July Hackathon is here! Rovio is visiting us!

Probably most of you are enjoying some sunny and warming holidays. So now that there is more free time is the perfect moment to start building those android apps!

Moreover, this time Rovio will be visiting us! It will be the perfect opportunity to get to know them and show your development skills during the hackathon. They are really interested in getting to know you!

Remember that Android Aalto does not close during the summer holidays!! So this month hackathon will be on Saturday 16th. Starting at 13.00 with the following topics:

  • Rovio presentation about next hackathons collaboration.
  • Android NFC workshop by Jukka Jokelainen.
  • Thanks to Elisa we will order some food for the attendees and have a relaxed lunch discussing about android and similar topics.
  • Develop new projects and continue evolving the two community projects.

If you have a project that you feel it would be interesting to develop with more people this is the right place, hackathons are the perfect environment! You can discuss technical issues, share and learn new tricks.
Moreover, people usually is happy to help to debug apps in their devices. So it is a great opportunity to polish your project for different mobiles at once!

This time we will be in Aalto Design Factory building (in front of the previous one). Check the map: Betonimiehenkuja 5, Espoo

Remember, the Hackathon will be on Saturday, 16th of July starting at 13.00 at the Design Factory.
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. We will publish a step-by-step guide how to use Git in a few days.

Welcome aboard and see you on July 16th at 13.00!

We are looking for developers who would like to do a demo of their app in one of our hackathons. If you are interested feel free to contact us.

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

July 4, 2011 | | Tags: , , , | No Comments »

Hackathon summary: app demos, droids and sausages

Android Aalto just held another hackathon last Saturday 11th. As usual, it was a success in number of attendants, ideas, good feeling and code.

One of the key achievements that cannot be stressed enough is the success in always having first time attendants to the events Android Aalto is organizing. There were new people interested in Android coming from all disciplines: from experienced developers to people with no background in Computer Science at all but with the right attitude, interest and excitement to contribute with ideas, testing etc. There were also newcomers starting to experiment with the Android SDK and looking for help and tips from more seasoned community members attending the event.

One of the ideas that we put in practice for the first time was presenting applications created by members of the Android Aalto community. I, Josep, was the first one to break the ice by presenting my Word Trainer: an application to practice vocabulary where everybody can collaborate by adding new languages and words to a shared spreadsheet.

Another important value that Android Aalto embraces is building the community. On Saturday there was a really sunny day and since the weather was excellent, it was decided to organize an Android Aalto barbecue outdoors, in front of the Aalto Garage. Elisa was, as usual, our main sponsor who paid the food, the drinks and even an Android Apps magazine we got from the shop. There was an excellent atmosphere and everybody shared ideas and expertise. Probably one of the geekest barbecues ever done in the Garage.

After eating it was the time to get the hands dirty again, not in grilling but in coding. We were basically divided in two groups: one group decided to code the Droidkino app while the other group decided to join Claudio and Hannu in brainstorming the geo-localization chat application they are developing. There are now some nice features coming to Droidkino: from one side there is the possibility to browse the movies by cover. On the other hand there has been some work done to parse the Finnkino areas xml so you can check the movies from your local cinema only. Moreover there are also small fixes and improvements in the layout to make it more appealing to the user.

After the official program, the last survivors went to the beach to enjoy the last sunbeams of the day and ended up having a relaxed dinner in Kamppi. From the community we can only say thanks to all the attendants and we are looking forward to the next event, coming in July!

June 13, 2011 | | No Comments »

Hackathon on June 11th

Although summer time is here, we believe that there are more people like us, who can’t wait to open another hackathon season. June 11th is the day for the new hackathon! During this event, not only we are going to continue working on SoundFused and DroidKino — projects that have been started in the previous events, but also you may expect a community member presenting his application. Stay tuned!

This time event is going to proceed like this:

  • 13:00 Welcoming and informal introductions of community, hackathons and getting to know old and new people.
  • 13:15 SoundFused and DroidKino presentations — what has been done to date
  • 13:30 Presentation of Word Trainer (a vocabulary training game made by Josep Maria)
  • 14:00 Ordering pizza (thanks to Elisa) and discussing new features for Sound Fused, DroidKino and any other app you may have in mind
  • 14:00 Lunch time and networking
  • 15:00 Hacking time! Till midnight?? Yes, this is possible.

