GTUG KL in 2010.

Usually you'll get this kind of reporting at the early of the year. But it took me some time to make time to go back & follow up on what has been happening in the year 2010 for the GTUG Kuala Lumpur community.

2010 was the year of the Android. Together with the core team members of CodeAndroid Malaysia, we've been working really hard to promote and build up the developer community for the Android platform. But that is for another blog post. Now, let's have a recap on what happened last year.

6 February 2010.

Our first meetup of the year. At this meetup, we introduced CodeAndroid Malaysia and their line of Android applications developed by the core team members. CodeAndroid Malaysia objectives for 2010 is pull in more interest in Android applications development. We've said that we will put more effort in growing awareness and most importantly knowledge in Android development. Here's what we've reached so far in 2010:

• Technical Partner at HTC Android Garage 2010. We presented to an audience of 200 people on how to get started in Android development and showcased homegrown applications developed by developers from Malaysia. We also shared with audience about our favourite Android applications.
• We've partnered with iTrain to provide training courses for those who are interested in Android development. We have trained over 50 upcoming Android developers at the iTrain facility and other parts of the country. We've also helped developers get started in Android at Celcom's League of Extraordinary Developers Challenge program.

20 March 2010.

Chrome extensions mini hackathon. Presented a tutorial on how to create an extension for the Google Chrome browser. What did we get? A Google Chrome extension for DevFest developed by Leonard Lee, a GTUG KL community member. Wuhoo!

13 June 2010.

Our first Office Hours session with Wesley Chun, a visiting Googler from Mountain View, California. A number of Python developers from Malaysia attended this event and Wesley was more than glad to bounce questions & answers with them. We're looking to invite more Googlers to come to Kuala Lumpur and connect with the local community!

16 July 2010.

Google DevFest Kuala Lumpur. The mother of all GTUG KL meetups (as tweeted by our friend, @sweemeng). Over 300 developers attended this event and was awed by presentations from the Google Developer Relations team. Daniels Lee on Google Maps, Google Places and how to find coffee; the dynamic duo Timothy Jordan & Bob Aman on Google Buzz and the Open Web; Patrick Chanezon on Google Predictions API & App Engine. We took this chance to highlight some of the best work from Malaysia as well.

Reza from Terato Tech presented Undies, an iPhone application to find out what kind of underwear people around you are wearing; Leonard Lee shared his experience about developing the Chrome extension for DevFest 2010.

18 September 2010.

A 1 hour tutorial on how to prepare existing or new web applications (and websites in many regards) for the upcoming Google Chrome Web Store. Showcased in this meetup was a webapp called TimeToBuka. TimeToBuka is a simple webapp for Muslims in Malaysia & Singapore to check for breaking fast times. It was built on App Engine using Google Spreadsheet as the database & a little bit of jQuery to make it work. It's HTML(5) compliant and is available on the Chrome Web Store. At Barcamp Bangkok this year, I presented an overview on how I used different technologies to build this webapp in 4 days.

All Mashed Up - A HTML5 Mashup Story

View more presentations from Nazrul Kamaruddin.

16 October 2010.

Swee Meng, GTUG KL community member, organised a meetup at HackerspaceKL with Graham Dumpleton, the creator of mod_wsgi for Python.

12 October 2010.

Timothy Jordan was in town again and wanted to meetup with developers. Instead, he got a classroom of students and lecturers from Multimedia University in Cyberjaya, conversing with him about the Open Web. This meetup was organised by Ikhwan, a GTUG KL community member.

That was last year. So what's coming for this year? This year will be a continuing focus on Android. CodeAndroid Malaysia has gone places last year and will continue to do so this year. We're also planning to have more mini (and large) scale hackathons and showcase applications developed using Google technologies. And one lesson that we've learned is to organize a meetup at least a month before. No more last minute planning!

If you have suggestions on what kind of Google technologies you would like to learn, which Googlers you want to meet, email your suggestions to nazrul at gtugs dot org.

