March 2014 Android Meetup - Android and Design

You know it’s going to be a great meetup when the pizza runs out before the talks even start. On Wednesday night we hosted our “Android and Design” meetup at Tumblr and had a huge turnout of about 200 members. We were treated to exceptional pizza (the sausage one was bangin’), Budweiser (Tumblr’s “favorite”) and a cozy space with many picturesque picnic tables.

Touchlab president and meetup organizer Kevin Galligan started the night off with announcements. Space Apps, which Touchlab is sponsoring, will be happening April 20-21 in New York City. It’s a tech development/problem solving event that takes place in over 75 cities worldwide.

We also announced DroidconNYC. Droidcon is the largest international Android convention spanning 15 cities and counting, consisting of barcamp, hackathon and conference/workshops. Droidcon’s main flagships are Berlin and London, and the team here at Touchlab will be organizing DroidconNYC, the first one in the USA! We’re looking for volunteers, sponsors, venue suggestions and contacts. If you’re interested in supporting Space Apps and/or DroidconNYC, get in touch with us.

Kevin also talked about app demos. If you have an app that you’d like to demo at our next meetup, get in touch with us. We’ll install your app on our device and at the end of the meetup, you’ll have two minutes to demo your app to everyone. Our host at Tumblr, Chris Haseman, then gave a warm welcome to the crowd and talked about their awesome Android team (hint: they’re hiring).

Dave Redding and Walter Dziemianczyk, our very own developers at Touchlab, started the talks off with their topic, hidden patterns in Android. They gave overviews on Gaussian blur, pull to refresh and Google+ share and how they’re UI/UX features that aren’t in design docs but are widely used. Their talk is here.

Kevin Grant, Android engineer at Tumblr, gave his comedic take on Android design and ways to rethink how you approach design. His talk is here. Don’t you love it when your designer asks, “How hard would it be to do this?” His motto? “Say yes!”

Deniz Veli and Paul Lau then delivered a detailed talk about end-to-end Android design at Etsy. Paul showed slides of screen sizes that he designs for, and also sample markups to demonstrate how devs and designers collaborate at Etsy. Their talk is here. After Q&A and great design insight from our speakers, we mixed and mingled and moved the party to Lillie’s for drinks and more conversation.

Join us next month at StackExchange for Mark Murphy’s talk. We’d like to give preference to Android developers since this will fill up fast, so please get in touch with me and clarify that you’re a dev if you’d like to be added!

See you next month,

Olivia
Operations, Touchlab
Co-organizer, NY Android Developers Meetup