Posts tagged ‘Events’
We’re taking this show on the road, folks. Our VP of Engineering, David Teitelbaum, is presenting a class at DroidCon London! That’s right, ladies and gents. We’re bringing our Android hacking love across the pond to show all the devs in the UK how to hack their favorite Android apps straight off Google Play. The class will teach developers the fundamentals of APK reverse engineering, including Dalvik executable disassembly/reassembly, code injection, and view hacking using tools such as Smali/Baksmali and Romain Guy’s awesome ViewServer.
Here are the deets:
Who?
David Teitelbaum presenting at Droidcon London
What?
Who Needs Thumbs? Android Instrumentation and Reverse Engineering
When?
Friday, October 26, 14:00 – 14:45
Where?
Business Design Centre
52 Upper Street
Islington
London
N1 0QH
So what do you say, UK? Want to meet up with us and find out what Apkudo is all about? Put the lager on ice (we’re talking to you, @dnlkbox) and give us a shout at SayHi@apkudo.com. Hey – we might even bring you a rad “Hacker” t-shirt!
Come on…you know you want one.
Boy oh boy, it feels like AnDevCon II was only yesterday, doesn’t it? All those workshops, classes, that fabulous expo…
Android developers – we’ve been missing you. Let’s #GetBuzzed again next week, shall we?
We’ve got a boatload of things happening at AnDevCon III and we can’t wait to see each and every one of you. Here’s what we’re up to:
Tuesday, May 15
At 1:45 pm Apkudo Engineer David Teitelbaum and CEO Josh Matthews will present the class, “Who Needs Thumbs? Android Instrumentation and Reverse Engineering.” This advanced level class will teach developers the fundamentals of APK reverse engineering, including Dalvik executable disassembly/reassembly, code injection, and view hacking using tools such as Smali/Baksmali and Romain’s awesome ViewServer, and then some. It’s so awesome that 9 out of 10 doctors recommend you should probably check it out.
After our kick-ass class, Josh will mesmerize everyone for 5 minutes with his Aussie accent during the AnDevCon Lightning Talks. Join us at 5:30 pm where you’ll hear from a bunch of great speakers talking about a bunch of great things. Josh will give a quick update on what we’ve been up to over here, including our work on our newest App Analytics project, Ape. And, hopefully, he won’t forget to mention our booth number this time (it’s #901).
Wednesday, May 16
This is when the fun begins. Join us in booth 901 when the exhibits open at 11:00 am! We’ve got cookies, we’ve got Red Bull, we’ve got tech previews, we’ve got a Winner’s Circle prize (Sony Blu-Ray player with built in Wi-Fi and Google TV), and we’ve also got your ticket to the free Apkudo Drink-Up at Knuckle’s Bar on May 16 from 7:00 – 10:00 pm. Pick up your t-shirt at our booth then wear it to the bar and drink/eat for free:
That’s a good lookin’ shirt.
We’ll also be talking about Apkudo Device Analytics for OEMs and Operators and its synergies with Apkudo App Analytics. As if all of this weren’t enough, we’ll have a few extra surprises at the booth to Monkey around with. Look, I can’t tell you what it is, but I’ll give you a hint. You’ve got to promise not to tell anyone, it’s a secret…if you bring your apk, we’ll bring the udo. 😉
Wednesday Night (still May 16)
Get your drinking pants (and t-shirts) on, cause we’re going to #GetBuzzed. Like I said above, wear your sweet new Hacker shirt to Knuckle’s Bar from 7:00 – 10:00 pm and drinks and snacks are on Apkudo. We’ve also got a themed drink, The Apkudo: Maker’s Mark on the Rocks. Like our Analytics platform, this drink is totally uncomplicated, incredibly easy, super awesome, and free! Plus, it’s kind of how we roll.
Thursday, May 17
Let us apologize in advance for your inevitable headache from the night before. Heed this advice: bring aspirin!
