March meetup: Android Experiments & AutoValue Extensions

What do you get when you put a bunch of Android devs in one room at the Google NY office? A series of chuckles whenever someone said, “I Googled it.”

GET IT?

(gif courtesy of giphy, Disney Zootopia)

Corny puns aside, our March meetup was probably one of our funniest yet. Kevin, touchlab President/meetup co-organizer, gave a quick welcome, announcing our next meetup on April 12th at Meetup headquarters.

The Water Tower Cafe at Google NY.

Richard The, Creative Lead of Android Experiments, kicked off lightning talks alongside Roman Nurik, Anthony Tripaldi and John Watkinson. They shared stories of their own Experiments, demonstrating the creativity and potential of Android on all kinds of platforms. A space shooter watch face, an interactive plotter, a tilting maze game… these are only a few examples of projects up on Experiments.

Roman Nurik talked about his Form Watch Face and showed how five APKs can happen simultaneously on one screen. When asked about getting started on shaders, Roman and Anthony mentioned a few resources. As his number one tip, Roman offers, “I’d point people to learnopengles.com (here’s their Android starter). I think that was the site I used when learning OpenGL ES. I might steal Anthony’s tip as well to check out shadertoy.com.”

John Watkinson of Larva Labs gave a very entertaining talk called “Physical Simulations in Android Apps.” He showed off Boo!, where little blinking creatures scatter as soon as they see your face. Boo! uses the front-facing camera and a face detection algorithm. John’s nugget of knowledge? “Simple physics simulations can make animation look very smooth and intuitive, and it’s easier to implement than you might think!” John’s slides are in an HTML-based presentation framework so download his presentation as a zip file. To see the presentation, double-click “index.html”.

Image courtesy of Android Experiments.

Sam Hill of touchlab spoke about the last Android Experiments, an interactive game that will be released soon in collaboration with Droga5 and Android™. He showed how various Google Play Services features, such as authentication and messaging, got him started quickly even though he had never built a game before. More details will be shared on this blog when the game is released 🙂

Our last speaker, Jake Wharton, talked about AutoValue Extensions. Jake’s slides can be found here and his recorded talk below.

He showed useful extensions and tips and provided a general timeline for the release of AutoValue 1.2 (below).

Image courtesy of Jake Wharton.

We hope everyone enjoyed the talks, knowledge and laughs, as well as the afterparty chats at Flannery’s. See you all in April at Meetup HQ!