Droidcon Bangalore 2011

Had great fun attending the first Droidcon in India at namma bengaluru. Here's my somewhat longish take (in schedule order):

The Good:

• Diogo's keynote on Cyanogenmod's growth and potential. Interesting to know that they support 80 devices. My cheapo LG Optimus P 500 isnt one of them, however :(.
• James Hugman's talk on making X-platform apps suck less. Bonus: the Kirin framework. Interesting idea of writing business logic in javascript, but using the builtin webview-based javascript engine as the runtime. Definitely worth checking out. 
• Hard Earned Android experiences by Khashif. Lots of sane advice here. Some interesting face-offs with his own (seemingly very young) CEO made me feel like I was at a tennis match but in all a nice talk. Most controversial point: optimizing database writes. 
• New features in ICS: Good round up of the new features. Had to ask the question on the new Google expectation to move physical buttons to soft ones even on phones. More on this below.
• App demos: Selected output from the Hacknight event that HasGeek held as a leader for this event. droid2chrome was interesting, as was the bookcompare (i forget the actual name). The former was interesting because most of the team members didn't want to do android and yet managed to do something; while the latter was interesting cos they actually screen scraped book prices from indian vendors!
• Anand Virani's end-of-day talk on the mobile growth wave: I caught the end of this talk but clearly this is a man who can talk and present well. Nice projections on how the mobile world is shaping up. Some sharp questions on open sourcing Qualcomm tech which he quite adroitly side stepped without pissing people off :) 
• Tibaut's keynote on i'm not sure exactly what (it had strands of droidcon history,android growth and political incorrectness), but it was by far the most entertaining and engaging talk i've seen in a while :). He made an interesting connection between Minitel - the French govt sponsored draconian internet offering that was in blue, green and while colors - and the recent fragmentation of the mobile market between blue(nokia), green(android) and white(apple). I'm not really sure what his final slide asking us to challenge the status quo of mobile really meant, but he DID get a few hundred indian geeks to actually talk to each other! That's an achievement for sure.
• IPR aka Who let the lawyer in the room: Again, I caught the last 5 mins of this talk, and immediately felt I should have taken it in whole. Malavika looks like she could be the india PJ and she likes open source. I asked her about groklaw's impact on relations between devs and lawyers, to which her quip was: "I think its great because usually developers never read the terms and lawyers never see the apps"! Nice.
• Indoor tagging engine: Was intrigued before the session and liked what I saw. Tagin is a project that allows identify indoor locations based on the surrounding wifi beacons. If this thing is accurate 50% of the time, it has great personal potential. The only downside that I see is that you have to have wifi on all the time. Barring that, however, I can think of some simple applications that extend the GPS's accuracy - especially within buildings that have lots of wifi routers - like apartments. Example: "Ding! you're near the mailbox, do you want to drop your bills off?"
• Creating apps that work at all sizes: Lots of good information here for UI devs. I couldn't help but feel that the raster vs vector wars were being fought all over again on mobile, however.
• Android and Arduino: Very enthusiastic presenter who knew his stuff and presented it in an honest, no-frills way. Learnt how easy it was to interface with arduino more than anything else; and that all this stuff (and knock-off cheaper boards) were available locally. Now all I have to do is magically make my family disappear so I could just hole up playing with these toys :)

Ok, could be better:

• Tech challenges of apps in limited connectivity: This is a topic that could have been a lot of things - especially given that mobile is becoming cheap and offline apps and syncing them up is something (IMO) a lot of developers should be worrying about. While the initial "here's the problem" part of the talk was good, the rest felt like reading a Craig Larman architecture book - dry, high on theory and boring as hell. If you read between the bullet points, there were gobbles of information just waiting to be let out. They stated the problem, stated the things you have to consider and then stopped. A better approach would have been: "here's the problem, here's the things you have to worry about, and here's what we did. Now lets discuss". My other takeway: offline and sync should be a framework problem, not an app developer one. More on this below.

Meh:

• Android Service Patterns: Was over my head because I'm an android tourist dev. However, I'm surprised someone built a new IDL to define service contracts. Doesn't the world have enough of those already without android creating one more? God forbid some (very possible) future where EAI vendors have to support AIDL! Oh look, the horrors of integration combined with those of android fragmentation!
• Honeycomb codelab: There were glitches in the setup - primarily because most people did not have the ICS Dev setup on their machines. It might have helped to have a note on the schedule asking people to prep for this one. Also, there was a whole lot of "how" and no "why" at all in the content - but maybe that's because I don't know the nuances between honeycomb and older versions. And: it WAS called a codelab, so maybe I shouldn't expect theory or reasons. Regardless, it would have been nice to have a brief this is why what we're going to do is important/fun/great. It lacked that oomph, IMO. Personal peeve: Seemed like the presenter was a bit miffed that "in this day and age" we dont have connectivity. The whole tutorial was online, with no way of even getting offline as it was on appspot. We ended up curl-ing the pages so that our unconnected buddies could follow along.