A honeycombed Google Code periodic table

Google Code released this periodic view of all the available developer APIs from Google. It's a really cool visual representation in a form that's familiar to geeks. When you hover over the Android (or Mobile) icon, you'll get to see the related APIs in the same category.

Got this tip from @ropu, a software engineer from Argentina. He was a presenter at the first Google DevFest in Singapore a few years back.

Honeycomb Preview SDK released.

In other news, the Android team has released a preview SDK for Honeycomb! Hurrah! Now developers can start building (or porting) new or existing apps for the tablet format. Apparently, any applications developed from this preview release won't be able to make it to the Market just yet. However, developers will have the chance to prepare themselves and their apps when it's officially released. You can start reading about the new SDK and fire up your Eclipse to download that honey. It's the beez knees!

Google I/0 2010 Day 2: Introducing Froyo

OktoberFOSS!

They have OktoberFest with free beers!

We have OktoberFOSS with free open source software! Malaysia boleh!

FOSS Malaysia 2009

FOSS Malaysia conference 2009 is the premier Open Source event in Malaysia for open source software developers, users, enthusiasts and you! It's happening this October 24th till 25th. They have Richard Stallman, father of Free Software Federation movement in attendance this year. They have MySQL co-founder in as speaker. There will be other sessions on Drupal, Android, Fedora Linux & many more.

You can listen to Ditesh & Yoon Kit talking about FOSS.my 2009 on BFM Radio earlier this week.

Curious? Why don't you check out the schedule to find out more what's happening in FOSS.my.

GTUG Kuala Lumpur & CodeAndroid Malaysia meetup

For GTUG KL, we're holding our meetup this month at FOSS.my 2009. I know it's a paid event, but if you register by today, you will get to attend all of the talks for 20 bucks! Today is the last day for this awesome deal. Register now!

CodeAndroid Malaysia, a developer community for Android developers & users, is launching at FOSS.my 2009 with a Birds of Feather session!

Together with CodeAndroid Malaysia, we'll be talking about the Android software platform and how to start building apps for Android. We'll also be talking about Google Maps API, App Engine, OpenSocial & anything that you can throw at us. If we don't have the answers, we'll find someone who does. There will be demos from local Android developers & users from the community during our session. So, come and visit us while you're there!

On top of that, we will also be giving away a couple of books from Oreilly & a bunch of Google Wave invites from our community :-))

Join us for CodeAndroid Malaysia BoF session & RSVP now at Facebook.

See you guys there!

First Impression Of MOTODEV Studio

Besides HTC, Motorola has also entered the Android market with Cliq. It even have a Android development platform. At http://developer.motorola.com/platforms/android/, you will can find information on App Accelerator Program (for Android apps distribution), and MOTODEV Studio, a set of Android development tools. In this blog entry, I will go through the installation process with screenshots. I have installed MOTODEV Studio Beta on my LinuxMint (Gloria), Gnome 2.26.1 Desktop. Here goes...

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1. Welcome screen.

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2. Of course you will *read* every single line, don't you?

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3. The installer tries to detect the Java environment. NOTE: The Android Development Tool (ADT) depends on Sun Java to work, therefore Sun Java must be installed first.

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4. Choose a location for installation. I chose my home directory.

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5. It will create the directory if it does not exist yet.

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6. The installation went through smoothly. Now, launch it.

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7. Eclipse will always ask for a workspace location (on first launch). You can check the checkbox at the bottom to prevent Eclipse from nagging in future.

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8. The Eclipse package does not come with Android SDK, which contains the emulator, debugger, ... Follow the instruction on http://developer.android.com/sdk/1.5_r3/index.html to download and install the Android SDK.

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9. Since I have already installed the SDK, I will just configure the path in Eclipse.

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10. Done!

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11. I have already setup an Android Virtual device. These 2 screenshots show 2 slightly different views of the same emulator. The 1^st screenshot shows an emulator with device body, while the 2^nd screenshot shows the emulator without a device body. There is a "Snippet" tool at the bottom-left of the screen. It contains some frequently used codes for you to add in your program. The "Device Management" tool at the bottom-center of the screen allows you to manage multiple Android (real/virtual) devices. These are some of the features that is exclusive to MOTODEV Studio.

