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MindStorm Software took its popular Android Hands-On Workshop across the seas for a change. This time the city was Dubai and the Hands-On Workshop was conducted for DCode Mobility, a leading provider of Enterprise Mobility solutions, headquartered in UAE and serving the entire Middle East.

DCode Mobility had seasoned developers who have been delivering enterprise mobility solutions for several years. They have primarily used the Windows 6.x Enterprise devices and their development platform of choice so far has been the Microsoft Tools. With the advent of Android, which is a game changer of late, DCode wants to be leading the game when it comes to providing solutions on the Android handsets also. Most of the existing Handset manufacturers in the Enterprise space are releasing newer handsets that run the Android operating system, chief among them being Motorola, which has brought out its latest enterprise device, the ET1 Tablet that runs the Android Operating System.

The Developer Training kicked off with the usual introduction to Android. A healthy mix of sales and marketing folks were also present during this session to help them understand what Android has to offer, its various capabilities, the kind of applications that it can enable, the current Enteprise mobile space and so on. We then proceeded with the setup and the quintessential “Hello World” project, which is a tradition as far as we programmers are concerned. The afternoon saw a deep dive into activities, explicit/implicit intents and User Interface creation along with Layouts and the default Android ListActivity. The Hands On Exercises kept the participants busy and everyone was itching to get the applications running on the ET1 tablet that was available during the training.

The next day proceeded with Menus, Persistence options like databases and Alert Dialog. Once through with that, we got through some REST based Networking, Google Maps and GPS Programming. The focus then shifted to working with the ET1 Tablet. Participants were able to build the Android application (.APK) and transfer them over the ET1 Tablet to see their application in action. Since the participants were from an enterprise mobility background and they had already written several Windows Mobile applications that did scanning, we did an interesting experiment over there. We integrated the ZXing library, which is a top of the line bar coding library from Google. We integrated that into our Android application and used the ET1 back facing camera to scan various 1D, 2D bar codes and decode them. That went off really well and gave everyone the confidence that yes they can write Android applications with all the scanning and other bells and whistles into it.

The Motorola ET1 Tablet is a cool device, in fact a rugged device that runs the Android OS. It runs version 2.3.4 (Gingerbread) Android OS. The device is fairly rugged, has both front and back facing camera and can be augmented by external hardware like a bar code reader, etc. With the purchase of Motorola Mobility by Google, the ET1 and its eventual successors present a great set of choices to organizations that are evaluating different options to replace the Microsoft 6.x Enterprise devices.

The training experience was good. Lots of questions asked, especially from the business side of things, so that the Android Devices and the applications that it can enable can be positioned across the Enterprise space. I am quite excited at the opportunities that exist in that region vis-a-vis training and Android development and I look forward to frequenting the place again in the near future. If you are looking for a serious 2-3 Day Hands-On course on Android in the Middle East, give me a shout and we can get this rolling along for you.

Our next workshop is scheduled for the coming weekend, February 25-26 , 2012 in Mumbai. The response has been encouraging and I look forward to training this specific batch of students, who will help me reach the milestone of 100+ individuals that I have coached individually to get them started in their Android Development Journey.

Thank you to all who have given me the support. Expect interesting things in the weeks and months ahead. As a teaser — How about an Advanced Android course?

Mind Storm Software successfully conducted another edition of its 2-Day Android Developer Workshop last weekend. This was the 2nd workshop that we have conducted this year and it went off well with a next set of developers all set to launch themselves into their Android programming journey.

We had 10 folks joining us for this edition and all of them were working software professionals. Our venue again was the Residency Hotel and we were hosted in the large and spacious Indigo Conference Room. Travelling in Mumbai is always a challenge especially if you are finding the place for the first time but we were all set to go with minimum of delay on the first day.

The workshop has found a successful pattern now and the first half of the first day is spent in understanding what Android is, developer machine setup and the traditional Hello World program. The rest of the first day typically sees us through Activities, Built in Intents, Views & Layouts and List Activity.

Residency Hotel tried their level best to put us to sleep during the afternoon by giving us a sumptuous lunch and like a strict school teacher, I made sure that the participants were getting none of their afternoon sleep by giving them hands on exercises.

