Brace yourselves! After the great success of the previous gaming hackathon, Android Aalto is organizing a new event for all those that were thirsthy for more (even more!) action. On Saturday 16th of June you will have the chance to try out one of the latest innovations in the Android ecosystem and even win 15.000 € ! Brought by Samsung, the S-Pen is a more precise input than a finger or stylus and it is a promising tool for interacting with Android devices. In this hackathon, we will present the features of S-Pen and if you have an app idea, we will help you develop it and submit it to the Samsung contest.
Whether to develop a game, a revolutionary app or a simple Hello, world!, we welcome you to join us the 16th of June and participate in the Samsung App Challenge.
Last Saturday we had the largest Android hackathon ever. Over 60 developers working in different groups, coding fragments to build applications that work seamlessly on both mobile phones and tablets. The hackathon involved over 50 Aalto students and more than 10 professionals from the industry coding together and even launching a beta version of the application to the Android Market. We also covered the basics of how to create an account on the Android Market and how to publish applications.
The event was sponsored by Elisa and Reaktor, which are actively supporting the Android community together with Android Aalto. We want to thank not only all the developers that showed up to get involved, but also several start-up founders that attended the workshop to learn more about Android and propose new ideas for the future hackathons. One important thing we’d like to remind everyone is that Android Aalto will have a demo stand at the Mobile World Congress 2012 (starting in February 27th), so if you have an app or design you want to show to demo at the congress, send us an email to team@androidaalto.org and we will demo your app at the Mobile World Congress completely for free. This is a great business opportunity if you are thinking of launching your app or need some contacts to take your idea further.
For those who didn’t attend this hackathon, you can find links to the material right below the text, and also some of the pictures that covered the whole evening. And for those who attended the hackathon, thank you everyone once again for coming to the hackathon and making it a blast! We are already working on a series of workshops with one theme in mind for the upcoming months. Just stay tuned and keep up the coding!
After a super-fun party we had last Saturday (thanks everyone, and specially all the new-comers), Android Aalto starts to close a year of awesomeness with two interesting events. Next Wednesday, there is the Android Seminar in Tampere, co-organized with Futurice and with the support of Elisa. But even cooler, there will be a 3-day development camp running in the Aalto Garage next weekend.
The Bonnier Dev Camp, organized by AaltoES and Bonnier, and where Android Aalto will participate, is a 3-day entrance-free hackathon where you can come and show how much you can achieve in just a weekend. What you get: an incredible network of developers from all platforms, working in teams with top apps developers in Finland, creating content for a real project for the Bonnier printing company, and many surprises you’ll only be to discover by attending the event. Whether you are a mobile developer, a designer, a business creative, a visionary or just a “I’ve-got-no-plans-for-next-weekend” free-wheeling code monkey, drop by the Aalto Garage and have fun participating of a real customer project.
It’s been already one year of Android Aalto and there is no better way of celebrating than throwing a party with all of you, that made possible this great community. Android Aalto will hold a Pikkujoulut (little Xmas) party next Saturday 19th of November, starting at 13:00 in the Aalto Venture Garage. This time, prepare to relax, because we won’t be coding, but actually playing games and having fun getting to know the people behind the community. Here is a rough schedule for the day:
13:00 welcome everybody
13:30 get to know Android Aalto
14:00 Mario Kart Wii competition
15:00 Pizza time!
16:00 RockBand competition
17:00 Santandroid, have you been a good nerd this year?
17:30 drink, dance, have fun!
We will have drinks, snacks and even dinner thanks to the support of Elisa. So now you have a plan for next Saturday 19th of November. Bring your friends and tell everyone to join, because this is a perfect event to know everybody in the community and see what we do and how do we have fun while learning. See you all next Saturday!
Android Aalto Halloween hackathon attracted zombies, vampires, ghosts and all kind of creatures to Venture Garage for a nice evening coding, designing and learning.