New ideas and projects are more than welcomed. If you are new to Android, don’t worry, we can help to set up your environment and learn all the basic stuff from scratch.

If you have your own device, please bring it. And if you don’t – don’t worry, we have some Androids for you. We are using GitHub for version control, so it would be easier if you create an account before you come.

Feel free to come and to test your application with other devices: usually there is a wide range of different devices in the hackathons!

Once again, the hackathon is on June 11th, 13:00 in Android Aalto room at Aalto Venture Garage. Confirm your attendance on our Facebook event. If you are a new comer, checkout the video from Gerard:

Many thanks to Elisa, once again, for helping us building a nice Android ecosystem, and for sponsoring food and beers for all of the attendees.



June 4, 2011 | | 3 Comments »

Hackathon Summary: Moving Things Forward

It’s been only 10 days from the Android event at Oulu and we are back in town for new challenges. Today we completed another Android hackathon session, where we have been working on our two initial prototypes and created a workshop about Android APIs, open for interesting discussions.



Thanks Elisa for sponsoring our developers’ hackathon with food and drinks!

Droidkino Prototype

The team working on Droidkino had a nice presentation from Gaia (a girl from Poland) who has been working on an optimized parser for the application (a SAX XML parser). Moreover, the team focused on distributing the code by creating 5 different branches and preparing the codebase for a release in the future.

Android APIs Workshop

Maksim took some of the beginners to a separated room to explain some basic (but also important) APIs used in Android, including the Contacts API, the Accelerometers and Gyroscope APIs, and much more. The workshop was more a lecture-like session, where there were open discussions about practical issues when using such APIs. It was a great idea to have something like this for people not familiar with Droidkino nor SoundFused.

SoundFused Prototype now has nicer-looking buttons and adjustable BPM

The “not-so-beginner” team worked again on SoundFused. The main target was to clean up the code, make it more maintainable by separating sub-classes and implementing “must-have” features. Among the new features, SoundFused now has beautiful toggle buttons and adjustable BPM setting (so you can play faster or slower your compositions).

Once again, I want to thank all of you for attending the event (this time we were many more people ;) ) and of course Elisa for providing us with food and drinks as usual, so BIG THANKS, and see you in June’s hackathon. Stay tuned for news!

Photos from the Hackathon event

May 14, 2011 | | No Comments »

Android Hackathon on May 14th

Hello droidaholics!! Get ready for the second hackathon in this spring! It will be on May 14th. Write it down in your calendar immediately!

During the last hackathon two projects were started:

  • SoundFused: an app to create music with gestures. You can see an early version in this video.
  • DroidKino: an app that provides Finnkino information about the movies close to you.

Some ideas that we could try to implement:

  • Add simple gestures like slide and pinch to SoundFused interface.
  • Generate sounds programmatically in SoundFused.
  • Social features in DroidKino (rate movies…).
  • Read reviews from movie websites (like Rotten Tomatoes, imdb…).
  • Improve XML handling in DroidKino.
  • Suggest yours!!

Next you can find the agenda:

  • Starting time at 13:00 at Aalto Venture Garage.
  • It would be possible to have a summary of the two projects so new people can participate immediately.
  • If there is enough people we will split in two teams: one with very basic or no knowledge at all and the other for a bit more advanced.
  • Basically the idea is to code and discuss practical stuff from 13.00 until… your head explodes ;-)
  • Feel free to bring your own food (there is a great kitchen) and drinks.

We are an open community, so feel free to come and suggest any ideas that you would like to share. It is not compulsory to develop in any of the two apps we mentioned above, maybe  a new idea can be started.

Usually people bring their own android device (although is not a requisite), so it might be a good opportunity to test your new app, too.

Remember, the hackathon will be on Saturday, May 14th, starting at 13:00 at the Aalto Venture Garage. We will try to use github.org with a public repository, it would be great if you can create an account to GitHub before you come. The Android Aalto Github account is:  www.github.com/AndroidAalto.