The second day kicked off with Menus, Dialogs and various persistence options like Files, Shared Preferences and SQLite database support in Android. The afternoon started off with Networking, Maps and GPS and then a complete Android application called Quotes.

The session that I enjoy most is to show how to build the APK, show the Android Marketplace and demonstrate how ridiculously easy it is to publish your Application to the marketplace. We also play a little game in which the APKs are submitted on a first come first served basis to see which participants APK gets through successfully first.

The few things that I changed in this workshop were:

• Clear labels in the applications telling what we are going to see next.
• A New Example on combining GPS and Maps together.
• Introduction of NodeJS in the Android Networking section. More on that in a later paragraph.
• Cleaned up the UI in various sample code.
• Updates to some of the hands on exercises.

Just to note, every participant gets the slides, roughly 20 odd Do-It-Yourself hands on exercises, all source code for the sample applications and the hands on exercises.

One of the important new introduction that I introduced in this workshop was the use of NodeJS in the session on Networking. NodeJS has been a neat way to setup a server locally for the participants to try out Android networking examples without the need to go outside the network to a web service. What I have done is to stub out the Networking calls with the correct JSON responses and simple run NodeJS on the local participant laptops. This saves a lot of time and everyone learns about NodeJS too. I will cover more on my usage of NodeJS in another blog post. In short, no more explaining Tomcat, web apps and stuff like to setup a local server. Simply whip up some Javascript, stub the response JSON and node your way to local services nirvana.

I have become a bit superstitious with my Workshops and wear a cute little Android pin on both the days. The Android pins are shown below and they are quite a hit with all the participants. I wear the formal Android on Saturday and the beach wear Android on Sunday.

One of the questions that I always get asked is where I got these lovely pins from? The Android pins were sent by my dear friend from France, Jerome Baton. Jerome is a passionate Java developer. He did the technical review of two great books on Android that I highly recommend and refer to constantly : Android in Action and Android in Practice from Manning Books. Thank you Jerome for the pins and for all the conversations on programming we have been having over the last few years.

This is the 6th batch that we have conducted in the last 4 months and every batch has given me great inputs in terms of the topics that they would like to see more of. With that in mind, I am happy to inform everyone that I have several topics that I have identified for an Advanced Course in Android, which is a followup to this course. Participants who have attended my introductory 2-Day workshop and even developers who have a basic knowledge of Android programming will benefit from this new course. The new course will delve into areas like Services, Broadcast Receivers, Widgets, Content Providers, Sensors and some UI related topics. The topics are still open for discussion and it might end up being a 1-day or a 2-day course. Stay tuned for more details.

I would also like to announce a piece of good news at this blog. We have been conducting this course in Mumbai, which is where we live and work. We are soon going international and are going to conduct the 2-Day Android Developer Workshop in Dubai in February. I am extremely excited to take this workshop across the Arabian sea. Thank you everyone for attending the workshop and helping me take it to the next level.

The feedback as with earlier workshops has been great. These 6 workshops have now provided me with enough gotchas that beginner Android programmers face while dealing with Java, Android SDK and the Eclipse tools. I plan to publish a series of articles where I will present those findings and solutions. Keep track of my blog.

We are going to conduct the same workshop in Mumbai in February too. The dates are not finalized and I would recommend to let us know if you would like to join the course. The batch is limited to 10 only. Please visit the 2-Day Android Workshop page and write to us indicating your interest.

The Mind Storm Android training has started well in January 2012. We thank all those who have been part of this workshop. Stay tuned for much more.

Yet another edition of Mind Storm Software’s Android Developer Workshop was successfully conducted last week, on January 7 & 8, 2012. We have continued to build on the terrific interest that developers have shown in this workshop and we hope to take it to new heights this year.

The venue for the 2-Day Android Workshop was our trusted place, The Residency Hotel in Mumbai. As always they were precision like in their planning and in fact upgraded us to much larger rooms this time around. The pictures of the training rooms before the action started are shown below:

We had a batch of 12 participants this time (the largest so far). There was a mix of experienced and junior developers. Their expertise ranged from Java, .NET, various Web technologies and some of them were even well versed with mobile programming (We had a PhoneGap pro and a Symbian, Windows Mango programmer also in our group). It is very encouraging to see that despite the varied backgrounds, all of them wanted to learn more about Android programming in general. The icing on the cake this time around was that several participants had their own mobile phone and the sheer delight of seeing your own code work on the physical devices is an experience in itself.

