Categories
Mobile Reading Material

New book: “Androids: The Team That Built the Android Operating System”

Androids: The Team That Built the Android Operating System is a new book written by Chet Haase, a long-time lead on the Android UI toolkit team, and more recently, an Android developer advocate.

This article is part of the Android August series, in which I’m writing an Android development-related article every day during the month of August 2021.

Haase has been on the Android team since 2010, which is back when it was still considered to be the “wild card” in the race for mobile OS dominance. This gives him serious “in the room where it happened” cred, as well as access to people, photos, documentation, and other behind-the-scenes information about the creation of a operating system that now drives over 3 billion active devices today.

The original demo, written by Brian Swetland and Chris White and later enhanced by Fadden, showing a home screen and several apps (most of which were not implemented). It’s a far cry from a modern Android home screen.
The is the original demo of Android on a mid-2000s phone, showing a home screen and a selection of apps, most of which weren’t implemented at the time. Hey, it was a demo for a pitch! (Photo by Chet Haase)

Android wasn’t originally meant to be a phone OS. The original plan was for it to be an advanced OS for digital cameras, which were more common back in the early 2000s, and it’s the use case they presented to investors in early 2004.

It was later decided that the camera market wasn’t big enough, and that Android should aim for the same space occupied by the big mobile operating systems at the time: Symbian (the most popular mobile OS until 2010) and Windows Mobile. They courted Samsung and HTC, but in July 2005, Google made the prescient decision to acquire Android for $50 million. According to Wikipedia, this move was described in 2010 as Google’s “best deal ever” by their then VP of corporate development, David Lawee, to whom I reported during the dot-com era at OpenCola.

A Look Back at the First Android Phone, 10 Years Later | Digital Trends
The first commercially-available Android device: The HTC Dream, also known as the T-Mobile G1, released September 2008. (Creative Commons photo by Michael Oryl.)

Androids is an insider’s history of the Android operating system, but Haase also promises that it won’t be above a non-techie’s head:

Instead, it’s a history: It describes the events, stories, experiences, thinking, and decisions made by the Android team, most notably in the early days, well before the present-day concept of a smartphone existed.

Want to find more about the book? Check out these articles:

Want to get the book? There are a couple of ways to do so:

The book will also be available in paperback form.

The Connectory
Women Who Code: WWCode is a non profit that helps mid-career engineers get promoted. | Y Combinator

Here’s another reason to buy the book: Haase is donating profits from the book to Black Girls Code and Women Who Code.

Categories
Mobile Programming

Learn how to build an Android app using MVVM

Last week, I pointed you to Tutorials.EU’s video tutorial, Everything You Need To Know About Retrofit in Android | Get Data from an API, which showed you how to build an app that accesses the Rick and Morty API using the Retrofit HTTP client for Android.

This article is part of the Android August series, in which I’m writing an Android development-related article every day during the month of August 2021.

This week, they expand on that tutorial by showing you how to clean up the project’s architecture by refactoring it so that it uses the MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) architecture:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Fn5vj74Oa8

This video is the second in a series. In next week’s video, you’ll change the implementation so that it uses coroutines to perform tasks in the background.

Categories
Current Events Tampa Bay

What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech/entrepreneur/nerd scene (Week of Monday, August 16, 2021)

Here’s your weekly list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events — plus a little area tech news — for Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for the week of Monday, August 16 through Sunday, August 22, 2021.

This is a weekly service from Tampa Bay’s tech blog, Global Nerdy! For the past four years, I’ve been compiling a list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events happening in Tampa Bay and surrounding areas. There’s a lot going on in our scene here in “The Other Bay Area, on the Other West Coast”!

As far as event types go, this list casts a rather wide net. It includes events that would be of interest to techies, nerds, and entrepreneurs. It includes (but isn’t limited to) events that fall under the category of:

  • Programming, DevOps, systems administration, and testing
  • Tech project management / agile processes
  • Video, board, and role-playing games
  • Book, philosophy, and discussion clubs
  • Tech, business, and entrepreneur networking events
  • Toastmasters (because nerds really need to up their presentation game)
  • Sci-fi, fantasy, and other genre fandoms
  • Anything I deem geeky

I’m moving this list to Fridays so that you’ve got more time to plan for the upcoming week. Let me know if this change works for you (or if it doesn’t)!

By “Tampa Bay and surrounding areas”, this list covers events that originate or are aimed at the area within 100 miles of the Port of Tampa. At the very least, that includes the cities of Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Clearwater, but as far north as Ocala, as far south as Fort Myers, and includes Orlando and its surrounding cities.

