I'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'. I have no idea if it will be accepted. But if it is, I will come here for feedback on the material I create. Nathan -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Discuss" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-discuss?hl=en.