See you all on May 14th at 13:00!

To warm up, take a look at the outcome from the last hackathon: Best Hackathon Yet.

May 7, 2011 | | No Comments »

Keynote in Oulu

The interest in Android is rapidly growing and we are proud to announce the first Android Oulu event. Android Aalto community together with Oulu Student Entrepreneurship Society is organising first Android keynote.

Event is going to happen on 4th of May and is going to host line-up of interesting speakers:

  1. Testing solutions on Android, Jouko Kaasila (Bitbar)
  2. Android and NFC, Vili Törmänen (VTT)
  3. Security and Privacy in Mobile Social Networks, Jyri Pyrrö (Agileight)

The event is open for everybody: developers, entrepreneurs, android enthusiasts and companies.

Event program

18:00 official start
18:05 Introduction about the community
18:20 Testing solutions on Android, Jouko Kaasila
18:50 Big break for networking
19:20 Android and NFC, Vili Törmänen (VTT)
19:50 Secure messaging on Android, Jyri Pyrrö (Agileight)
20:20 Official end/Mingling

Register for the event on facebook or on Eventilla.

Event is sponsored by Elisa.

April 19, 2011 | | Tags: , , | No Comments »

Best Hackathon Yet

I think, that’s the right title for this post. Last Saturday we had the greatest hackathon ever in the Android Aalto Community. We came up with interesting ideas to develop in the community, we created two teams of developers, we got new members in the community, and the most important: both teams had a working prototype by the end of the evening ;) Furthermore, we got two new coordinators in the community: welcome Marcos and Donato!

We have now improved hackathons by starting much earlier (around 13:00). We have also focused on development skills now, so we talk less and do more ;) From now on, we will keep people in two teams: Autobots (less-skilled people) and Decepticons (people who can write at least some Android code). Both teams brainstormed and came up with two very nice ideas, one for the Autobots and another one for the Decepticons. Autobots were working on Droidkino, a very nice application that fetches the Finnkino information about latest movies and shows everything in your mobile phone. If you ever want to watch a movie and don’t know what’s on today, Droidkino is the way to go! Find a screenshot of the working prototype at the bottom of the post.

Decepticons started working on a very cool idea about creating music with gestures, called SoundFused. The idea is to create different sounds with gestures and movements of the phone/tablet. However, for now, the team created a digital sequencer that generates music out of samples using tempos. See the video at the bottom of the post, about the working prototype.

We were 11-12 people and we hacked from 15:00 to 23:30, it was a great event. We agreed to finish at 18:00, but both teams were so enthusiastic about their projects, that we stayed almost till midnight. We had a nice lunch with hand-made dessert, all thanks to Elisa, who also paid drinks and beers for the event. The event was held in the Aalto Venture Garage, provided by AaltoES.

To conclude, I’d like to thank each of the participants that yesterday made possible the best hackathon event ever in the community. The Droidkino application is something useful and very suitable both for learning and for putting an application that can be beneficial for Finnkino and users as well, so we are looking forward to develop it further. SoundFuse is more of a long-term project, and it looks very promising. And for the coming hackathons, we can create more teams and assign new tasks, it is all about YOU, people! ;) So THANKS for a great event and see you in the next one! Stay tuned for the new date and time…

March 27, 2011 | | No Comments »

Android Hackathon on March 26th

Hello droids! It’s time to get our hands dirty and hack for fun! The next Android hackathon is coming on March 26th, and there are many and interesting changes in the structure of the event. Some of the highlights for the next hackathon are:

  • hackathon starts on Saturday at 13:00
  • you are welcome to bring your own food and cook it there (there is also oven for pizzas and microwave)
  • this time, we will code and hack, so be prepared to get your hands dirty
  • there are several possibilities to write an application together in the community:
    • game with gestures
    • something with maps
    • music generation with gestures
    • something to do with augmented reality and maps
    • if you have any other ideas, please drop us an email ;)
  • if we are enough people, we will split in two teams: one for very basics and the other one for not so basic stuff
  • the idea is to code from 13:00 to 17:00 and then have 15 minutes to present what was done by each team

Please note that we will be using Git for placing our source code. We will use github.org with a public repository, so please install Git in your development environment (e.g. EGit for Eclipse) before you come to the hackathon, we will appreciate it. The Android Aalto Github account is: github.com/AndroidAalto.