This week’s events

Monday, August 16

Tuesday, August 17

Wednesday, August 18

Thursday, August 19

Friday, August 20

Saturday, August 21

Sunday, August 22

Do you have any events or announcements that you’d like to see on this list?

Let me know at joey@joeydevilla.com!

Join the mailing list!

If you’d like to get this list in your email inbox every week, enter your email address below. You’ll only be emailed once a week, and the email will contain this list, plus links to any interesting news, upcoming events, and tech articles. Join the Tampa Bay Tech Events list and always be informed of what’s coming up in Tampa Bay!

Categories
Current Events Entrepreneur Tampa Bay

“Funding Florida’s Growth”: Thursday, Aug. 12 at Embarc Collective

On Thursday, August 12th from 5:30 p.m. – 7:30 p.m. at Embarc Collective, TiE Tampa Bay will host Florida’s Office of Financial Regulation Commissioner, Russell C. Weigel III in an event titled Funding Florida’s Growth. It will include a networking reception followed by their special guest speakers:

As the event page says:

The goal is to promote Florida’s economy by creating a self-sustaining, in-state capital market where many newly formed businesses can obtain seed or expansion capital. The desired outcome is to have Florida residents and businesses receive capital from within our state and ultimately remain in Florida and contribute to the state’s economy.

Visit the event page to find out more or to register for the event!

Categories
Current Events

The crypto amendment silliness is straight out of “The Simpsons”

From the Decrypt article Bitcoin Lobby Loses: Senate Rejects Revised Crypto Tax Provisions in Infrastructure Bill…

The Senate rejected an amendment championed by the cryptocurrency industry that exempts non-custodial crypto actors from a crypto tax reporting requirement built into the $1 trillion infrastructure bill.

The amendment failed after Senator Richard Shelby attempted to tack on $50 billion in military infrastructure spending to it.

If this kind of silliness seems familiar, it’s because something similar played out in that episode of The Simpsons where a comet is headed straight for Springfield:

Categories
Mobile Programming

Android’s Camera2 API

This article is part of the Android August series, in which I’m writing an Android development-related article every day during the month of August 2021.

If you want to write an Android app that interacts with the camera beyond merely taking a picture or shooting some video, you’ll want to make use of the Camera2 API, which became available at API level 21 (a.k.a. Android 5.0, a.k.a. Lollipop), which goes all the way back to late 2014.

There are a number of recently published articles and documents that you can consult if you’d like to explore Camera2:

Categories
Mobile Programming

It’s time to get a head start with Jetpack Compose

This article is part of the Android August series, in which I’m writing an Android development-related article every day during the month of August 2021.

As I mentioned in the previous article in this series, the biggest development in the latest version of Android Studio (at least as far as I’m concerned) is that Jetpack Compose is now included, and therefore official.

Jetpack Compose is Android’s declarative UI, which puts it in the same general category as iOS’ SwiftUI or Facebook’s React.

Jetpack Compose is called declarative as opposed to imperative, which is often summarized as building UIs in a “this is what it should be like” way versus a “this is how it should be created”. It’s the difference between this…

// Imperative UI (Kotlin)
// ======================
val helloButton = Button()
helloButton.text = "Hello, World!"
val layout = Layout()
layout.add(helloButton)

…and this:

// Declarative UI (Kotlin)
// =======================
Layout {
    Button("Hello, World!")
}

The first one specifies, step by step, how to build a simple UI, while the second simply says “this is the UI I want”.

This is a brand new way to build Android UIs, and it’s expected to become the standard way. Now is you chance to get a head start, and the following links can be your first steps.

Get Started with Jetpack Compose

If you want to learn Jetpack Compose, start here — at developer.android.com, where they’ve got a page of links on learning the basics.

Android Developers’ Jetpack Compose Tutorial

In this official tutorial direct from Android’s own creators, you’ll learn Jetpack Compose by building a screen for a chat app that features:

  • A list of expandable and animated messages
  • With each message containing an image and some text,
  • Using Material Design principles with a dark theme included

…and all in fewer than 100 lines of code.

Android Developers’ Jetpack Compose Basics

You’ll want to supplement the article above with this video, which also has you writing a list-based application using Jetpack Compose.

CODE Magazine’s A Practical Introduction to Jetpack Compose Android Apps

This article introduces Jetpack Compose in small steps, starting with a “Hello, World!” app. It goes from there to introduce key concepts such as state, modifiers, and layouts. Finally, you’re introduced to the list and are shown how to use it by building a list of famous comic book superheroes.