We kicked off Day 1 with the usual introduction to Android. I try my best not to be a spokesperson for Android or Google, since the manufacturers have done the Android marketing blitzkrieg in all forms of media. The first half is always a bit tense so as to make sure that we setup the Android Dev Environment – Eclipse IDE, JDK, Android Eclipse plugin, Android SDK 2.2 & 2.3 and so on. With a little hiccup or two, we were well on our way.

The day proceeded then with the traditional “Hello World” in Android, then Activities, Built In Intents / Explicit Intents, Views/Layouts and List Activity. The Hotel stuff tried their best to keep us all asleep in the afternoon with a decent spread of lunch dishes but I guess we survived the lunch, the afternoon and Android Layouts, to make it through the first day. Not a bad achievement for day 1.

The next day kicked off with Android Menus, Alerts, Notifications, Persistence Options (Files, Shared Preferences, Databases before we broke for lunch. Post lunch we started off with Networking, GPS (Location) programming, Google Maps and rounded it off with a study of a complete Famous Quotes application that included most of the building blocks that we covered since day 1.

The Mind Storm Android Developer Workshop is going strong. We held our second workshop on Android Training last weekend. The venue was the same as last time, Residency Hotel and the 2-Day Developer Workshop was held on October 8-9, 2011.

The goal of the Developer Workshop is to get any interested developer get started with Android programming. It is geared towards both newbies and experienced developers who would like to learn what it takes to get started with programming their first Android applications.

We had an interesting mix of participants this time. 8 of them were Engineering students while the rest of them were professionals working in the software industry. All of them had a clear goal in mind and that was to demystify what Android meant as a developer and get them started with their first steps in Android Development.

We received some good feedback from the first workshop that we held in September and based on how participants received some of the topics; I had made small changes to the curriculum to keep it relevant to the audience and also to fit the material within 2 days. The material that we have is among the most comprehensive, nearly 200 slides with numerous hands on exercises (both to be tried during the two days and some more for homework) for the participants to try out throughout the course of the Workshop.

The first half of the first day also comes with some surprises and stress. The main task that we need to do is to make sure that all the participant machines are setup with Android Developer Tools. This involves setting up Java, Eclipse, Android SDK and the Android Eclipse Plugins. Our last workshop taught us a lesson that it does not harm to carry an extra laptop or two to cater to a scenario where one of the participants’ laptop does not take too well to the new software. The extra laptop turned out to be handy. Once the machines were setup with software, we follow tradition typically and take the participants through the Hello World program. My repeated experiences with numerous developers that I have trained till now in Android tells me that the Android team needs to seriously look at improving the Android Virtual Device performance as much as they can. They have been doing a good job across the releases but the earlier some of its quirks like start up time, occasional freezes are taken care of , the newbie Android programmers will feel much comfortable.

Next up was understanding Activities, Passing Data to Activities, Built In Android Intents like Web Browsing, Calling Phone Numbers, SMS and Email Programs were covered next. We then took up Views, Layouts and rounded up the day with an introduction of ListActivity.

The second day took off with Menus and various persistence options like Files, SharedPreferences and Databases. That was enough in the morning to break for some sumptuous lunch that was served by the Hotel. The afternoon began with an introduction to Location Based programming, Google Maps and then a 2hr+ session on attempting to build a complete Android Application, which was then rounded out with how to publish your application to the Android marketplace. While the participants completed parts of the whole Android application, the main thing that I hope all of them took away from the experience was that Android Development is no longer a mystery to them and hopefully the training has been a launching pad for them to take off in their Android journey.

The queries raised by all the participants kept me on my toes. Residency Hotel, located in Andheri, Mumbai — once again did a great job in terms of logistics. It definitely makes our task much easier and lets us focus on delivering great Android content. It was good to see the Hotel buzzing with various other conferences/workshops that were going on in the weekend.

If you are interested in signing up for the Android Developer Course, do not wait anymore. Please visit the detail page and get going. 2 dates have been announced in November. We also encourage organizations to call us to conduct corporate trainings for their team within their own premises.