Reposted from the Solutions for SE Asia blog.

CodeAndroid is the Android Developer group for Singapore, a grassroot developer initiative to promote Android development locally as well as provide network and resources for everyone to benefit from it. Android is an open source operating system for mobile and embedded devices that is developed by the Open Handset Alliance, with the vision to create an open platform for device manufacturers, telcos and developers to foster innovation and speed up the creation of software to meet mobile users' needs. Since its formation in February 2009, CodeAndroid has organized four meet ups and gathered over 50 developers and users for each session, for developers to share their Android experience.

We also welcome non-developers who are interested in learning more about the Android platform and want to pick up basic concepts for development. Please feel free to also attend and network if you are a marketer or business owner looking for people to help you build your Android applications.

Looking forward, CodeAndroid is looking to help other cities around the region to setup CodeAndroid meetups, so as to build an Asia Pacific network of Android developers, to share resources and contacts. Even if you are from outside Singapore, and want to make a contribution to the Android community, feel free to contact us at codeandroid.org@gmail.com!

Check out the Singapore Application Directory for the list of Singapore-developed Android applications. You can also find them in Android Market, accessible via your Android-powered phone like the recently launched HTC Hero.

To keep informed of CodeAndroid happenings, or you wish to contribute to the community, you can follow us via:

CodeAndroid Website: www.Codeandroid.org

Facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=54219346370&ref=mf

Facebook fan page: http://www.facebook.com/CodeAndroid

Twitter: www.twitter.com/codeandroid

Google Groups: http://groups.google.com/group/WeCodeAndroid

IRC Channel (come and chat with us!): #codeandroid on irc.freenode.net (server)

Alternatively you can also download the CodeAndroid widget on your Android phone: Click here on your Android phone to install or search for "CodeAndroid" in Android market.

Mark the date, the next meetup will be on the 26th of September, 2pm at Google Singapore office (we will post up the event post very soon). Stay tuned to our group fan page as we are bringing a web conference call with the folks of Wikitude!

Photos and the slides from our last meetup are below. We would love to see you at our next meetup.

Test Driven Development: Part 2

View more presentations from CodeAndroid.

Design for Responsiveness : Multi-Threading

View more documents from CodeAndroid.

Introduction to Canvas

View more presentations from CodeAndroid.

Why Code 'for' Android and Motodev Studio

View more documents from CodeAndroid.

Guest Post From Zi Yong Chua, CodeAndroid

Following the success of last year's first ever DevFest tour in Southeast Asia, where companies like eXo Platform, Friendster, Globant, Google, hi5 and others presented on the new OpenSocial standard and its capacities to add social to any website activity, Google and eXo Platform organized simultaneous OpenSocial hackathons is three different cities: Hanoi (Vietnam), Sydney (Australia), and Singapore.

The goal of these hackathons was to show how to handle the new standard and to start working on it with Open Social partners that could help.

More than 50 people joined these events and it was nice to see enthusiastic people wanting to have a deeper understanding of OpenSocial uses. Among all these people, we met website developers wanting to add a social aspect to their web activities, as well as social network developers interested in the new technology and its possibilities.

In Hanoi, Vietnam, Jérémi Joslin, eXo Social product manager for eXo Platform, did a great presentation for application developers as well as for containers. Jérémi also explained how eXo Social leverages the OpenSocial standard and how it can be easily implemented on other major social networks.

The principal hack came from the NewHanoian.com website, whose founder, Tom Lancaster, wanted to increase the social penetration of the site.

It was a great exchange, and people discussed together about the standard, how to write applications, how to implement the server using Shindig and everybody got 2 t-shirts. It was also a great time for meeting other companies, sharing ideas and setting up new projects around the OpenSocial standard and other subjects.

All in all, it was an interesting meeting involving enthusiastic people and we hope at eXo Platform and WebPal to have feedback on their OpenSocial use.

In Sydney, Australia, 12 developers came to the Google Sydney office. Most of the attendees, who ranged from freelance contractors to employees of Australian startups like Atlassian, Momentville, and Wotif, had heard of iGoogle and OpenSocial but hadn't used either platform. We started off with an hour about using the OpenSocial APIs and socializing existing apps. Then, after 5 hours of hacking, the developers presented their creations over ice cream and beer - applications that displayed Flickr albums, intersections of friends, upcoming concerts in the area, and more.

In Singapore, 15 developers were hosted at the Google Singapore office. A lot of the developers had attended DevFest Singapore earlier in October, and so this was a great opportunity to refresh their knowledge on OpenSocial. The focus was on building OpenSocial applications for iGoogle. After an hour-long refresher, the rest of the day was spent hacking away on OpenSocial ideas. Developers were building apps to share their carbon footprint with friends, to organize rollerblading sessions together, and even to list the great food they are eating in Singapore.



















