Category: Conferences

OSCON 2013 – Presentation on Android SDK Geolocation

If you are headed to OSCON, swing by my session on Mastering Android Geolocation. It’s a deep dive into the Android SDKs android.location package. If you’ve ever wanted to learn about the fundamental’s of the SDKs Geolocation capabilities then this is a must attend session. It will also give you a strong foundation to understand the underlying capabilities of the new Google Play Services SDK that includes Fused Location, Activity Recognition, and Geofencing APIs.

The presentation includes digging into the capabilities of my open source GPS Testing tool that lets you easily test different aspects of the Geolocation capabilities.

Here’s the details and I hope to see you there:

 Location, Location, Location: Mastering Android Geolocation
07/25/2013  5:00pm –  5:40pm PDT (40 minutes)
Room: Portland 251 (capacity: 200)
https://www.oscon.com/oscon2013/public/schedule/detail/28713

Hack4Colorado 2013 – Civic Hackathon

Do you live in Colorado and want to have fun playing with code, learn new APIs and datasets, and generally testing your coding “skillz” while under pressure and competing with other hotshot developers for prizes? If you answered “yes”, then I strongly recommend you check out the opportunities at the Hack4Colorado event which takes place on the weekend of May 31st. This event is part of a national civic hacking day where other States, Counties and Cities around the country are doing exactly the same thing.

The concept is simple. These events help promote open government data that can be used within applications that you build to solve everyday problems. So, these organizations provide you with cool data sets to choose from and you have fun building an application around it. Ideas include find the nearest rent-a-bike location, explore local hiking trails and so much more.

Full disclosure, Esri has also graciously offered to provide bountiful cash (yes, cash!) prizes. Other sponsors are offering Rokus, Kinects, and even Big Wheels (yes you also heard that right!). I even have an application in mind that I might try to build when I’m not helping other folks out.

What do you think? Hopefully I’ll see you there.

Esri DevSummit 2013 – Worlds Largest Geo Developer Conference

I will be presenting in Palm Springs, California in a few weeks and I hope to chat with some of you there. For those of you who are interesting in Geospatial, the Esri Developer Summit is the largest gathering of geo-spatial developers that I know of. I don’t know the exact numbers, but it’s going to be over 1,500 geo-geeks. If you want to learn about the technical aspects of geo-spatial this is “the” conference.

I’m going to be talking a lot about mobile this year and how to transition from the desktop environment to mobile. Sure there are lots of experts out there building awesome mobile apps, but there are also many, may developers, organizations and companies that are just starting to get their feet wet.

I have four topics this year, so swing on by and say “hi”. Oh, and be sure to bring sun block and hot weather clothes. I hear the temperatures my reach 100F! Here are my sessions:

  • Best Practices for HTML5 Geolocation – This will be an A-to-Z overview of the HTML5 Geocation API including the good and the not-so-good. (Tue. 2:30p, Demo Theater 2 and Thur., 1:15pm Mesquite G/H)
  • Getting Started with the ArcGIS Runtime SDK for Android – Great session if you are getting ready to start doing native geo-spatial development on Android (Mon. 1pm, Pasadena Rm.)
  • Building Mobile Applications with the ArcGIS API for Flex – Apache Flex is an incredibly easy-to-use platform where you can take one code base and compile for native iOS and Android. (Tue. 5:30pm Primrose C/D)
  • iOS and Android: Let’s have a hug – this is a fun session where @geeknixta and I get to make fun of each other as well as show off the similarities of our Runtime SDKs on iOS and Android. I’m the Android fanboy, of course. (Wed. 5:30pm, Catalina/Madera)