Thursday, March 17, 2011

Last Call for Google I/O

Google is running a series of contests this week to give away the last remaining tickets to the Google I/O developer conference. The 2011 conference sold out in record time, so for me, this is about the only way I'm going to have a chance to go. Yesterday was the start of the first challenge which focused on Android. Due to the time difference, the 30 minute "lightning" round 1 started during my normal lunch break, and I was able to quickly submit my answers. I was pleasantly surprised to receive an e-mail 30 minutes later informing me that I was one of 200 entrants to pass round 1 and move on to round 2.

For round 2, the objective was to create and submit an Android app that recreates the bouncing balls countdown clock seen on the Google I/O home page. Of course, today being St. Patrick's day, the clock is slightly changed to be formed of clover leaves blowing in the wind, but on non-holidays it is multicolored balls. Contestants had 22 hours to complete their app and submit, with the deadline being 9am pacific time this morning.

Now that the deadline has passed, I thought I would share my entry. I'm publishing both the source code and the APK file, so if you are curious how I made it, feel free to take a look.

15 comments:

  1. Thanks for sharing your submission! Your post inspired me to share my submission to the contest as well:

    http://eddiekim.posterous.com/my-last-call-for-google-io-contest-app-barfin

    Good luck to you and hope to see you at Google I/O!

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  2. Nicely done Eddie! Very clever to include the orientation sensor to impact the display.

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  3. Very well done! I like how you made your app work in both orientations, I locked mine into Horizontal for simplicity sake. You even had my app beat by 1 kb but I also did bouncing Androids instead of bouncing balls. Hope to see you guys at Google I/O!

    http://www.digitalrakoon.com/Android/APKs/GoogleIOChallenge.apk

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  4. Very cool teleknEsis! I like how the little droids sink to the bottom after they stop bouncing :-)

    Hopefully we all get a ticket so I can meet you there!

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  5. Thanks! That effect was actually unintentional but I liked it so I left it :D

    This was my first experience with the Canvas class and custom animations in Android, and I didn't even start on the challenge until 6 pm when I got off work. All in all I was happy with my submission and if nothing else this was a LOT of fun and a great learning experience!

    It will be really cool if we all get a ticket!!

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  6. So did none of us win a ticket?

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  7. It seems that the winners are keeping quiet about it. I wasn't planning on winning anyway, but a rejection would help kill that tiny bit of hope. ;-)

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  8. Hat tip to teleknEsis for pointing out this AndroidDev blog post.

    Last Call Contest Stats

    Appears that @heliodorj is one of the winners.
    Random Usefullness

    It was a cool contest, and fun to put the demo together. Would have been great to win a ticket, but a neat experience nonetheless.

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  9. Yes, it's driving me quite mad. I was watching the tweets roll in on twitter yesterday from all the winners and it seemed they were announcing them backgrounds from the last challenge to the first.

    It got down to Android and then there were no tweets. I've identified nearly 5 winners from each of the categories on twitter but none yet for Android. No one I've talked with has even seen anyone claim a prize for Android.

    But I did come across this blog post this morning...

    http://bit.ly/i8sQPK

    Not sure what to think. A rejection letter would at least be nice so I can go on with my day :)

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  10. Good link, teleknEsis. I wish they'd let the other applicants have the option of buying a ticket: would be a nice consolation prize. (The countdown clock doubles as a birthday countdown for me, and being able to attend Google IO would be the best present. :p)

    In any case, I agree that it was definitely a nice learning experience! I'd been meaning to make an Android app for awhile and I finally did. (Actually I had been working on a simple non-graphically intense little app for a couple days, but it is languishing in my private bitbucket repo...so far!)

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  11. Well I guess we all know by now we were clearly not winners.

    However, I changed my entry into a Live Wallpaper, replaced the countdown clock with the System clock, and stuck it on the market for $0.99.

    https://market.android.com/details?id=com.kmiller.livewallpaper.bouncingclock&feature=search_result
    Who knows, maybe it'll make enough $ so I can buy a ticket from eBay. Ha!

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  12. Ha! Great minds think alike. I was working on doing the same with mine :-)

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  13. And now mine is published. It is still a countdown clock, but you can adjust the target date through settings.

    Countdown Clock Live Wallpaper

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  14. Nice. I'm thinking that my current version will become free and I'll add accelerometer and some settings for a $0.99 version. Curious to see if anyone purchases mine before that haha

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