droidconbe notes

These are my very personal notes on the Droidcon.be gathering on April 2, 2010. Presentations were very short, and we were too much distracted by the twitter wall that was more prominent than the speakers themselves. It was a lot like the first Flash applications: a lot of animation distracting from what was important and creating irritation. Organizers, please make the twitter wall less dominant next time, and reduce the display time: nobody cares about tweets send 2 days ago when you're at the conference....
I did some cherry picking here, as so many topics make it hard to review them all. (Full schedule on www.droidcon.be)

• Google keynote: we were a bit late due to public transport issues and could only follow the final 10-15 minutes of the presentation, but the impression was a bit that Google send some representative that didn't have permission to tell something interesting. On topics that she knew were coming, she had no more information than "I don't know that". And she started the first round in the battle about who's responsible for not having paying apps in the Belgian store: "ask the providers".
  But my impression could be wrong as we missed the major part of the presentation, and other participants seemed to be satisfied...
  
• Mobile Monday

  "This loose network has been recognized as a catalyst for mobile innovation. Mobile Monday defines itself as the community of professionals of mobility."

  Looks interesting. I already put their session on Augmented Reality on 3rd of May in my agenda...
  
• Betagroup.be
  

  "The BetaGroup is a group of 2.100 Web Entrepreneurs in Belgium passionate about Internet, Software, Mobile Technologies and Online Media.
  We aim to connect Entrepreneurs, Creative Thinkers, Software Developers, Digital Marketers, Web Designers, Web Agencies, Advertisers, Publishers, VC’s and Business Angels to innovate together. We want to provide a platform to meet each other, present our projects and foster new collaborations."

  I think you need to check out these guys if you plan to start your own business, but personally, I'm not that entrepreneurial (yet).
  
• OneSocialWeb: provides a framework for integrating social web services into your application using XMPP. (Hey, we were no so mad after all in the good old ReNA days to use XMPP for our prototypes.)
  However, I had a bit the feeling that they were focussing a bit too much on dedicated XMPP servers, and thus not harvesting the existing social networks. But overall feeling for me was: "I wish we had that 3 years ago."
  
• Game publishing on Android: a lot of interesting facts and figures about mobile gaming. I hope we have access to the presentations soon.
  
• Sportwereld sportsapp - cross platform development presented an application written for iPhone and Android using Appcelerator's Titanium development environment: you write your application in HTML5 + CSS3, have access to native stuff like GPRS, camera, accelerometer, and compile directly to native Android and iPhone applications. I also looked very neat, so I immediately downloaded the stuff! (Meanwhile I found out that it only works from Android 1.6 on, which is a bit a bummer for me, but hey, you can't have it all.)
  
• Build apps with Flash for Android: I expected something like the Titanium topic, but hey, Adobe keeps disappointing me last years at conferences. No access to the camera, need Froyo and new Android machines to run Flash in the browser... I think I'll skip Flash for some time...
  
• Android App: STIB Very much impressed! (Unfortunately, the bus I needed to go home was not an STIB bus...)
  
• Closing keynote: Ramon's vision I liked it a lot: the guy was telling all of developpers the most import lesson: it's only people that matter in the end...