On Saturday I presented a short talk on building a basic android application in 20 minutes. This was the full process, from generating the shell project, to writing the code, generating the layouts, testing on the emulator, signing the application and uploading the binary. I wasn’t able to do this as “live” as I would have liked – I’ll perfect the routine in time for Barcamp Manchester, but the group did a good job of being a dummy audience.
For those interested the application is called “Barcamp Blackpool” (available on the Marketplace). It downloads the latest 20 tweets with the bcblackpool hash tag and displays them as a list. Clicking on an individual item will then launch a browser session showing the tweet on the twitter website. Basic but functional. The source code for the application is available on Google Code.
If there are other things people would like to see in a 20 minute Android demo – please feel free to comment on this post and I’ll see what I can do for Barcamp Manchester.
This weekend saw the first Barcamp Blackpool, held at the Blackpool Pleasure Beach. Many thanks go to @ruby_gem for organising the event, and to the various sponsors, including Yahoo for sponsoring the all important bar and Pixel Programming for ensuring we had a venue and noms. My apologies to to all those I may have caused hangovers to for the following day. We also managed to lose Phil Winstanley for a few hours.
Talks were wide ranging, from some light-hearted ones on upcoming social network Pokebook through to code reviews of the new W3C website and my own talk on building and publishing an Android application in 1 hour 30 minutes 20 minutes (code to follow).
Evening entertainment was provided by Paul Sylvester, who provided the BEST MAGIC SHOW I HAVE EVER SEEN (don’t let the website fool you). So much so, there’s speculation about hiring him for one of the next Geek Girl Dinners.
You know, it’s absolutely right. We’ve got so obsessed over security of liquids, toothpastes and belt buckles that people appear to have overlooked that laptops, iPods and mobile phones are potentially a hell of a lot more lethal. Maybe we should just point to all people with beards and laptops and scream “terrorist” instead.
Kian Ryan is a 
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