Droidcon London 2014

I had a great time speaking at Droidcon London 2012, and I am very happy to go back this year.

First thing first: gotta love these super cute icons!

Barcamp

Day 1 is barcamp. Everyone got a chance to get on stage and pitch their session.

There were quite a variety of topics. I was entertained by a hilarious app clinic, killed the refresh button with SyncAdapter, and discovered that you can address any 3mx3m grid in the world with 3 words.

Practical Best Practices

We rounded up the day with a satire talk by Chet Haase: Practicing Practical Best Practices for Software Development Practitioners.

Lollipop

Day 2 is presentations, starting with keynote from Chet the Googler, not to be confused with Chet the consultant from the day before, who wore a tie.

Chet the consultant (Credit: Skills Matter)

Chet the Googler (Credit: Skills Matter)

Chet told us about What's New in Android, followed by Chris and Nick with more Lollipop tips:

Nested scrolling in Lollipop: delegate to scrollable parent containers when appropriate - @chethaase at #DroidconUK. #AndroidDev

— Chiu-Ki Chan (@chiuki) October 31, 2014

Analyze battery history from Lollipop bugreport with https://t.co/IiGJn5w7Bl - @chethaase at #DroidconUK. #AndroidDev

— Chiu-Ki Chan (@chiuki) October 31, 2014

Use CardView to distinguish different types of data e.g. in Google Now. - @chrisbanes at #DroidconUK. #AndroidDev

— Chiu-Ki Chan (@chiuki) October 31, 2014

Use Theme.AppCompat to tint your widgets back to v7. -@crafty at #DroidconUK. http://t.co/3rLuvDsZhU #AndroidDev

— Chiu-Ki Chan (@chiuki) October 31, 2014

3 ways to use RippleDrawable: 1) Bound to drawable 2) Bound to invisible mask 3) Unbounded @chrisbanes at #DroidconUK #AndroidDev

— Chiu-Ki Chan (@chiuki) October 31, 2014

Design

Next I learnt about design from Juhani Lehtimaeki and Taylor Ling.

We need the up button because we deep link. But nobody knows how it works. - @lehtimaeki at #DroidconUK. #AndroidDev

— Chiu-Ki Chan (@chiuki) October 31, 2014

The Google design is the super class of ours. Override functions only if you need to. Avoid duplication. - @lehtimaeki at #DroidconUK.

— Chiu-Ki Chan (@chiuki) October 31, 2014

Lack of feedback causes user frustration, just like that close button which gets pressed to death in the lift. @taylorling at #DroidconUK

— Chiu-Ki Chan (@chiuki) October 31, 2014

When showing an error, also let the user know what they can do about it. Don't show an error code! @taylorling at #DroidconUK

— Chiu-Ki Chan (@chiuki) October 31, 2014

Graphics trilogy

In the afternoon, there were three talks on graphics, including mine.

Mark opened the trilogy with Graphical Magic. And by magic I meant he was setting stuff on fire!

With that great opening, Mark went on to show us how to do image manipulation programmatically.

Next in the trilogy was my talk, Fun with Android Shaders and Filters, where I showed more image processing techniques.

Slides: http://chiuki.github.io/android-shaders-filters

And finally, Sebastiano Poggi covered the Skia pipeline in Framing the Canvas.

Best part: The people

Droidcon London is one of my favorite conferences. The talks are great, but more importantly I get to hang out with really awesome people.

Erik Hellman

Chet Haase

Benjamin Weiss

Thank you everyone for the wonderful conference!