By SW staff
The Android Developer Conference (AnDevCon) took place in the Boston, MA Sheraton Hotel from May 27 to 30, 2014. Hosted by BZ Media LLC, the event spanned four days of more than 75 intensive technical classes and tutorials on building high-quality Android applications (apps), creating in-house apps linked to enterprise systems, and marketing apps more effectively.
The event kicked off on with a keynote presentation that focused on Yahoo Weather, an app that won numerous awards for functionality and appearance. Albert Song, senior director of design for mobile and emerging products, Yahoo, spoke to attendees, as well as his colleague Alex Hanuska, senior software development manager, Yahoo.
The event’s Thursday keynote included Going Native — Delivering Exceptional User Experiences with Cross-Platform Native Development Tools by Jeff McVeigh, GM, performance client and visual computing, developer products division, Intel. Leon Farasati, staff product manager, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., concluded the event with a presentation on Friday.
One of the event’s main draws was its educational sessions, which included more than 80 classes on mobile app development. Attendees were able to create a custom Andriod developer training experience with a series of overview, intermediate, and advanced classes.
Additionally, Android developers benefited from full- and half-day Android tutorials, from an introductory boot camp to deep dives into topics such as 2D physics.
Speakers also presented throughout the event, included a late night talk, Android Design Panel: Design Is The New Black, hosted by Dan Bricklin, CTO, Alpha Software. Bricklin is a fellow of both the Association for Computing Machinery and the Computer History Museum, and received the IEEE Computer Society Computer Entrepreneur Award for pioneering the development and commercialization of the spreadsheet. He is a founding trustee of the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council and holds a degree in Electrical Engineering from MIT and an MBA from Harvard University.
Exhibitor Showcase
Between presentations, classes, and tutorials, attendees were able to stop into the conference’s exhibit hall for networking and demonstrations from the event’s sponsors and exhibitors. Here are highlights from a few vendors.
Alpha Software empowers a range of business application developers with development and deployment products that offer significant productivity gains. Alpha Anywhere is the company’s complete front-end to back-end, prototype-to-production environment for rapid development and deployment of enterprise-level, cross-platform mobile, and Web business applications.
Couchbase provides NoSQL database technology and the company behind the Couchbase open source project. Couchbase Server, the company’s flagship product, is a NoSQL document-oriented database with production deployments at AOL, Cisco, Concur, LinkedIn, Orbitz, Salesforce.com, Shuffle Master, Zynga, and hundreds of other household names worldwide. Couchbase Mobile, the newest product from Couchbase, is a lightweight mobile NoSQL database with Android and Apple iOS platform support that can meet developers’ online and offline mobile app requirements. Couchbase is particularly well suited for interactive applications and is known for its scalability, consistent high performance, 24 by 365 availability, and a flexible data model for ease of development.
Crittercism is the company behind the first mobile app performance management—or mAPM—solution. It provides a real-time global view of app diagnostics across multiple platforms and is used on more than 500 million unique devices and in more than 100 billion app sessions.
Intel designs and builds the essential technologies that serve as the foundation for the world’s computing devices. Intel is also helping businesses maximize the value of their big data investment, with the Intel Data Platform, a software suite based on open source technologies designed to make it easier and faster for companies to move from big data to big discoveries.
LEAD Technologies, Inc. develops and publishes LEADTOOLS, a line of digital imaging software development toolkits. LEADTOOLS is a family of comprehensive toolkits designed to help programmers integrate raster, document, medical, multimedia, and vector imaging into their desktop, server, tablet, and mobile applications.
New Relic is a software analytics company that makes sense of billions of metrics about millions of applications in real time. Its comprehensive Software as a Service-based solution provides one interface for Web and native mobile apps and consolidates the performance monitoring data for any chosen technology in a particular environment. Its customers use the cloud solution to optimize more than 118 billion metrics for two million apps.
More than one million developers, testers, and operations professionals use SmartBear software tools to ensure the quality and performance of their APIs, mobile, cloud-based, and Web apps. With five million downloads and counting, SmartBear products are affordable, easy-to-use, and ready for deployment. Free tools and plug-ins for automation and performance testing, code review, and Web site monitoring are available for download on the Web site.
Android Education
The AnDevCon technical conference provides software developers building Android apps a place to learn and network with peers to both extend and share their knowledge in an educational, fun, and exciting environment. SW
Jun2014, Software Magazine