The hackathon will be on Saturday, March 26th, starting at 13:00 at the Aalto Venture Garage (see map link below). Just so that you come prepared to the hackathon, we will be using a Git repository to add our source code. Please send us your ideas if you really would like to do something else than what is on the list (either to maksim(at)androidaalto.org or claudio(at)androidaalto.org).

Aalto Venture Garage — Map link

Welcome aboard and see you on March 26th at 13:00! Let’s have a happy hacking!

March 13, 2011 | | Tags: , | No Comments »

AdMob, challenges and tablet ideas

Yesterday we run the third hackathon of the Android Aalto Community. Once again, it was astonishingly fun and enriching, were we covered several interesting activities, including:

  • AdMob presentation: how to include Ads in your Android applications. See presentation below.
  • Greek hackathon challenge: an Android hackathon was running at the same time in Greece. We had a Skype call with them and challenge each other by writing down five questions related to Android.
  • Playing around with our new tablet (Archos 70): we brainstormed about possible ideas and we came to some interesting ideas that we might be implementing in the future as a project.

Let me elaborate a bit on each of the points. First, I held a presentation about AdMob and the basics of using Ads in applications published through the Android Market. It was very interactive and, since it is a very interesting topic (after all, we all want to make money with our apps), everybody was making good questions and we learned from each other.

Secondly, we run a Skype videoconference with another hackathon running at the same time in Athens (Greece). They had been working for the whole weekend in a Valentine’s Day application for Android. We held a challenge, where each team wrote down five questions and then asked the other team. It was very fun and we learned interesting facts and figures about Android (e.g. how many people learn in Dalvik ^__^).

Last, but not least, we were playing a bit with the new tablet the community received, the Archos 70. Maksim upgraded it to Froyo 2.2.1 and we had a brief brainstorming about possible projects that we could do on the tablet. The idea is to create some enriching project were we can create a large team among the members of the community and cooperate to create something useful, fun and attractive. We will continue this discussion about ideas and possible projects in the next hackathon.

So this is all for January, and we hope to see you all in the next event, which will be on February 8th. We will have the second Android Aalto Keynote, running from 18:00 to 20:30 (aprox) at the Aalto Venture Garage (Betonimiehenkuja 3, Espoo), in Otaniemi.

Just to remind you some of the most important events coming related to Android, please check the following list:

  • Android Aalto Keynote #2 — Tuesday 8.2.2011 (18:00 – 20:30) — Aalto Venture Garage
  • Jfokus Stockholm 2011 — 14-16.2.2011 — Stockholm (Sweden) — Please contact Hannu
  • Mobile DevCamp — Saturday 26.2.2011 (10:30 – 18:00) — Arcada (Helsinki)
  • Android Aalto Hackathon #4 — Sometime in February

A big THANKS to all the participants of the hackathon and see you all at the keynote event. As always, you can get more information from our facebook group, following us on twitter (#droidA, @claudiomkd, @MaksimGolivkin) and reading our mailing list (androidaalto@googlegroups.com).

Android Aalto Community — Integrating AdMob in Android Apps

View more presentations from claudiomkd.
January 23, 2011 | | No Comments »

Hackathon #3

First of all, congratulations with the New Year! Hope everybody had a great party and some rest and now are ready for action. There are many promises that 2011 is going to be an interesting time.

If you followed news, you know that Honeycomb, Android 3.0, specially designed for tablets has been presented at CES 2011 (kudos to Ramon for link), along with other interesting gadgets and tablets. More over, it was earlier announced that Google TV is running Android with prospective of application market access.

More Android gadgets -  more opportunities to create cool things! The last hackathon was awesome and we think it is time to come hack again. We would like to invite you to the Hackathon #3 , which is going to happen on January 22 16:00 at Aalto Venture Garage, Betonimiehenkuja 3, Otaniemi, Espoo.

Invitation to the event on Facebook.

January 11, 2011 | | 2 Comments »
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