AI and mobile are are great combination. Over the past few years we seen an explosion of AI related mobile technology: Siri, Google now, Image and voice recognition. We will conduct a high level, broad overview of the AI field, looking at some of the recent breakthroughs on mobile and the technologies behind them. We will also look at the Google TensorFlow library in more detail explaining what it is exploring some of the models that have been built using TensorFlow. Finally we will look at how TensorFlow can be used to enhance your own mobile apps, providing examples of both running TensorFlow directly on a mobile and on a server to provide a web services. This will include a live demo of my phone using TensorFlow to recognise a banana!

A simple, scalable app architecture using the Android Annotations library will be presented. The app architecture has been used in multiple projects to quickly and reliably produce well architected, maintainable apps, with a minimum of effort. We explore how the Android Annotations library can be used to solve several problems with android application development, such as excessive boiler plate code and dealing with interactions between background tasks and the UI thread. We will also discuss how this architecture can be easily scaled from small apps with no persistent storage all the way up to complex applications backed by a DB and interacting with multiple web services and 3rd party APIs.

As a freelancer, many of the customers I work with have extensive iOS experience, but little or no Android dev experience. iOS focused organisations and developers have many questions about Android development: About the android ecosystem, fragmentation, test devices, app design, libraries to use and what to expect from Android development. Making the situation even worse there is a large amount of hyperbole and uninformed opinions spouted online by the supporters and detractors of both operating systems.

We will cover many of the common questions those with iOS experience have about Android, providing concrete advice on subjects such as dealing with multiple screen sizes, choosing test devices, what versions of android to support, etc. We will discuss the Android ecosystem and the business aspects of building Android applications. Finally we will conclude with some short code examples, showing how to use the Android SDK to create a simple ‘hello world’ project in Android studio.

With the 100th year anniversary of World War 1 the Australian War Memorial in Canberra needed to provide a unique way for visitors to experience their displays. They wanted to allow people to both contemplate and experience spine chilling moments, to relate to individual stories, to create a personal connection between visitors and the exhibits. Their solution was to commission a system which allows visitors to experience customised audio, through a mobile device, triggered by indoor positioning technology. At the entrance to the gallery visitors select one of 5 tours from a wall length touch screen, and then with a Nexus 5 device and headphones, enter the world of World War 1. As they explore the galleries their movements trigger audio files which are combined, based on the users’ movements. This creates an experience which is personal and moving.

AI and mobile are are great combination. Over the past few years we seen an explosion of AI related mobile technology: Siri, Google now, Image recognition, Auto e-mail replies and voice recognition. We will conduct a high level, broad overview of the AI field, looking at some of the recent breakthroughs on mobile and the technologies behind them. We will also look at the Google TensorFlow library in more detail explaining what it is exploring some of the models that have been built using TensorFlow. Finally we will look at how TensorFlow can be used to enhance your own mobile apps, providing examples of both running TensorFlow directly on a mobile and on a server to provide a web services. This will include a live demo of my phone using TensorFlow to recognise a banana!

The Fragment API forms one of the core components google has provided to build Android apps. Despite the key role it is meant to play, many people find Fragments hard to use, prone to bugs and frustrating. We will pose the question – do we actually need Fragments? Are they worth the trouble? We will review some of the common problems with the Fragment API and look at why Fragments are so prone to issues. We will also survey some alternative approaches to using Fragments look at what solutions provided by the community and review best practices. Finally will also look at what advice Google has provided and how they are improving fragments.

There are many advantages to using vector-based assets in your Android apps — smaller binary size, faster loading, easier support for all pixel densities, dynamic drawing, and more ways to animate. Despite the upsides, SVGs and VectorDrawable assets are more complex to author and use.

Luke and Marc explore everything needed to create, export, and implement SVGs and VectorDrawables on Android, including common issues and their remedies.