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12. Publishing to Motorola's market and Google's Android market made easy. This is one of the reason why I preferred to develope Android app over iPhone app. For iPhone apps, developers are tied to 1 distribution channel (App Store). Android live in a free (as in speech) world, anyone can setup an app market. And because the Open Handset Alliance has made Android open source, I think there will be many interesting app/hacks coming out in future. That's it! Now it is time for me write some apps in my new shiny IDE ;)

Useful Links:

• MOTODEV Studio features list
• Download MOTODEV Studio
• Android SDK 1.5 download and installation instructions
• Working with Eclipse

Android API Demos

Did you know that the Android SDK comes with a number of sample code? The SDK reference is very comprehensive, but it only documents the the various class individually. Examples are very useful in a learning process, it helps us to understand how concepts are translated to code, and how various components work together to accomplish a task. Unfortunately the SDK reference pages lack example. Besides the whole copy of SDK reference, the SDK package also comes with a number of sample projects. It is located in the <sdk>/platforms/android-1.5/samples folder. Follow the steps to load the project in Eclipse IDE:

1. Goto: File > Import...
2. In the Import window, select Existing Projects into workspace, click Next.
3. For the Select root directory option, click on the Browse button.
   
   
4. Import ApiDemos in the sample folder.
5. Click Finish and the ApiDemos package will appear in the Package Explorer.
   

This project is an excellent resource for learning Android programming, and it covers a variety of topics (e.g. animation, widget, graphic, audio, video, ...). You might have noticed there are a number of other projects in the sample folder. Feel free to import them into your workspace, try them out. (If you are thinking of developing a game, JetBoy it a good starting point for learning audio programming.) P.S. Just found a reference website for using emulator: http://www.android.encke.net/android-emulator-tutorial.html.

GeekCamp SG

Hi, I am Leong Hean Hong aka hongster. I am part of the KL GTUG blog team and I will be sharing some of my experience in Android development here. I gave a talk on Android at the GeekCamp Singapore last week (22^nd August 2009). These are some of the questions I answered in my presentation:

• What is Android?
• How to setup the development environment?
• How to start building an Android app?
• What are some of the differences between Android and iPhone development?
• What is an Intent?

Slides:

Geekcamp Android

View more presentations from Hean Hong Leong.

Source Code: An demo app had been created for the presentation. It is a simple application which allows user to select an image from image gallery, and applies effects to the image, displays it on the screen. I hope it can serves as a little tutorial for developers who are interested in graphical programming in Android. The Android emulator does on come with any image. You have to create a SD card and attach it to the emulator. It is always advisable to launch the emulator before launching Eclipse, and leave the emulator running throughout the development. In Eclipse, change perspective to DDMS. The File Explorer allow you to insert/retrieves image file into/from the SD Card. Please email me (expertleong_at_gmail_dot_com), if you need any help on setting up the envrionment. Download source code.

Watch GTUG KL meetup #1 video

Thank you to iTrain for sharing with us these awesome videos. I shall see you in our next meetup =)

GTUG KL Meetup - Let's talk about Google Android

For our 1st meetup, it's going to be about Google Android. With more Android based phones coming out from HTC, Samsung and other major phone makers, Android is hot stuff. Today, Google Code Blog posted a nice set of Android related session videos from the recent Google I/O conference.

Nice timing!

Have a read 1st and let's talk more at our meetup! We will try to play Android videos, so that everyone can watch & learn together.

We're still looking for a good venue for the 1st meetup, and we're kinda fussy like that :D That's because we'd prefer a place where there's good, reasonable WIFI, the very least. If there is a cocktail or coffee bar, that's a super plus! If you have any suggestions, tell us & let us know where so we can check the place out.

Have a good weekend! Cheers :)

Oh, when is the 1st meetup you ask? It's going to be on the 27th this month. Hope you can make it!