AndroidTO Conference Recap: Keynotes, Design Talks and Developer Sessions

Getting there

The attendee flew in on Porter, learned there is a shuttle downtown, and took a few wrong turns on the way to Union Station. A transit week pass bought by mistake, a search for an ATM and a hunt for tokens turned the trip into about two and a half hours. The next morning, the Tim Hortons lineup was long, and the venue was already packed shortly after 8:28 a.m.

The booths

Sony, Mindzai, Startapp, Google, Rogers, MaRS and Jamdeo were among the exhibitors. Crowds cleared swag as soon as it appeared, so the attendee chatted with the teams instead. Highlights were the Sony Xperia Go, which was dunked in water as a demo, and Jamdeo, which was working on more apps and systems for Google TV. Sony staff also answered questions about the Sony Google TV box. Kobo handed out ice cream sandwiches, a nod to the Android version, and was launching the Kobo Arc that day.

Opening keynote: Kim Pimmel of Adobe

The talk covered the process behind a good user experience, using textures, lines and artwork to show how design ideas apply to apps. One example was Diptic, an app that a user applied in an artistic way the designers had not expected. Slides were published online.

Design track

Rethinking tablet UX, James Wu of Kobo

The talk argued that people use tablets differently from phones, and that sharing, curating and bringing content into an app should be easier, for example through gestures. The speaker repeated that technology frustrates most people, so an app should not be built around its developer’s habits. A line that stuck: if you train your users to care about what you care about, you will ultimately fall.

Social design, Sachin Monga of Facebook

The session showed how an app can help users tell the story of their experience to friends, using the new Facebook SDK for Android. One figure quoted was that the Facebook app sent people to the Google Play Store more than 174 million times a month.

Developer track

Matthew Patience and Greg Carron of BNotions presented Vicinity, a multi-screen approach where phones act as controllers for a game shown on a Google TV, joining by QR code. A draw for a Sony Google TV box asked for multi-screen app ideas by tweet, and the attendee missed the deadline by a few minutes.

A friend who attended Alan Paulin’s Google session, Architecting your Android app for success, rated it the best of the day. It covered updating functionality without a full app update, splitting an app into a static web part and dynamic data so downloads feel faster, and using analytics.

Business track and closing keynote

Anthony Kanfer of Rogers discussed web apps versus native apps. Web apps are cheaper and easier but lack things like push notifications, while native apps cost time and money. The attendee noted that hybrid apps are just web wrappers.

The closing keynote came from Chris Haseman of Tumblr, titled I wish I’d known that when I started. It was the attendee’s favourite talk: honest about developer mistakes, with good audience questions. It advised learning the rules so you can break them, and cleaning up the look of apps for Gingerbread users. The key line was that Google, carriers and manufacturers do not control Android. Users do.