Android Event a Great Success

For our second GTUG meeting Dick Wall gave an excellent talk on Android. We capped the registration at 200 and sold out several days before the event. Dick was very prepared and was giving a presentation he had given before. This was nice because Dick did a great job of pointing out past questions and pointing out when we needed to pay close attention. Dick's presentation was among the best presentations I have seen in a long time.

It is amazing how much interest there is in Android considering no phones are on the market yet. I am looking forward to watching the mobile environment grow as Android evolves. A few weeks ago I attended the Mobile and Embedded Developer Days. At the event I was surprised to hear that all the Sun mobile experts were instructed by Sun not to download Android and not to read anything about Android. It will be interesting to see how Sun works out its differences with Google. At the Mobile and Embedded Developer Days I also met JavaFX expert Jim Weaver. Jim is a really nice guy who is interested in helping developers get started with JavaFX. Jim even does a daily blog on learning JavaFX at his blog http://learnjavafx.typepad.com/. I spoke with Jim about writing a JavaFX based Raffle tool. I had attended No Fluff Just Stuff conferences where they had a nice web based raffle tool. I had been speaking with Van about us writing a raffle tool. I never had time to get started on the project so meeting Jim seemed like the perfect opportunity to ask Jim if he'd be interested in taking on the challenge. A few days later I had the first version in hand.

You can read more about the spinner on Jim's blog post http://learnjavafx.typepad.com/weblog/2008/01/spinning-wheel.html. The spinner worked great and its nice to help get the word out about JavaFX.