Preparing for the 2.5 Days AT&T Hackathon

Note: I've enabled the waiting list. Please do the homework assigned before signing up on the waiting list to come to this meeting. We're not meeting at the library, we'll be meeting at a Starbucks this time.

First off before I say anything else, I want to congratulate my own team: Felix Palmer (http://www.linkedin.com/pub/felix-palmer/24/a76/153), Kent William Inholl (http://kentwilliam.com/), Veda Rogers (https://www.meetup.com/AndroidClasses/members/19007001/), and myself (http://www.linkedin.com/in/frenchaccent) for winning 1st place in the Multiple-Screens Category at the Google TV Hackathon (https://sites.google.com/site/gtvhackathon/home) last week.

http://photos4.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/d/9/f/0/event_116155792.jpeg (https://www.meetup.com/AndroidClasses/photos/7941212/)

We did a Quiz game for Google TV, where multiple players could control the game using their cell phone or tablet, while the questions and scores appeared on the Google TV (we used TCP sockets over local wifi for the communication).

:-)

Now coming back to our regular agenda:

This Thursday night we're going to have a hands-on preparation session for the upcoming AT&T Hackathon (http://mobileapppa.eventbrite.com/) this weekend (which is already sold out, I'm sorry to say).

As homework before coming to the preparation session itself, please install the Sample Messaging App (http://apigee.com/about/products/usergrid#sampleapps) from Apigee UserGrid (the HTML5 version). The rules AT&T published recently make it clear that they're aiming for an HTML5 application --> http://bit.ly/HTML5rules . (For a while, I was thinking that we would be allowed to program in Android directly, but according to those rules I was mistaken).

If you don't receive the activation email from Apigee immediately, wait at least an hour or so (in my case, I didn't receive my activation immediately, but I did receive it eventually, thought I'm still getting a login error. May be, it didn't like my .org email address? or my complicated password? Please tell me if any of you are getting an error as well??). Also note, that that the AT&T developer web site also has an Apigee console built-in, so that may be another way to get to it immediately (I'm going to try that next, thought I'm not sure if it includes the new UserGrid functionality as well).

If you're one of the folks that came last time (https://www.meetup.com/AndroidClasses/events/59475132/) with LeanEngine installed, you'll come to find that those developer tools like Apigee Usergrid (or parse.com, or even Stackmob) are designed to be much easier to install and use than LeanEngine and that for many other reasons, those solutions can also be a lot better than LeanEngine.

If you have some extra time, please do peruse the AT&T apis just to start thinking about what can be done using those apis. If you're an iOS developer for instance, try playing around with their U-Verse iOS sdk (unfortunately, they don't have an Android SDK for that yet, nor an HTML5 one, so I won't be able to try it myself, and sadly now that I've seen the official rules, I'm not even sure that the U-Verse API can be included as part of the weekend Hackathon anymore).

Starting back on May 21st, we will be returning to our normal location at the library, and we'll be able to open our meetings back up to more people.