What would you do if you had the chance to meet some fellow android developers at Google’s Europe HQ in Zürich for free? Yes, you register and go there. As did I, we. Unfortunately, someone at Google’s messed the times up, which lead to us having to depart in Stuttgart at 6am rather than 10am, but nevertheless we made it on time.

What’s the impression of the Google HQ? It’s quite hard to remain objective and unimpressed, so the report may well be seriously biased. Sights along the way in: Streetview car, Google Sign. No suits. Sights in the entrance area: Pool table ( playable ), fridge, Google Sign. Very colourful, nice. Once we waited about 10 minutes we were guided to the conference location, which was also located on the ground floor, right next to the cafeteria and the ( ! ) gym. The overall impression on the way there was that it’s actually not a place that’s perfectly suitable for working there, but it’s a place where living might be fun as well

We had to wait some time until the event kicked off, but the time was spent more or less usefully setting up wifi, talking to other developers and the android stuff ( specifically Reto Meier who held the talk ) and drinking free coke. The event started, but was interrupted to give away free nexus ones. This came not really as a surprise as a) the boxes were located next to the entry, so it was not hard to spot and b) most of the participants I talked to followed the other lab sessions e.g. in Berlin and Paris. But forget about surprises, it’s so amazing to get a phone for free ( actually, it’s even more amazing if it’s the second one ). And what can I say, it rocks, you need to play with one for a little while, forget the iPhone, honestly.

After about half an hour later, the talk finally began, very interactive, very well-held. It basically included a what is android-primer, as well as some focus on technologies available and best practices. After a short while ( let’s guess it was 30 minutes ), we switched over to having .. lunch. And damn, it was tasty like hell. Just like the whole day, all people were nice, friendly, it was a really great atmosphere even just to eat.. wow.

The second part of the talk focused on some code examples, and afterwards, the fun part of the event began: the big bang question session. I had some prepared, as had almost all other people there. And it’s just great to talk to someone who knows ( omitting the should here ), and gives you a clear answer. Reto Meier, again, did a great job on this.I also showed some people qwerted, and I guess some even liked it . There is one app I really want to recommend, it’s called Music Queue and tries to change the way we listen to music and organize our on-the-fly playlist. Great app, cool developer!

What can I see? We left too soon ( for my impression ), and I need to work there. Like, really. Unfortunately, picture taking is generally not allowed on the premises, yet we were able to take some at the conference room itself.

Thanks to all the great people there, was a really cool day.. next year again, hm?

After having mastered the fun part of the day, I had a really interesting skype call with a former colleague of mine who is now enrolled at UCL. We spoke about some projects we have been doing, and of course the upcoming ones. And I guess a sideproject of his, 1bucketapp.appspot.com, is really worth mentioning. I don’t know what to do with it, but maybe you can put it to use.

Another, at first sight, useless site is http://750words.com/, a project where everyone is encouraged to write 750 words every day. The texts are not published nor accessible to anyone else but you, so it’s a private diary for everyone who has a need for one. From my personal attempt to use it I can tell that 750 words is a lot.

The last interesting snippet of the day was a collection of tipps for keeping Java code clean and maintainable. Although the text dates back to 2001, it’s still of remarkabel relevance and definitely worth reading.

Twitter is still distracting me from everything, always. And it will keep doing so, it’s uselessness in perfection. Really great. If you want to follow me, it’s derwildemomo .

The next best thing is stackoverflow, a prototypic kind and polite community very focused on solving problems. If you haven’t heard of it ( impossible if you read this blog ), you should really visit it. Renders almost all programming-related discussion boards useless.

I need a Nexus One. So if you do have a Nexus One: I need it. Stay tuned, more to follow.

First of all, I noticed something Techcrunch was also writing about some time ago, that google doesn’t protect embedded images in private documents in _any_ way. So basically, everything you upload there can be treated as public.

Next thing, latex, the typesetting system, seems to be stuck in a time where character encodings where something rather bizarre, and for that reason has it’s share of problems with it. There are packages, like utf8 and utf8x to work around this issue, but it’s not perfect. What I’ve experienced, a strange error message telling me that

Package inputenc Error: Unicode char \u8:  not set up for use with LaTeX.

And my way to get around it was to simply add the packages ucs besides utf8 to the preamble..

\usepackage{ucs}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

and everything is working fine now. great.

Last topic today is a project update. What’s going on?

• A virtual keyboard for android with some nice effects, I’m doing this one together with Marc Seeger.
• I just participated in the foundation of the Google Technology Usergroup Neckar-Alb ( A region in southern germany around Stuttgart ), and we hope to be able to provide the community here with some cool events in the future! If you want to participate or are just curious, be sure to check out our twitter.
• I’m currently also writing a paper on distributed contact management, a really interesting field, stay tuned on that one.
• Some hacking involved, but nothing releasable actually.

If you want some nice reading, I can really recommend two papers: the first one is on API design, and some kind of a .NET-rant, it’s called “API Design Matters” and is written by Michi Henning. The other one was written by Marc Seeger and is a practical overview of available Key-Value stores ( applause for NoSQL ). Get it on his blog.

The next weekend I’m going to spend in Hamburg, really looking forward!

I’d define a problem worth solving as something that has 3 attributes: It is persistent, in a sense that it reoccurs too many times, that it has an impact on some activity or workflow. That is something worth resolving. Another point is the “factor of annoyance”. Remember the  Microsoft’s Paperclip? High factor of annoyance. One dialog asking for a bit of love in the form of a ok-button? Not that annoying. But keep in mind, that’s all a very subjective rating. So if you find Dialog Boxes more annoying than speaking Paperclips, just change the order accordingly.

The third factor is the most important one: the Time spent working around. The attributes mentioned above may be pointless if it takes no time to work around the issue. If something takes a serious amount of time to be worked around, solved, corrected or understood, it’s time to do something. Recently, GMail and my Mac synced. The result was a Address Book disaster. Time to correct it: 3 hours. That’s a problem.

Anything that’s built to return money should solve a problem or improve something. Anything else? Naaa..That’s my point. What is yours?

[nggallery id=3]

First of all: it’s fun. It’s really, really fun. I spent an estimated hour or two a day reading blogs and trying to write down some thoughts and opinions, and from what google analytics tell me, some people like it. Though comments are still rare ( I guess that’s just normal ), there are already, please don’t laugh, about 40 unique visitors a day, and I’m happy about each and everyone of them. 

At first it was hard to change from writing in German to English, but I think I made a good start, and although I may sound a bit too self-confident, I’m not, but that’s just my impression, please correct me if I’m wrong.

And one thing I really started to do seriously is to link other, related posts. I guess this is to build and keep up the famous blogosphere.. so let’s roll.

I’d be glad to have some feedback on my first month as a pretend-to-be-good english writer! Moritz.

Tommy was or is ( he claims to be at 90% ) busy coding some kind of document managing system in Java, you can read all about it in his blog. He seems to be a bit focused on glass effects, though. And his blog is in english, so good for you. 

Good boy Johannes, who is just like me, long-haired and changing his blog URL quite frequently, is very ambitious: he’s doing a game engine in C++. He points out what he’s doing very detailed in his new blog at mumpitz.p-shuttle.de. Unfortunately, it’s in german.. 

Käse ( best nickname ever, means just “cheese” ), who just got married, congratulations, creates some musical visualisation using Process. Read about it here. He’s not updating it too frequently, but the stuff present, especially the preview movie are quite amazing.

These are only the projects of the three guys I’m talking to frequently. I don’t have one so far, but I’m on it, trust me!