Jérémi Joslin from eXo Platform, Jason Vu from WebPal Networks, and Pamela Fox & Vinny Vijeyakuumar from Google

What an exciting couple of weeks it's going to be for OpenSocial in Asia Pacific.

This weekend, there will be 3 OpenSocial hackathons happening simultaneously in Vietnam, Singapore, and Australia. Organizers are expecting the combined attendance of all three hackathons to be 100 developers. The emphasis for the events in Hanoi and Singapore will be on creating applications to be submitted to the OpenSocial contest for Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, the hackathon in Australia will focus on creating iGoogle applications, then throwing in the social elements. Big thanks to eXo Platform, WebPal Networks, and e27 for all of their help in organizing these hackathons. Unfortunately, the Singapore event is closed for signups. If you'd like to register for the Sydney event or the Hanoi event, please be aware that space is extremely limited so sign up quickly! The organizers will do their best to accommodate as many people as possible. More details on the agenda for each country can be found here for Vietnam, Singapore, and Australia.

Next week, Google China will be hosting OpenSocial hackathons in Beijing (12/16) and Shanghai (12/18). Space is extremely limited and filling up fast, so if you're in China and want to join us for either of these two events, please register here. We'll spend the mornings talking through application demos, code samples, container updates, and then we'll dive into coding. During the evenings, we'll see an overview of branded application opportunities from Mentez, plus a presentation from Google's AdSense team. Mentez is a partner company working towards the promotion and development of successful Internet applications, mainly geared towards social networks.

In China, we're looking forward to seeing attendees develop high quality OpenSocial applications for leading social networking sites in China such as MySpace.cn, Xiaonei, 51.com, YiQi.com, and Tianya. There will also be quick updates of OpenSocial support from those same leading sites, followed by topics of interest to all developers such as best practices for Chinese and foreign app developers, monetization opportunities, consulting partnership, and hosting solutions. The hackathons will last from 9:30am to 8pm (or later), culminating in a contest to determine the best apps, as voted on by participating developers. First prize winners will receive an iPod Touch.

There will also be an OpenSocial hackathon for developers in Japan on 12/18. If you'd like to register, you can do so here. This event will feature OpenSocial partners MySpace Japan and Recruit. The goal for this event is to prototype high quality applications for the Japanese market.

It's really exciting to see both OpenSocial's adoption in Asia, as well as tremendous interest from developers to make the web more open and more social.


Jason Costa & Shawn Shen, Developer Relations, OpenSocial

We finally finished up the tour, coming to a close in Vietnam and the Philippines. We met a lot of really great people in both countries, and it was inspiring to see some of the locals get up and give lightning talks on products that they've built (including some that use Google APIs).

In Ho Chi Minh City, our attendees were extremely engaged and for a while "devfest" became the #3 trending topic globally on Twitter. Just after the Maps API presentation, we got to see a great lightning talk from SkyDoor, a Vietnamese travel site that leverages Google Maps, YouTube, GWT, and Earth. The outfit is already working on an OpenSocial version of their application. As a side note, we went to some really great restaurants there, and I even got to try eating snails for the first time. Yuuummyyy.

















And in Manila, wow - the DevFest party was off the hook. Seriously, we didn't just cover Google Maps, OpenSocial, Google App Engine, and even an additional talk on YouTube - we also got to see our very own Pamela Fox (Maps API extraordinaire) perform "Baby Got Back" (video below). Mid-way through some of our presenters decided to perform the dance from "Thriller", priceless stuff. Lastly, we saw five different lightning talks from groups working on apps for Android, OpenSocial, and more.

















A big thanks goes to Jason Vu and WebPal Networks, as well as to Kevin Miller Jr., Tony Fernandes, Aileen Apolo, and everyone else for their tremendous help in pushing these events forward.

Finally, we launched an OpenSocial application contest for all of the countries that we hit in Southeast Asia (plus Malaysia!). We're excited to see some great apps developed from this. Fire up your editors now!

And a really huge thanks also needs to go out to the DevFest partners that helped to make this entire tour happen: eXo Platform, Globant, hi5, and friendster. Thanks guys, and let's do it again soon!!



Pictures from our Vietnam DevFest are here. The pictures from our Philippines DevFest can be found here.

OK - that's it. We need to go sleep now.

Jason Costa, Developer Relations, Asia Pacific

It's tiring being out on the road constantly, but meeting all of these awesome people that just weeks ago we didn't even know existed made it all worth it. We met some really amazing people during the course of the DevFest tour, and neither Singapore nor Thailand were an exception.