This time I’m proud to say that we started even a bit earlier than scheduled. In order to wait for the lost souls to arrive the attendees introduced themselves so we could get to know each other immediately. It was a nice surprise to meet not only coders but people with business ideas, designers and newbies that came to learn and expand their knowledge.
More or less, people divided into the three earlier proposed groups:
Haunted Garage: where the main ghost, Josep Maria, introduced to the newcomers the basic Android spirits (Eclipse, ADT and Android SDK), where they are and how to use them to scare people.
Horror movies: a group of witches gathered together around the magic wall to decipher the black powers needed to manage the monster of Droidkino. (That is, we tried to improve the UX/UI of Droidkino )
Story fragments: our storyteller, Marcos, explained fragments of magic powers that would help the Android apprentices to become UI masters. The beginning was not easy but finally we were able to invoke the mobile and tablet ghosts.
In the upcoming days we’ll update the Droidkino page to include the outcome of the ideas discussed. The app has a lot of potential and we are really excited to see so much people collaborating to make it happen!
Once again, thanks to all the participants and also to our sponsors:
Hi there!! all Android Enthusiasts in Tampere and FI!
This month Android Aalto, Coss, Futurice and Ixonos hit the road for this exciting event in Tampere, FI, a great space to exchange ideas and discuss with Android enthusiasts outside the capital area. Tampere is also well known for the large IT community, and particualrly its great to see how the android community there is germinating and growing.
Event Details
November 23rd from 13:45 to 19:00
New Factory, Väinö Linnan aukio 15, 3rd floor, Tampere, FI.
Please RSVP since places are limited: http://androidtampere-estw.eventbrite.com
Time has past fast, the cold season started and for some students the scary mid-term exams are ongoing now. Thus end of October a great time to relax, hack, discuss about android and have fun!
Where? and When?
Aalto Venture Garage – Betonimiehenkuja 3, Espoo
October 30th starting at 1pm
Welcome everybody to AA October Hackathon!
Three proposed areas/topics:
Haunted Garage – For everybody that wants to get started in android, Don’t be afraid to say hi to the android spirits! Aalto Venture garage will be a safe great place to start by installing the sdk, trying examples and learning the basics.
Horror movies - For the ones that feel like continue working on our community projects – working on horror movie schedules using Droidkino and weicked sounds from Soundfuse.
Xooming to the beyond – At some point we will establish a link with some Honeycomb’s (Android 3.x) apis and see some features there. Similarly we could do for new stuff that is in 2.3.x as well.
Other topics – Feel free to propose other topics.
Two short “paranormal sessions”
Scary story telling - There will be room to tell scarey stories about bugs, memory crashes, exceptions and other issues you could have experience while doing android projects. But also this is a good place to tell about some lessons learned and to demo /show your app if you would like to.
Lets explore the strange activity – or activities that are not behaving well inside your projects, perhaps we can try debuging or troubleshooting to find out that they are not actually paranormal and could be tamed
This heading doesn’t even come close to the amazing day we had at Android Aalto last Saturday. An event combining professional speakers, hacking space, outdoors games, lots of networking, prizes and much more.
The session was opened by Vili Törmänen, who gave a deep talk about Near-Field Communication (NFC), which is coming very strong from Google and its latest product Google Wallet. The presentation included both theory and working examples about NFC peer-to-peer communication, with code and even live demo with two NFC phones transferring data to one another. Elias Pietilä, from Qvik, gave a very entertaining speech about user experience in general and how it applies to the mobile software and the special aspects of Android mobile experience.
After the keynotes, some people decided to play the find Droid game we prepared: A funny challenge where different teams had to find hidden QR-codes and NFC tags around the Venture Garage and the surrounding area to get new hints and clues in order to complete the game. The teams were amazingly fast and finished the challenge quite ahead of the expected time.
For those who preferred to learn Android, there was a huge hacking space with more than 50 hackers. We divided the group in those who wanted to start from scratch and some of them who wanted to work on already existing applications (e.g. Droidkino).