Didn’t get enough of Apkudo on Wednesday? Come check us out again at booth 901 from 11:00 – 2:30! Don’t forget to enter to win our Winner’s Circle prize – a Sony Blu-Ray player with built in Wi-Fi and Google TV! The winner will be announced at 2:30 on the exhibit floor. Best of luck to everyone!
Wow! Just writing this is making me tired. I hope you’re all ready, AnDevCon III is going to be a blast! We’re looking forward to seeing you all there!
-Kate Lyons, COO
Hear ye, hear ye, fellow tech nerds! The glorious Consumer Electronics Show is upon us and you know what that means, right? A crop of new Android phones! But with the bountiful harvest of these snazzy new gadgets comes…dun dun dun…fragmentation!
Ah, fragmentation. The Android application developers mortal coil. Different UIs from different OEMs, divergence in hardware, look and feel, behavior, APIs, etc, etc, we developers need a hero. Enter Ice Cream Sandwich. While ICS is a step in the right direction for fragmentation in some respects (e.g. unifying Honeycomb and Gingerbread), there are some ways it makes things a bit harder:
Screen Resolutions
The launch of ICS coincided with the new Galaxy Nexus touting an unprecedented 1280 x 720 display compared to the ‘ordinary’ 800 x 480 displays of the past. Plucked against Gingerbread, ICS also brings along a new method of reporting screen resolutions and adds a new kick with on-screen ‘hardware’ keys for phones. On devices without dedicated hardware keys, a portion of the screen is allocated to providing on-screen hardware keys, thus slightly altering the remaining available display region. Previous methods to report the screen resolution, display.getWidth/getHeight have been deprecated and replaced by display.getSize.
These differences may lead to complications with unusual object placement/layouts and simple incompatibilities. For example, the popular 3rd party keyboard, ‘Swype’ is problematic on the Galaxy Nexus with a message explaining an unsupported screen resolution. A temporary solution has been discovered by users by modifying the config file, ‘display0_SwypeScreen.ini’ to suit the appropriate screen size.
Menus
For devices without physical hardware keys, ICS programmatically displays a virtual menu key depending if the application requires it. A new ‘Action Bar’ has been brought over from Android 3.0 which is included if the activity uses the Theme.Halo theme – which is the default theme if either the targetSdkVersion or minSdkVersion is set to 11 or greater. In the presence of the action bar, a menu key will appear typically near the top right of the display. In absence, a menu key appears among the row of soft keys to the bottom of the display. However, even between standard Google applications like Gmail, Calendar, Maps, Gallery, Market, etc, which make use of the new Action Bar, the location of the virtual menu key varies making the user search around for three little dots.
In addition to the differences in the virtual menu key’s location, the operation of the menu key can occasionally be problematic. In certain apps such as Gravity Guy, Guerrilla Bob, and Market Enabler, a virtual menu key appears at the bottom next to the row of soft keys, yet it doesn’t serve any purpose. Pressing the menu key yields no response leading the user to think something has gone awry. Similarly before being updated, the popular application ‘Facebook for Android’ did not have any menu key appear at all despite the undoubted existence of a menu page.
Hardware Acceleration
As the display resolutions of Android mobile devices reach PC levels (many 13″ laptops are only at 1280 x 800), the demand for offloading screen rendering to the GPU is ever more important especially when a fluid 60fps experience is desired. ICS incorporates the level of hardware acceleration that existed with Android 3.0. Dianne Hackborn from Google:
“The implementation [of hardware acceleration] in Android 4.0 is not any more full than in 3.0… The main change in this regard in Android 4.0 is that now apps that are explicitly targeting 4.0 or higher will have acceleration enabled by default rather than having to put android:hardwareAccelerated=”true” in their manifest.”
This similarity brings forth drawbacks for developers who may want to use hardware acceleration. A number of operations such as Canvas.clipPath, Canvas.drawPicture and Paint.setLinearText are not supported by hardware acceleration at the moment. Tiny Towers crashes with logcat citing ‘E/AndroidRuntime(20581): java.lang.
