Thoughts MotoDev App Summit

I attended the MotoDev App Summit in London on Friday 15th April 2011 and I have mixed feelings about this event.

Most events I’ve ever attended have one of two approaches:

1. The event is made of lots of short talks with option to break off into smaller groups later
2. The event is an hour or two with talks on how x, y and z was achieved which would be new features used in a fairly complete example
3. Several talks going on at once and you’re given the choice of which talks to attend

Normally I’ve found these to be particularly useful, whether it’s just one part of the event or the entire thing, the app summit was different, it was one room and all talks were held one after the other.

The biggest problem I had with this approach is it meant that whatever stage you are in with you’re Android development, you need to either listen in or sit outside the hall. I listened to all the talks, hoping it would get into some fairly advanced topics, but to be honest I was left feeling fairly disappointed.

The UI tips given were tainted with the comments along the lines of “There aren’t any guidelines for tablet app design”. Well Motorola, if you have a UI expert and you have one of the first Android tablets and you’re traveling the world to meet the developer communities to show you’re tablet and encourage app development, could you note at least give some recommendations?

The examples of fragments, UI customisation, HTML5 use and other area’s were fairly simplistic and often an incomplete example.

The fragments topics, while useful for someone completely new (which I am), it didn’t actually show any real insight into the problems fragments introduce, i.e. should we really be developing using the compatibility package? Again the answer was along the lines of “Google want you to produce only one build”, in other words “we’ll tell you what Google want us to tell you”.

Don’t get me wrong Google have done great things, but if their recommendation isn’t the best solution, say so and say it with confidence!!

The HTML5 example was literally just a web page, that scaled well, it didn’t look like it was targetted for tablets or phones in terms of a UI for touch devices.

The main highlights for me were the talks from Ben Medlock the CTO from TouchType / Swiftkey who went over their shift from mobile to tablets, but also discussed how Android helped him start his company and the community had helped along the way as well. The other great talk was from one of the Adobe Evangelists who went over the capabilities of Flash on Mobile and Tablets and he gave some very nice and compelling reasons to move over to Adobe for mobile development, now he didn’t touch too much on cross compiling for different devices, only Android phones and Tablets, but very enthusiastic and gave some interesting examples and cool features that could be used to get going quickly for certain tasks.

To be honest I think it comes down to me not being the target audience, I would of been much happier cutting the event down to four hours, given one hours worth of talking at (sales pitch or whatever) and then lent a Xoom to hack on for the rest of the day with optional talks.

Also while at the event I met Matt Oakes, who like me, wasn’t to impressed by the MotoDev App Summit app. For me I prefer his as being more along the lines of what MotoDev would be producing. It has the action bar, the views have been customised to create a nice, simple and elegant application. Mine is a slightly more O.T.T equivalent, but again focused on the UI.

Below are the official MotoDev App Summit App, my application and finally Matt Oakes application.

But this is frankly the most simple application and I would of expected much more from Motorola on this front, I spent 4 - 5 hours on my application and stopped at the event details because I didn’t have the time to hard code the details in. But given a full day I would of matched their functionality, given another day I could of included mapping functionality, which hooked into Google Maps for directions and sharing capabilities with the hashtag included in the tweets. Then on the third day I would of optimised it for the Xoom (Something the current release doesn’t do, or it at least didn’t at the London event).

All in all the event was good to meet new and old faces within the community, all I hope is that Motorola take a bit of a forward step in the way they organise the event, give developers the opportunity to actually develop on the Xoom while there and also have more concrete and full examples.

As someone pointed out, forget the fancy hotel, put us in a basement and give us a free Xoom. That will guarantee you a room full of developers getting apps running on Xoom’s, instead of a room of developers wondering if they were pulled into a sales pitch to buy a Xoom and Atrix.

Orig Photo: https://flic.kr/p/i9XcKW