UnRulyRecursion

The Git mad App-A-Thon is back, and so am I (Taylor), along with continuing partner Larry, and new addition Tamil! This year’s contest will include GT WebDev as well, so we are looking forward to a bigger, better contest with more apps and more prizes!

Last year’s app-a-thon was a great experience, and as a team and individually we learned a great deal. The 14 hour ordeal took quite a toll on us, but we did stick it out to the end and had a working prototype to show off!

This year we are planning to do even better!

To start, take a look at last year’s research post here. It contains lots of background and useful information whether in the learning, design, or building phase of an app.

Next, if you haven’t yet, DEFINITELY read all the way through the Android training course. I can’t stress this enough, there is extremely important information in that.

-Android Training Course link

After that, take a browse through the API Guides / App Components section of the Android Dev website. This is where I currently am, and it covers material that is slightly higher level.

-Android App Components link

Lastly, for anything else Android related, Vogella has lots of good tutorials such as the one below which covers ListViews and Adapters. That site will definitely be a good resource if we get stuck.

-Vogella ListView Tutorial link

Get PSYCHED!

edit: 4/15/2013

Yo, App-A-Thon SP’13 is coming up soon. If we do the inventory app, which is looking more and more likely, I think we will employ some/all of these resources:

– Meteor Framework link – This will be used to rapidly develop a rich webapp with a fluid backend database.

– MongoDB link – This is the database that Meteor is based on. We’ll have to do some hand-waving to go back and forth with SQLite (the android db).

– Handlebars link – This is a minimalist js framework that provides HTML templating. It is the preferred template-r for Meteor. We can use this to lay out the page, and have full and mobile sites.

Read up on these and how to use them, because they are going to help make our app kick-butt!

edit: 4/18/2013

T-1 day on the countdown, here are some more links that I have been looking at in preparation for this event. A lot of them have to do with getting up to snuff with meteor!

A good thing to note is that the Meteor team likes answering questions on Stack Overflow ( Tag: meteor ) and on IRC ( link )

– ( link ) First resource, Meteor official Documentation. Has great information above the nitty-gritty as well

– ( link ) A team at CMU working with Meteor during a Hack-A-Thon

– ( link ) Collection of learning resources for Meteor

– ( link ) Another Hack-a-Thon experience, but this time information from the point of view of learning it on the fly

– ( link ) Third Party Fundamentals and Best Practices

– ( link ) Caveats of Javascript

– ( link ) Mozilla Dev Network JavaScript Guide (for da n00bs)