The result: more than 10 HelloWord apps created in less than an hour, plenty of people installed the SDK and were reading official documentation from Google, a movie rating feature implemented for Droidkino (fetching ratings from Imdb), and a nice surprise: many girls getting their hands dirty with Android code and creating a second app after their first HelloWorld.
At the end of the evening, there were some small presents to those people who really kicked ass during the event: winners of the game, most passionate game team, almost every girl coding, the guys who implemented the movie rating feature and much more.
So far so good, we thank everybody who attended yesterday’s event and we are already working on the next event to bring many more interesting things to the community and help you learn faster on Android and also have much more fun than ever before. Thank you for a great day folks!
By the way, since the community is actually you guys that come to our events, we would really like to hear all the complaints and feedback to make the events much better. So please take 2 minutes and give us some feedback at AndroidAalto.org/survey.
After the summer break, it is time to get some action! Android Aalto has prepared an Android event that will open the study year with plenty of fun. The Android event will include two professional speakers from the industry, a hacking space for developers and games for non-technical people who just want to have fun with us and meet new people.
Just to give you a taste of what is coming up for October 1st, we are bringing an expert in NFC, a top designer and mobile UX speaker, a hacking corner to help you get started with Android, a hacking space for those who already know Android and want to check out real projects (check out Droidkino, a client for Finnkino movie theaters in Finland), games for people who don’t want to develop, the finest mobile and software development networking people around the Helsinki area, and an amazing evening with surprises and even prizes for the most active participants.
The event will start on Saturday at 12:00 sharp (remember: 1st of October), at the Aalto Venture Garage (Betonimiehenkuja 3, Espoo), in Otaniemi. Click here to see the map. The rough schedule for the program is as follows:
12:00 Doors open, welcoming and pre-networking
12:15 NFC Keynote, Vili Törmänen (VTT)
13:00 Break for networking
13:15 UX and mobile design keynote, Elias Pietilä (Qvik)
14:00 Lunch break
15:00 Hacking space opens
15:15 “Rescue the droid” game begins, for non-programmers
The event is run thanks to the wonderful people managing the Aalto Venture Garage. All the food, drinks, beers and magic in our events is possible thanks to our main sponsor and Android community supporter Elisa.
I’m truly delighted by the environment during the last hackathon. It wouldn’t have been possible without all of you! Amazing people came to learn and share knowledge!
Everything started with an introduction to NFC by Jukka Jokelainen. Then, people was divided in teams and they had some minutes to come up with ideas and present them:
Developers immediately started to code and those more business oriented were discussing different ways to make the ideas profitable:
Elisa sponsored the different snacks, drinks and pizzas for all, so people had plenty of energy to develop the ideas further.
The attendees had a great time discussing and learning about NFC. Some of them even had some early functional prototypes. As an example, Nagasai Arun gave us the following feedback when we asked about his experience in the event:
“The Android Hackathon at Aalto Design Factory was a great experience. It was all about joy of building. People from various backgrounds showed up to get their hands dirty. Firstly, thanks to Maksim for introducing me to the awesome Android Aalto community and the members. Rovio team also got involved and encouraged everyone with their valuable suggestions, cool NFC angry birds and presentations.
This was my first hackathon event and my intentions were to learn the stuff about Android plus NFC by doing it. The event was much more than I expected. It was like a turbocharge of amazing guys working to get things done. In addition to hacking stuff, most importantly I met lot of great guys; includes Rovio team, designers, finance analyst, programmers, great thinkers.
Our theme was to create a crimson room, where a person has to use his NFC enabled phone and solve the sequence of hints to come out of the room. The idea was provided by Tomasz Mucha, and I definitely see the potential in making it big for event management firms.
All in all, the hackathon experience was amazing and looking forward to many events like these.”
Moreover, it was really interesting to learn a bit more about Angry Birds Magic platform from Rovio, which connects physical world with digital entertainment using NFC:
Later on, Hesham Omran, who came from Sweden for the event, also shared his experience and knowledge about NFC:
Thanks a lot to all of you who participated in this event. It was great to see so many people and we’re looking forward to see you again in the next Android Aalto event.
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