UnsupportedOperationException at android.view.GLES20Canvas.clipPath’ when GPU acceleration is forced. Whilst this may be a non-issue for Bob and Jane, developers may find it difficult and frustrating to have to re-develop their application to take advantage of hardware acceleration in order to improve user experience. In the case of new applications, a dilemma may arise between using a certain operation but not being able to gain hardware acceleration, against a possibly less favorable operation but able to be accelerated.
New API’s
Often with a major OS release comes a number of new additions. In the case of Android 4.0, one of these is a new set of documented APIs for accessing Calendar data. However, as this was only released with Android 4.0, a number of developers had previously developed their applications using old undocumented Calendar APIs, some of which use low-level access to the calendar database.
As mentioned here http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/10/ics-and-non-public-apis.html, some developers may find that their apps won’t run correctly on ICS without some updates being made. Applications such as SMS Backup+ were initially broken after ICS first released owing to a change in Calendar APIs, with recent specific changes just made in order to have Calendar features working once more. https://github.com/jberkel/sms-backup-plus/pull/206. It is without a doubt that these new API’s ease the task for future apps and developers, but in the mean time in order to support older releases, a bit of extra work needs to be done.
With all new OS version and device releases, there’s going to be some good and some bad. Google is trying to steer the Android ship away from fragmentation by offering a common base for all mobile devices and providing more official APIs for developers to use. However, changes need to be made. As developers we can’t rest on our laurels and wait for Google to figure it out, and we definitely can’t wait around for every OEM to push ICS updates for every Android model – some of the most popular devices may not even get it. We need to write code and then it to make sure it actually works on real devices. Unless everyone starts churning out code according to the books and the professors who jabbered on about ‘tightly coupled code’, certain things are going to break one way or another.
If only there were a way to see my app run on all of these devices so I could know with confidence that it works…oh, wait.
-Benjamin Tseng
Apkudo Engineer
Last Wednesday I tweeted, “If you don’t leave a conference absolutely exhausted, you’re not doing it right. #AnDevCon”
I said it because the energy at AnDevCon’s was palpable and it took a lot for all of us at Apkudo to keep up! I’m sure we’ve all been to our fair share of boring, stiff conferences, but AnDevCon blew those shows out of the water. We can’t thank the conference organizers and attendees enough for allowing us to contribute to such an amazing show!
Here are a few of the highlights from AnDevCon:
Josh’s Lightning Talk about the Apkudo Test Platform was very well received. If you weren’t able to attend these Lightning Talks, check out Josh’s talk below.
*Note to self: next time use a tripod. 
Buzz on the exhibit floor around the Apkudo booth:
If only we took more pictures! The energy around our booth was phenomenal. We met tons of people who asked really fantastic questions about the Apkudo Test Platform and our company. We came to the show with 450 t-shirts and gave away 429 of them on the first day. Within the first hour of the exhibit floor being open, we were flooded with developers wanting to speak with us and get a shirt! All for very good reason, too. Why?
The “Get Buzzed” t-shirts were your ticket to the Apkudo After Party at Knuckles Bar! This was definitely a lot of fun. We had an awesome time meeting and getting buzzed with all of the developers that came out to Knuckles. It was quite funny to see everyone wearing the same shirt, too.
Head over to our Facebook or Google+ pages to check out all of the photos!
All of that drinking left us thirsty for knowledge. Thankfully Apkudo CTO, Nicholas Fitzroy-Dale, was able to quench that thirst with a really engaging class about app testing methods called “Testing Sucks, But It Doesn’t Have To”. If you missed his presentation, you can listen to the (lo-fi) audio here:
Testing Sucks, But It Doesn’t Have To
It takes a bit of time to download, so please be patient! Just want the slides? Fair enough. Check them out on Slideshare.
Thanks again to everyone we met at AnDevCon, we had a blast! If you’re interested in a private beta invite or want to keep in touch, email us at sayhi@apkudo.com.
-Kate
apkudo 