Android Aalto

Android Aalto just held another hackathon last Saturday 11th. As usual, it was a success in number of attendants, ideas, good feeling and code.

One of the key achievements that cannot be stressed enough is the success in always having first time attendants to the events Android Aalto is organizing. There were new people interested in Android coming from all disciplines: from experienced developers to people with no background in Computer Science at all but with the right attitude, interest and excitement to contribute with ideas, testing etc. There were also newcomers starting to experiment with the Android SDK and looking for help and tips from more seasoned community members attending the event.

One of the ideas that we put in practice for the first time was presenting applications created by members of the Android Aalto community. I, Josep, was the first one to break the ice by presenting my Word Trainer: an application to practice vocabulary where everybody can collaborate by adding new languages and words to a shared spreadsheet.

Another important value that Android Aalto embraces is building the community. On Saturday there was a really sunny day and since the weather was excellent, it was decided to organize an Android Aalto barbecue outdoors, in front of the Aalto Garage. Elisa was, as usual, our main sponsor who paid the food, the drinks and even an Android Apps magazine we got from the shop. There was an excellent atmosphere and everybody shared ideas and expertise. Probably one of the geekest barbecues ever done in the Garage.

After eating it was the time to get the hands dirty again, not in grilling but in coding. We were basically divided in two groups: one group decided to code the Droidkino app while the other group decided to join Claudio and Hannu in brainstorming the geo-localization chat application they are developing. There are now some nice features coming to Droidkino: from one side there is the possibility to browse the movies by cover. On the other hand there has been some work done to parse the Finnkino areas xml so you can check the movies from your local cinema only. Moreover there are also small fixes and improvements in the layout to make it more appealing to the user.

After the official program, the last survivors went to the beach to enjoy the last sunbeams of the day and ended up having a relaxed dinner in Kamppi. From the community we can only say thanks to all the attendants and we are looking forward to the next event, coming in July!

It’s been only 10 days from the Android event at Oulu and we are back in town for new challenges. Today we completed another Android hackathon session, where we have been working on our two initial prototypes and created a workshop about Android APIs, open for interesting discussions.

Thanks Elisa for sponsoring our developers’ hackathon with food and drinks!

Droidkino Prototype

The team working on Droidkino had a nice presentation from Gaia (a girl from Poland) who has been working on an optimized parser for the application (a SAX XML parser). Moreover, the team focused on distributing the code by creating 5 different branches and preparing the codebase for a release in the future.

Android APIs Workshop

Maksim took some of the beginners to a separated room to explain some basic (but also important) APIs used in Android, including the Contacts API, the Accelerometers and Gyroscope APIs, and much more. The workshop was more a lecture-like session, where there were open discussions about practical issues when using such APIs. It was a great idea to have something like this for people not familiar with Droidkino nor SoundFused.

SoundFused Prototype now has nicer-looking buttons and adjustable BPM

The “not-so-beginner” team worked again on SoundFused. The main target was to clean up the code, make it more maintainable by separating sub-classes and implementing “must-have” features. Among the new features, SoundFused now has beautiful toggle buttons and adjustable BPM setting (so you can play faster or slower your compositions).

Once again, I want to thank all of you for attending the event (this time we were many more people ) and of course Elisa for providing us with food and drinks as usual, so BIG THANKS, and see you in June’s hackathon. Stay tuned for news!

Photos from the Hackathon event

I think, that’s the right title for this post. Last Saturday we had the greatest hackathon ever in the Android Aalto Community. We came up with interesting ideas to develop in the community, we created two teams of developers, we got new members in the community, and the most important: both teams had a working prototype by the end of the evening Furthermore, we got two new coordinators in the community: welcome Marcos and Donato!

We have now improved hackathons by starting much earlier (around 13:00). We have also focused on development skills now, so we talk less and do more From now on, we will keep people in two teams: Autobots (less-skilled people) and Decepticons (people who can write at least some Android code). Both teams brainstormed and came up with two very nice ideas, one for the Autobots and another one for the Decepticons. Autobots were working on Droidkino, a very nice application that fetches the Finnkino information about latest movies and shows everything in your mobile phone. If you ever want to watch a movie and don’t know what’s on today, Droidkino is the way to go! Find a screenshot of the working prototype at the bottom of the post.

Decepticons started working on a very cool idea about creating music with gestures, called SoundFused. The idea is to create different sounds with gestures and movements of the phone/tablet. However, for now, the team created a digital sequencer that generates music out of samples using tempos. See the video at the bottom of the post, about the working prototype.

We were 11-12 people and we hacked from 15:00 to 23:30, it was a great event. We agreed to finish at 18:00, but both teams were so enthusiastic about their projects, that we stayed almost till midnight. We had a nice lunch with hand-made dessert, all thanks to Elisa, who also paid drinks and beers for the event. The event was held in the Aalto Venture Garage, provided by AaltoES.

To conclude, I’d like to thank each of the participants that yesterday made possible the best hackathon event ever in the community. The Droidkino application is something useful and very suitable both for learning and for putting an application that can be beneficial for Finnkino and users as well, so we are looking forward to develop it further. SoundFuse is more of a long-term project, and it looks very promising. And for the coming hackathons, we can create more teams and assign new tasks, it is all about YOU, people! So THANKS for a great event and see you in the next one! Stay tuned for the new date and time…