
HONEYCOMB
HoneyComb is a big deal and way different, as I will discover as I dig
into the SDK. The use case for a tablet is just different.
I don't know yet how much of a big deal HoneyComb will be for me
personally. The .17% of visits that came from a honeycomb device are
probably from people that already have an Android phone. My app still
supports 1.5 - I'd have to drop that if I want to do fragments.
Luggability is a big deal for people who use my app.
UI
I like to learn all I can about UI cause mine sucks.
I went to another session that was supposed to be on UI but turned out
to be 'Ui for Honeycomb'. Here I was disappointed, since I know there
are these great things to do to make your UI clearer for users on
Honeycomb, but I need to solve those problems on a smartphone.
There was a good session on UI from the developer of the Android
Market client (yes, I do see the irony). I learned some things about
what they do to make it look okay in landscape mode. He talked about
the importance of two way communication with your design team and with
your use case team. I gave him some honest feedback for his app,
explaining why the user experience for a denied credit card is
terrible. His response implied that the problem goes deeper than the
layer he works on, but we'd hopefully see some improvements in the
coming months. I'll send him an email with some screenshots to follow
up.
He did confirm.
Analytics
I've spoken about Android Analytics at another conference, so I both
contributed and learned from this session. The guy teaching this had
built up a set of about 500 boilerplate apps before his account was
terminated by Google without explanation.
Testing/Continuous Integration.
This session was fun if just for the nutty professor type persona that
taught the class. I plan to make some improvements in my process since
I'll have another developer touching the code as of next week. Maybe
I'll send him the slides and say, figure this out.
Haptics
I wasn't all fired up about haptics, but hearing from the Immersion
Motiv guy and what they've accomplished convinced me to go to the
session. There was a 'strum the guitar' demo app. I was thinking of
putting a few haptics from their library just to try out in the app.
But I've scrapped that for now based on the fine print in their eula.
It's free at first, but they want royalties of 5% after the first
$50,000 profit. Definitely worth it if you are doing an immersive
game; I'm not sure it is if you are just trying to make a few buttons/
dials more interactive.
I ran out of business cards.
Neighbors:
In my last session, I found that there were two other people there
from Camas, WA (It's not a big place). On meeting them, I found out
one of them had my app, and liked it. Small world.
Next AnDevCon:
I've proposed a session for AnDevCon II in November called 'Marketing
for Independent Android Developers'.