Present your app and win a Samsung Galaxy S3

Yesterday we had a really nice hackathon were people had the opportunity to test their apps on the latest and most powerful Android mobile available currently, the Samsung Galaxy S3. Thanks to the Samsung App Challenge who provided two S3 for the Android Aalto community to use.

We will bring those two Samsung S3 in every hackathon so you can test with them and discover the new things introduced in the Android 4.0 Platform.

Wouldn’t it be nice that you could test with one Samsung Galaxy S3 anytime and anywhere? Then this is your opportunity, thanks to Samsung App Challenge the two best apps/ideas developed by you will be given one Samsung Galaxy S3 each.

  • How to participate?
  • It’s pretty easy. You can prepare an app (doesn’t need to be finished at all) and explain in a few sentences (slides and/or youtube video) what it is about and why you deserve the Samsung Galaxy S3. If you are not tech savvy enough or you don’t have time to develop an initial app you can also submit your idea explaining it (using some appealing format, e.g. slides/youtube video).
  • Who can participate?
  • The only requirement is that you have a valid Finnish address where the device can be sent.
  • What’s the deadline?
  • You have until Wednesday 20th June at 17:00:00 (Helsinki timezone) to send links to your material to team+samsung@androidaalto.org (we can’t host all the material so please send a link to a public URL that anybody can access).
  • Who is the jury?
  • The jury will be the Android Aalto community itself!! Some time after the deadline (remember: 20.6.2012 at 17:00) we will publish a poll to our Android Aalto Facebook group where the members will be able to vote the different submissions.
  • Other important details:
  • When sending us the information you must include your full name, e-mail, phone, your Facebook page link (or G+, or twitter). Although you can submit several apps/ideas only one device will be given to the same person.
    In case of tie the winner is the one who sent the material earlier.
  • Important recommendations:
  • Keep in mind that all the members of the Android Aalto Facebook group will be able to vote so we recommend you to make it really easy for them to use/understand your app/idea so they like it and vote for it. For example, if you have an app it would be great if it’s already in the market (contact us: team@androidaalto.org and we can try to publish it through our Google play account) or they can download the apk from somewhere else.

More questions? You can contact us or post your questions at our Facebook group, Google plus or Twitter

June 17, 2012 | | No Comments »

Let the games continue and S-Pen coding on 16th of June!

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.

The event will start at 11.00 at Aalto Venture Garage (Betonimiehenkuja 3, Otaniemi, Espoo)

Although not compulsory it would be great if you can RSVP at our Facebook event: Games and S-Pens hacking

June 10, 2012 | | No Comments »

La Fiesta Hackathon at Mobile World Congress

Ever wanted to attend Mobile World Congress, the largest mobile event in the world, but never had the time or money? Do you have a great team or a great idea and want to show it to the rest of the world? Do you want to attend the Mobile World Congress 2013 for free? We have a hackathon for that, and it’s coming on Tuesday, February 28th. Android Aalto will be present in the Mobile World Congress 2012 and you can also be virtually present by registering to La Fiesta Hackathon, where multiple teams of developers from all over the globe will have to come up with a nicely-designed and functional app and demo it.

Not only you will be virtually present at the Mobile World Congress 2012, but you will also have the opportunity to be judged by the Mighty Eagle of Rovio (Peter Vesterbacka) and your app will be demoed to hundreds of company top-managers and investors stopping by our stand. La Fiesta Hackathon, that’s how we call it, will take place on every corner of the World. Develop an app for Blaast, Windows, Android, or iOS, submit, and present it via Skype at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on the 28th February, 2012.

The prizes are just amazing:

  • Winner team: entry tickets to Mobile World Congress 2013 in Barcelona
  • First runner-up: 500€ gift certificate from Amazon.com
  • Second runner-up: 250€ gift certificate from Amazon.com

You may select one (or more) of the following platforms to create your app:

The criteria for judging the app will be based on creativity (the idea), design (layout and design) and performance (how well it runs). Your application should be submitted to email2sivakumar@gmail.com (or josep@androidaalto.org) no later than 16:00 (GMT+1) on Tuesday, February 28th. After that, the judges will test your application during an hour and the awards will be released at 18:00. You can start developing your app right now if you want, and our team of coordinators will contact you through Skype on Tuesday, February 28th, between 12:00 PM and 16:00, to check the progress of your application. All the times are Spanish times (GMT+1).

So what are you waiting for? Gather your team together and show the rest of the world the great apps you can build with your team, plenty of opportunities are awaiting for you! Registration as well as competition rules are in www.lafiestahackathon.eventbrite.com and ping Siva Kumar (email2sivakumar@gmail.com) if you need more information or have some questions.

February 22, 2012 | | No Comments »

Fragments, publishing apps and Droidkino launched

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! ;)

January 30, 2012 | | No Comments »

Bonnier Dev Camp hackathon next weekend

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.

 

So the dev camp will run from 25th to 27th, at the Aalto Garage and you should register here: http://www.bonnierdevcamp.fi/index/29 (as soon as possible).

 

See you all next weekend! Get ready to show how much you have learned in the community!

