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Here are the details about the meetup. What will happen today?

2:30pm - Introduction
2:45pm - We Code Android
4:45pm - Lightning talks
3:45pm - Chrome Extensions 101
5:30pm - Breakout!

We Code Android
A presentation about CodeAndroid Malaysia plans for 2010. We will also showcase 3 new Android applications recently developed by our community of developers: The Star Online by Marvin Lee, KL Traffic Cam by Bernie Eng & Antollroid by Leong Hean Hong.

Chrome Extensions 101
Google Chrome OS is Google's answer for a netbook operating system which is tighly integrated with Google Chrome, the browser. With the introduction of Chrome Extensions, you'll be able to extend & enhance Google Chrome's functionality & improve your browsing experience. Armed with HTML, CSS & Javascript, this session will show you how you can start building your own Chrome extensions.

There will be a lightning talk session today. So if you have something interesting to share, like your "secret" project or new developer ninja tricks with the community, come on over! We heard that someone from myPrize, the infamous RM1 million global developer competition, is coming over too.

See you there :)

Our prophecy: Developers in Southeast Asia will rise!

Today we received a little bit of buzz from the e27 chaps from Singapore & also Jason Costa, former Technical Programs Manager for Google. The article talks about how Jason is excited about the growing developer ecosystem in Southeast Asia.

Jason is a good friend of ours, personally for me. He has been the supporting backbone in the early stage of raising awareness to developers in Malaysia. He was the 1st Googler that actually spoke to me in real life. And that means a lot to a small time developer like me. Kinda like a Google fan boy reaction. From there onwards, I've made friends with Vinny, Stephanie, Pamela & other Googlers for which I personally am grateful in supporting GTUG KL community efforts.

Also last week, I've been called in for an podcast session with John Lim from The Digital Edge. Together with David Lian and Yoon Kit, we had a blast talking about Android, Google's attempt in social search and Geocities! You can listen to the podcast here.

The developer ecosystem is growing, and we are pushing it ahead to become the strongest. Watch out now!

Let your avatar free on Google Wave

The most common question I received about Google Wave is how to enabled the user's profile picture. To begin, obviously you need to have a Google Wave account. If you don't have one, you can come for our BoF session this Sunday. Or you can head on to http://wave.google.com and apply for one.

Go to your Gmail account settings. You can find the link at the top right hand corner of the Gmail UI. Then you scroll down and look for "My Picture" setting. As pictured below, allow your picture to be viewed by everyone.

Now go back to your Wave and voila, you can see your profile picture & so can everyone else. Cheers!

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!

Using Multiple Email Addresses With Google Account

I guess many people own a Gmail account. All gmail account comes with a Google Account. With a Google account, you can sign up for a number of Google services (e.g. Blogger, Picasa Web Albums, Youtube, ...). Did you know that you can sign up for a Google account without a Gmail address? Suppose you have a Yahoo mail account, you can still use your Yahoo email address to register for a Google account.

Why would I want to do that? Well, managing multiple accounts can be a hassle. I have separate Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Twitter, company email, ... accounts. Sometime 1 single inbox/email address is all I need. I feel that the world will be a better place if I can just maintain a single acount for all services. Projects like OpenID also provide similar convenient.

Google gives you freedom. It does not force you to use Gmail. In fact you can even forward all emails, sent to your Gmail address, to any other email address you want. You can use your existing (non Google) email address to sign up for a Google account. And this Google account can be linked to multiple email addresses.

From Blog

Settings for various Google services can be found at https://www.google.com/accounts/ManageAccount. You might have noticed I have associated my Google account with 5 email addresses. When I arrived at any website (e.g. Youtube) that requires login with my Google account, I can just type in any 1 of the addresses associated with my account.

Suppose you have bought a domain name (e.g. mydomain.com), and created a Google Apps account to manage it. You already have a Gmail address and used it to access your Blogger, Youtube, Picasa services. This is how you can use you existing Google services with your new domain name:

1. Create a new personalized email address (e.g. myname@mydomain.com) through the Google Apps Dashboard. 
2. (Optional) Forward all your mail from myname@mydomain.com to your existing Gmail inbox. In this way, you only have to maintain 1 inbox.
3. Associate this new email address to you existing Google account (as shown in earlier picture).
4. Now you can sign in to your existing Google services with the new email address.

Reference:

• Alternate Email Addresses: Adding alternates

Meet Dr. Wave

Today is September 30th. As promised, Google will start opening access to more people to the Google Wave sandbox.

Also, they've let loose a doctor riding your Waves. Not an episode of Fringe, but close. Meet Dr. Wave.

And to make more history, Google released a new design for http://wave.google.com. Awesome dude!

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...

From Blog

1. Welcome screen.

From Blog

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.

From Blog

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.

From Blog

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

From Blog

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.

From Blog

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.

From Blog

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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From Blog

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.

From Blog

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.