Day 1 Droidcon UK in London

HeavenHell @DroidconUK in London preview made by Nelphy (Diotasoft)


I had the honor to see some sequences of the new HeavenHell game made by Nelphy Games (Faceboook, Twitter). The game is realized using Unity3D and will be available on Android and iOS.

Smooth, responsive and user-friendly UIs: Greendroid prime

Talk by Cyril Mottier, the developer of Greendroid, a popular Android opensource library on github that implements improved user interfaces, like ActionBar, impressive variety ListView examples and a lot more. He talked about principles to optimize and turbo charge your application. Pronciples he follows while developing Greendroid. Here are some essential points (not complete!)

• Responsiveness, give visual feedback to user action as fast as possible
• User-friendliness, task-oriented vs feature-oriented
• Respect the Android UI-Thread, do computation intense stuff in separate parallel threads (AsynchTask)
• priorize, stop loading/computing when important animal running, reduce of priority of thread/process

Somehow new to me was the fact that you should consider to use services instead of asynctask. Since AsyncTask restarts when the device orientation changes (reload layout). One example could be an image gallery, that loads its content from a webservice in a background thread. Its not improbable that the user switches often in between Landscape and Portrait mode, when watching a single image.

I hereby clarify that Greendroid supports also honeycomb tablet devices! There is only a naming issue concerning the ActionBar method, which will be fixed soon. I tweeted that there is incombatibility, which is not correct!

Surprise surprise! Blackberry goes Android. I heard it before, but RIM indeed had a booth at Droidcon. Unfortunately there were no devices available for developers to test their apps on RIM products.








Papayamobil Talk

The main news (for me!!) at the Papayamobil talk was that there users that indeed spent insane amount of money for Game items. Apparently one single user spent 2400$ on items though in-App purchase. So make sure your game will integrate this feature. Papayamobile games make most money though the in-app payement. There will be Papayamobil iOS support in the near future.


OpenGLES2 & Android QEMU Emulator

Two developers from Accenture presented their work on a Emulator for Android that supports OpenGL ES 2.0 specification. This is quite important work, since up to today, developers without OpenGL ES 2.0 capable phones can't pretty much test their code during development. OpenGL ES 2.0 is the standard implementation for 3D rendering on mobile devices on Android as well as on the IPhone/IPad.

The project is available for download on github.