Elisa   Reaktor

 

November 21, 2011 | | No Comments »

Halloween evening with newcomers, Droidkino and fragments

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 :-P )
  • 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:
ElisaReaktor

Photos from the Event

November 7, 2011 | | No Comments »

AA Halloween Hackathon Oct 30th

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 :P

Community Hacking

We use Git and Github to handle the community projects. Feel free to check out the Android Aalto Github account:http://www.github.com/AndroidAalto
Please refer to this previous post to know more about How to Collaborate using GitHub

Special Thanks to Elisa !

Many thanks to Elisa for collaborating with us to build a nice Android ecosystem, and for sponsoring food and drinks for all of the attendees.

October 16, 2011 | | No Comments »

Continuous integration for AndroidAalto developers

Great developers should use great tools. Take github for example: contributing to projects has never been so easy. Old school open source developers will remember past times when we had to send broken-out patches and beg concerned maintainers about SVN write access.

But we already covered version control. We will start with continuous integration. There are many solutions out there, but in this case, we just rolled our own (I can admit a case of NIH here, but it was fun!). It’s pretty basic and it relies on github hooks. Despite being pretty hacky it’s already working and deployed. In fact, you can already benefit from it in the Projects page, where the Download links will get you the latest build straight from AndroidAalto repositories (yes, it’s a live link). If you are looking for different builds, you can access AndroidAalto build directory and pick.

And all this nice automation is also available to all Android Aalto members! If you want your android project to be processed by the autobuild system, you just need to hit me in a hackathon and I can add you. Or if you’re savvy enough, just send a pull request modifying the gh-builder configuration. In fact, any project that contains an AndroidManifest.xml will build without problems! So you can use it for your own projects too.

Of course, contributions to the gh-builder system are also welcome. After all, there’s more in our community than coding android applications :) .

September 3, 2011 | | No Comments »

Splendid people participating at July’s hackathon

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.

July 18, 2011 | | 1 Comment »

Collaborating with the AndroidAalto community

This community is built on collaboration. And that is why all the code that comes up in the hackathons is open source.

In this blog post, we will try to encourage you to join your forces with us. As you have probably seen, we use github to share code and git as our version control system. But don’t let that scare you. Our projects are quite young and as such you’ll find that is very easy to get started. There are just two steps where git is involved: getting the code and sharing it with the rest of the community. Well, then there’s the hacking in between, but that’s where you get in ;) .

First, you are going to need to get yourself a git client. If you are a linux user, I suggest that you get it using the usual package management system on your distro; Mac users can use macports and if you are Windows guy, have a look at msysgit. I’ll be using linux to walk you through, so take that into account if you are on a different setup.

Then, create an account on github. The image above, is what you will see when you have an account ready and you go to any repository page. So, once you are logged in, go to any of our projects and hit that fork button. We will use SoundFuse in our case. After you do that, you’ll be brought to your own repository where you can see the cloning URLs:

So now we are ready to execute our first git command. Copy the URL of your repository and execute the following command. Note that you cannot just copy-paste this command since the URL is unique to your user.

droid@host:~ $ git clone git@github.com:{your-user-goes-here}/SoundFuse.git

Also, if you want to keep up with the changes in the community repository (and you really should), I suggest you add a remote (or link) in your repository so that you can keep your repository up to date. This command is safe to copy paste:

droid@host:~ $ cd SoundFuse
droid@host:SoundFuse $ git remote add community git://github.com/AndroidAalto/SoundFuse.git

Now the code is yours and you can do whatever you want with it. If you have something in mind that you want to contribute I suggest that you think for a while how can you split that work in small pieces for your commits. Why is this important? Because you want to keep other people motivated about your code and the best way to do it is by helping them understand it.

So, after you have something you are willing to share, it’s time to push your changes to your github repository. You can do this for each commit or not: I’ll let you decide on that.

However, before you push your changes, I suggest you get the latest changes on the community repository. Note that this can lead to potential conflicts, since the repository could have changed since you forked. Now, there are two strategies to do this: merge and rebase. I suggest you use rebase always for now. So this is how you should do that:

droid@host:SoundFuse $ git fetch community
droid@host:SoundFuse $ git rebase community/master

Now, we have the most up to date code with our changes. Let’s push that to your personal repository. Note that after this your changes will be visible in your public github account.

droid@host:SoundFuse $ git push origin master

After you have something you are proud of, the next step is to notify the community about what you have done. Send a pull request and write a small description of what you have done in general terms (the specifics should already be contained in the commit logs, right? ;) ). To do so, just go to your own repository page and click that “Pull Request” button that is next to the “Fork”. You’ll be greeted with the following:

Specially check the top part. You should really understand what it really means: “You are asking AndroidAalto to pull N commits into AndroidAalto:master from gerard:master”. That is you are asking a user to get N commit into the community repository from your own. It shouldn’t be that surprising by now, I hope :) .

And that’s about what I wanted to explain. Now, I’m sure that if you juggle with git for a while, you’ll want to do more fancy things with it. And there have been some side steps that I have avoided explaining. For instance, how to resolve a conflict or what is the difference between merge and rebase.

Why is that? It would be pointless to rewrite one of the many good manuals and howto’s that you can find in the net. So don’t be shy and show your google-foo. Feel free to point any good resource that you come up with. From my side, I’ll point out that git has possibly one of the best set of man pages that I ever seen, so be sure to check that (try git help {any-git-command}).

On the other hand, if you want to talk about git and have some questions, feel free to ask us in the comments or even better in one of the community events.

Happy Hacking.

July 14, 2011 | | Tags: , , | No Comments »
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