• Note to organizers: Tell people to setup machines prior or tell them about the thumb drives at registration
• Note to speaker: Do not expect a perfect environment; have fallbacks. Most of us were trying very hard to manage to follow you, but a little understanding would go a long way.
• Note to self: Read up on the content to know the why before attending a codelab instead of bitching about feeling listless at it :)
• Android app: A deconstruction: I was distracted; hence the meh. Seemed like a pretty ok breakdown of building an app for AAA. However, I've attended a similar talk earlier, and the guy then made me want to have the app; so I was interested in how it was made. This was a lot of the hows; and a lot of it was pretty standard stuff when looked at through the lens of web development. My bias, I know.

Did not attend, would have liked to:

• Android Multimedia Internals
• Pricing models for apps
• Continuous delivery for android apps
• Cloud to device messaging.
• Android Memory optimization
• Enterprise App Development, admin api.
• Close to metal programming with the NDK.
• OpenGL on Android: My colleague attended it and liked it.
• Humanizing Android.
• Extending android with new devices
• From stock to CM: Ericsson.
• Smartphone Platform Frameworks.
• Android porting for dummies.

Just plain Did not attend:

• Android UI secrets: Heard from another guy that this was not as secretive gyaan as expected, but that's second hand info.
• Sensors on UI: My colleagues attended; they were not the right audience, however. Must have been interesting to the the right people.
• Demystifying mobile advertising
• Infusing Android with social.
• ICS Camera and connectivity.
• The Phonegap session.
• Android products with TI tech.

Sitting through some of the sessions, I couldn't help but feel that Google should:

• Think of phones as phones, not as small tablets. Some of us actually use these things when we're not looking at them, and some of us actually (gasp) LIKE  "Call" and  "hang up" buttons. Not all things are meant to be used with two hands.
• Create offline and sync apis: I'm not sure if there is an api for these in the android platform; but if there isnt, there should be one. I spoke to at least 2 app developers building their own solutions for these problems, and clearly, these are not application-level problems. "In this day and age". 

Surprises:

• Robosoft: A company based in Udupi, doing Android! Go figure. I might just retire there - if they'll have my sorrily backed-up-in-tech-skills behind :)
• Copperspiral; Fronted by a very informed and polite Vineeth, this RFID comapny was the first that showed up in India when I googled for local vendors; and I had quite a few informative chats with him. I'm not an RFID expert, but he's the guy to talk to if you are a hobbyist, methinks.
• Github: They sponsored the party (which I couldnt attend owing to stupid excuses such as having a family) was conspicuous by they absence. Sure, the cut outs were there. Maybe there was more of them at the live music show? Thanks anyway, github. Love your software, love your support.
• The 2 guys volunteering to set cyanogenmod for random strangers: Completely unplanned, apparently, and completely cool. My LG still didnt get love, sadly.
• Dextera: I learnt that this company from Cochin built a Siri-clone called Iris while at their CEO's session. Have to definitely check it out.
• The venue: Did not expect this good a venue, actually. Except for the small room, a top-notch place; and still a little away from the madding crowd. I particularly liked the steps that also doubled as an access ramp on the way to the courtyard. I'm by no means an architecture expert, but I have not seen that before.

The experience:
Hats off to HasGeek for the organization. I'm one of the entitled bunch that gave them grief about the lack of net connectivity, but Kiran's saga of their attempts to get wifi for a month won me over. Kiran, if you're reading this, I'm the guy who was willing to pay Rs.500 more. You have my apologies.That said, here are my suggestions:

• A panel discussion would be nice. I know you guys had plans for it, but it didnt work out. Now you know the people will come, so have one for Droidcon 2012.
• An app for the event. Methinks this could be community-sourced. I met some guys from Cochin who were in mobile tech training. Seems like they can whip this thing out :)
• Prior notice for things like the codelab. Update: I just read your blog. You did tell them in advance.
• Content: Android scripting, esp JRuby on Android aka Ruboto.

In all, a fun two days.