Honeycomb Fragments: Creating UIs for Android Tablet Devices by Blake Meike

http://photos1.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/2/4/1/0/event_77889232.jpeg (http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Android-Zigurd-Mednieks/dp/1449389694/)

This December 14th, we'll have Blake Meike, co-author of the very good O'Reilly Programming Android (http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Android-Zigurd-Mednieks/dp/1449389694/) book, giving us a talk on Android Honeycomb Fragments.

Thanks to Pearson Publishing (http://www.pearson.com/), we will also be giving away one complimentary pass to the San Francisco Voices That Matter - Android Developers Conference (http://android2012.voicesthatmatter.com/) this February 9-10, 2012.

For everyone else, use the code ANDR789 to get $150 off, and combine that discount with the early bird discount for a combined total of up to $350 off if you reserve your spot by January 5th. Here is their list of speakers (http://android2012.voicesthatmatter.com/speakers).

Tonight, we will be in the large conference room, in either A or B, on the ground floor past the Dewey Coffee area all the way to the back of the library.

There will also be food for this meetup, sponsored by Chevy Volt (http://www.chevroletvoltage.com/index.php/launch.html), and some book giveaways sponsored by O'Reilly (http://oreilly.com/).

6:00 - Food and networking

6:30 - General Announcements

7:00 ~ 9:00 Feature Presentation (Blake)

Talk Description

When Android was used nearly exclusively for very small screens, the one-activity/one-screen UI worked very well. Users moved from screen to screen to access different parts of a program's interface, and the Activity class (Android's concept of a task) maintained a back stack enabling quick and intuitive traversal through the strictly tree-structured workflow. This changes completely, however, when the UI is spread over the surface of a larger tablet screen. Some parts of the screen will remain constant over longer durations than others. Some parts of the screen determine the contents of other parts. A card-stack metaphor simply won't cut it anymore. With Android 3.0 SDK (API 11), Honeycomb, Android's developers introduced Fragments, a new, complex and powerful tool to encourage great large-screen UIs with consistent feel and behavior. This talk will introduce Fragments, give a thorough example of their use, and describe some of the traps that lurk in their use.

About Blake Meike
Blake Meike is an engineer with more than 30 years of experience, much of it with Java. He has built systems as large as Amazon's massively scalable AutoScaling service and as small as a pre-Android OSS/Linux based Android-like platform for cell-phones. He is currently deep in Android.