Devoxx: Then and Now

I'm starting to prepare presentations for the ~8 hours of talks that Romain and I are giving at Devoxx in a couple of weeks. "Preparing" generally entails mostly worrying, followed by a mad rush of writing slides and code at night, on the long flight, after beers, between talks, and sometimes during the talks. It's a busy time of year.

I realized that the organizers of Devoxx had recently released all of the recorded talks from last year into the wild (read: they're free on parleys.com), so it seemed worth linking to them in case anyone wanted to see what we had to say last time around.

I'll give a plug for the conference and the Parleys site here. If there were an ad banner, it'd go here. Not because I'm paid (I would make a poor ad salesman, apparently), but because I think that both the conference and the parleys site rock. The organizers do a great job of putting it all together, and the recordings and presentation of the talks on parleys.com is the best I've seen by far of any conferences I've spoken at.

Yes, that young man on the pedestal is
throwing a hand. It's an Antwerp thing.

Parleys is a subscription site; after the annual conference, you can join for the year (for a fee of 79 Euros) to watch all talks given at the conference. During that year, the talks are made freely available, one by one, then at the end they are all free. That year has passed, so the 2010 talks are all available now for free. If you enjoy them, consider joining parleys next time around to see them earlier. Or better yet, join us in balmy Antwerp, where the beer is good and so are the fries.

Dive into Android, Part 1
Romain talks about layout. This talk includes live-coding a custom layout, which is a good lesson in how to do it yourself (although you probably don't need to do it on stage in front of the cameras to make it work the way you want).

Dive into Android, Part 2
I talk about custom graphics. This is kind of a Filthy Rich Client talk, but more focused on the core principles and approaches of doing custom graphics in Android applications. nothing over-the-top filthy, just good stuff to know about Android GUI development.

Android Graphics and Animations
We cover lots of architectural details about the Android platform, including the view hierarchy, classes used in custom graphics, and pre-3.0 animations (remember: this talk was given before Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) was released).

Android UI Development: Tips, Tricks, & Techniques
This talk consists of a smattering of tips that will help you write efficient Android applications. We discuss the various tools that you should use, techniques for avoiding unnecessary garbage creation, and various performance tips.

Flex 4 FunThis is my swan song for the platform that I worked on prior to Android, and for my Flex 4 Fun book that was published last year. I cover various things from the book, including graphics objects, filters, states and transitions, component skinning, and (of course) animation effects (the area I worked on for Flex 4). Lots of demos and code.