The event in Singapore saw the MDA arm of the Singapore government subsidize all travel costs for fifty developers from Malaysia to come down and attend for the day. This was a really inspiring move, and allowed us to meet with a cool group of people from the developer community in Malaysia. And for those developers from Malaysia that made the long trek down for the day: thank you!! Clearly we're going to have to host a DevFest there in the (hopefully near) future. The folks from Singapore were just as great, taking all of us out for a crazy night of Karaoke after the event.

















A few days later, we were en route to Thailand. That event was a lot of fun too, even though it kicked off to a rocky start with wifi issues. Once the wifi was resolved, we were able to push things back into gear with some nice presentations on OpenSocial, Maps, and Google App Engine. During any downtime he might of had, our very own Patrick Chanezon (Developer Advocate here at Google) was going through the ringer with five hours of interviews - needless to say, the guy was exhausted.

















Lastly, both events saw some exciting company profiles and platform overviews from our partners who joined us on this leg of the tour. Our partners for the tour were eXo Platform, Globant, hi5, and friendster. A special thanks to them for helping to put this tour on, as well as to John Berns and the BarCamp Bangkok folks, plus Bjorn Lee, Daniel Cerventus, Justin Lee and the awesome e27 folks. Thank you!!

















Pictures from the Singapore event can be found here. Pictures from the Thailand event are here. There are also additional materials that were covered during the course of the tour that can be found on our DevFest site: http://tinyurl.com/apacdevfest.

And be sure to check out the OpenSocial contest for Southeast Asia!

Jason Costa, Developer Relations, Asia Pacific

After finishing up the DevFest tour in Southeast Asia (with some voice loss after excessive rapping in Manila), I took my first trip to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to be a speaker at FOSSmy. FOSSmy is a 2-day conference that revolves around open-source development, and is modeled after other FOSS conferences in the world - FOSSin, FOSDEM, etc. Several dedicated Malaysian developers started organizing the conference just 2 months ago, and managed to secure a great venue (stable WiFi, ftw!), a diverse lineup of speakers from both Malaysia and abroad, and an audience of over 250 people - many of them developers that had heard about the awesomeness of open-source, and wanted to use the conference to get a kickstart in it.

My personal FOSSmy experience began at the speakers party, where I met the other speakers (like Toru, memcache + mixi hacker extraordinaire), found out that I lack the patience to play "Mao" (Pie's favorite game), and discovered a use for my growing collection of foreign coins (make-shift poker chips!). The next day commenced with a talk from Ditesh, one of the organizers and my gracious chauffear from the airport. Ditesh gave us a whirlwind tour of the various open-source activities going on in Malaysia, both enlightening the audience about some of the very popular OS projects that originated in the country (like ADOdb and Hex Live CD), and highlighting the future work needed to increase OS activity ("dedicated stuff/funding"). Throughout the day, I also listened to Kamal's talk on git (from slides: "Learn a new version control system every year"), Pia's talk on OLPC(favorite part: Pie fervently dropping the laptop on the floor to demonstrate its robustness), and Jerome's talk on SaaS/PaaS (with great comparisons of offerings like AppEngine, Zoho, Amazon EC2).

I also gave two talks myself. At the first talk (organized by the girls of FOSSchix.my ), I discussed my experiences with university outreach and introduced an initiative called "webdevedu" that aims to create easily re-usable lessons and labs about web development. I got great feedback from Pie, who recommended reaching out to Australian universities and using the open-source Moodle system to actually host the content. At the second talk, I explained the goals and history of the HTML5 specification, and then showed a bunch of HTML5 demos in various browsers, proving that there's already features that developers can start playing with right now, and finally, I encouraged developers to join the mailing lists and send feedback on the spec. According to the twitter stream, the audience was learning (or "getting schooled") from the talk:

yoonkit: "HTML5: Drag&Drop without hacky JavaScript code. Supports events"

kamal_fariz: getting schooled on iframe hacks for cross-domain communication by @pamelafox

brianritchie: #fossmy participants are the first people that have seen HTML 5 canvas Car Nav implementation thx to @pamelafox .. cool..very

You can check out the slides below, or watch the tech talk by Ian Hickson that inspired my talk:

Overall, I was impressed by the enthusiasm and attitude of the Malaysian developers. They're going out of their way to push forward the state of open source in their country, and also going through the effort needed to create more of an actual community of developers. In the next few weeks, there will be a StartupCamp in Kuala Lumpur and a BarCamp in Johor Bahru. The Malaysians prove that developers anywhere can find a way to band together, communicate, collaborate, and form a community around their common interests. I'm now living in Sydney, Australia, for the next 5 months, and I look forward to finding out the ways in which Aussie developers form communities.

Pamela Fox, Developer Relations, Australia