At the airport, the
gate agent informed me my flight was delayed for two hours “because of
weather”. Maybe she was telling the truth. All I knew was
that I’d be two hours late for my event at the destination.
I
was on my way to an unusual software developer event, known as
“Midnight Mobility Madness”. Midnight Mobility Madness is an
evening of “edu-tainment” that alternates between "technical
presentations about mobile software", and "noisy contests for novelty
prizes". Guess which I was there for? Really? (Well,
sez you, mister! I was actually there because I’d been invited to
give one of the tech talks).
There have been several previous
Midnight Mobility Madnesses, all of them associated with the developer
conferences of enterprise software company SAP.
Tonight’s event coincided with the SAP Insider conference
in Las Vegas. Because of the flight delay, the Mid/Mob/Mad event had
already started when I got there. I entered the auditorium just in
time to hear the warm and capable event organizer Marian announce “One
of our speakers isn’t here right now, so …” I didn’t want Marian
to give everyone the wrong impression, so I shouted out “I’m here! I’m the missing speaker and I’m here!”
People
talk about being surprised by events, but what happened next was truly
unexpected. Everyone nearby rushed up to me, and begged for my
autograph! As more and more people realized that I was the
“absent” speaker Marian was talking about, they joined in the general
clamor for my autograph. I haven’t been this popular since I was
eight years old, and a sudden toothache motivated me to give away all my
Halloween candy to the neighborhood kids! I had the presence of
mind to snap this photo of my new posse of admiring fans!
Admiring fans mob Peter for his autograph!
This
outburst of crowd enthusiasm was surely a long overdue recognition of
my speaking, writing, and coding talents? Sad to say, this natural
assumption proved inaccurate. It turned out I had arrived
at the start of the first contest. The contest had the audience
trying to guess who the speakers were, by matching “fun facts” about
them, and getting their fact sheet signed off in return. There
were some great prizes for the winners. By identifying myself as one of
the speakers, I caused a mob scene worthy of ancient Rome, and used up
my 15 minutes of fame all in one go. But it was quite a rush while
it lasted!
Later in the evening, I delivered my presentation on
“The customizable Conference Room App.” The presentation is an app I
wrote that lets the user choose the name of a conference room, and then
displays a map of the floor of the building where that conference is
located. All the data is externalized into resource files, so it’s
easy to change the app to use the conference room names and maps for
your organization.
You can download the “customizable Conference Room App” at this link.
Unzip the downloaded file. One of the files within it
is “showoff.zip”. Don’t unzip it - that zip file can be imported
into MOTODEV Studio as an existing project, then customized by editing
res/values/strings.xml and providing new map files as png images.
Showoff is a very popular app. But not as popular as I was
in the crowd activity at SAP Insider’s Midnight Mobility Madness!
They say “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” and (sadly)
in this case, that turned out to be entirely true.
Peter van der Linden
Android Technology Evangelist
DJ_Ksar
on:
The Deathly Hallows of Mobile Security
