The Detroit Google Developers Group is excited to host a fireside chat with a member of the CyanogenMod development team, Jef Oliver. Jef will answers questions on CyanogenMod and discuss CyanogenMod's overall development process.

"What is CyanogenMod?" you may ask.

CyanogenMod is an aftermarket firmware for a number of cell phones based on the open-source Android operating system. It offers features not found in the official Android based firmwares of vendors of these cell phones.

In short, CyanogenMod is a custom version of Android that users can load onto their Android phones. It provides all kinds of goodies not found in the stock Android operating system that ships with many phones. For Android phones that are heavily themed by their manufacturers (ie Samsung, HTC, Motorola), CyanogenMod provides a very clean stock Android experience with some extra features. CyanogenMod is one the best known and most widely used custom Android experiences out there. Check out the latest news and more details at http://cyanogenmod.org/

This meeting will be very informal with lots of audience participation as we discuss CyanogenMod with Jef Oliver (via video conference) and understand what it is and the effort required to develop such great software.

Bring any questions you have and be prepared to have your world expanded as Jef sheds some light on CyanogenMod. Dinner and prizes will be provided.

Effective Data Visualization

We spend much of our time collecting and analyzing data. That data is only useful if it can be displayed in a meaningful, understandable way.

Yale professor Edward Tufte presented many ideas on how to effectively present data to an audience or end user.

In this session, David Giard will explain some of Tufte's most important guidelines about data visualization and how you can apply those guidelines to your own data. You will learn what to include, what to remove, and what to avoid in your charts, graphs, maps and other images that represent data.

 

About David Giard

David Giard has been developing solutions using Microsoft technologies since 1993.  He is a Microsoft MVP; a member of the INETA Board of Directors; and a past President of the Great Lakes Area .Net User Group. David has presented at dozens of conferences and user groups around the Midwest.  He is a recovering certification addict and holds an MCTS, MCSD, MCSE, and MCDBA, as well as a BS and an MBA. He is the host and producer of the mildly popular online TV show Technology and Friends. He is the co-author of the Wrox book Real World .NET, C#, and Silverlight. You can read his latest thoughts at www.DavidGiard.com.  David lives in Michigan with his two sons.

 

MORE DETAILS:

THE HOW: We will be meeting at the Quicken Loans Chase Building Security Desk and will go up to the meeting room from there. The Security Desk for Quicken Loans is off the Northeast entrance of the Chase Building (closest to Campus Martius).

FOR PARKING: There is Visitor Parking available at the Compuware Parking Garage on Farmer Street for $5 after 6:00pm for the evening.PLEASE NOTE: Please register here for the event even if you are not certain you will be attending. We need to provide Security at Quicken Loans a list of potential attendees 48 hours prior to the meeting.

 

A Tale of Three Lightning Talks

Join the Detroit Google Developers Group (GDG) for an evening of three fine lightning talks (hence the title). Each speaker will get 15-20 minutes to present and at the end of the evening we will have a question and answer period.

 

The order of the presentations will be:

Lightning Talk No. 1

Mat Stollman will present on Behavior Driven Development (BDD) and testing Mobile Applications using the BDD style. In particular he will cover UI testing of mobile applications. There are many tools out there currently to UI test mobile applications and Mat has experimented with many of them. He will cover how he recently started using a testing tool called Cucumber to run automated acceptance tests on Android and iOS devices. 

 

About Mat Stollman  

Mat Stollman is a mobile software quality assurance analyst for Quicken Loans. He helps build Quicken Loans mobile testing infrostructure using and testing it out with various open source frameworks. He also likes cats.

 

Lightning Talk No. 2

Build a Gateway with Google OpenID APIs

Google offers many services and some of these (like Google Apps) are federated; that is, a user can use a non-Google account to log into Google Apps. On the flip side, can a Google account be used to log into non-Google services? The answer is yes, since Google is an OpenID identity provider.This lightning talk describes how to federate Google identities with non-Google services. In particular, we will demo a prototype that gateways Google identity (based on OpenID 2.0) into the InCommon Federation (a SAML federation of higher ed institutions).About Tom Scavo

 Tom is a long-time developer, teacher, and general technologist (you know the type). An enterprise SAML technologist by trade, Tom is finally coming to appreciate the utility of lightweight APIs and the security technologies springing up around them.Tom lives and works in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is Operations Manager for the InCommon Federation (incommon.org), a trust federation of higher education institutions in the US. He loves to write, cycle, and enjoys films of all kinds.

 

Lightning Talk No. 3

Accessing Google API's with OAuth 2.0

 

Google has a wealth of information hidden behind its API's. Much of it requires user authentication, OAuth 2.0 is Google's preferred mechanism for authenticating users. This talk will focus on what OAuth 2 is, how it works, registering an app on the Google API console, Google's libraries for performing OAuth 2 authentication,  and some examples of working with Google API's.  

 

About Dave Turner  Dave Turner loves to code, and has been doing it in some form since 1999. He is experienced in many areas of software design and development including;  database, web, desktop, automation processing and mobile devices. 

 

 

DEVELOPING ANDROID APPS WITH CLOJUREOnorio Catenacci will lead a very hands-on, introductory session on building an Android app with Clojure. With Android hardware more and more sporting multiple cores, it will become more important to utilize those multiple cores without the issues that often arise with concurrent code (deadlocks, livelocks and race conditions). Functional programming offers an elegant solution to the problems arising from shared mutable state—don’t allow it. While some of you might be aghast at the thought of coding without any mutability it’s not quite as bad as it might sound.  And Clojure, built from the start to allow developers to build concurrent software in a very elegant way, is a great option for building concurrent Android applications.ABOUT ONORIOOnorio Catenacci is a .Net developer for Quicken Loans.  Onorio has been developing software for approximately 25 years on a variety of platforms and in a variety of languages.  Onorio is a past leader of the F# Special Interest Group which was affiliated with the Great Lakes Area .Net Users’ Group as well as formerly heading the Commercial Users Of Functional Programming-Michigan users’ group.  Ask Onorio about his birds at your own risk.MORE DETAILS:THE HOW: When you arrive at the Compuware Building please check in at the security desk in the main lobby. The security desk is in front of the inside entrance to the Hard Rock Cafe. Security will give you a visitor pass to go to the 10th floor where the Quicken Loans' reception desk is. Check in at the reception desk and Don Ward will escort you to the meeting location at Quicken Loans. FOR PARKING: There is Visitor Parking available at the Compuware Parking Garage on Farmer Street for $5 after 6:00pm for the evening. PLEASE NOTE: Please register here for the event even if you are not certain you will be attending. We need to provide Security at Quicken Loans a list of potential attendees 48 hours prior to the meeting.

Join us as Michael Pardo presents on Android Protips.  You can read more about the event here: https://groups.google.com/group/detroit-gtug/browse_thread/thread/52d01f2a599492e5

Virdender Amanji will be talking about Google Fusion Tables.

We're going to have a round of lightning talks.  More info coming soon.

This was our first meeting so we went through some introductions, gauged interest in future topics, and watched a video on Dart.