I already gave 2 Guru Sessions with Appsterdam, one Introduction to Android and one about Tools for Android Game Development. Since the last one was in March, it was about time to prepare a new one.

This time it is going to be about Android Design Patterns and Tools on Oct 20th.

Android Design Patterns is something I am very interested in. I think it is very important for a platform to have a personal look and feel, and that the apps in that platform actually DO follow that.

In Android we were left in our own for a while, the guidelines were brief and you had to implement them on your own. Since the release of Ice Cream Sandwich, there are much more clear guidelines and patterns, and Google even set up the Android Design site. Much better than the old guidelines.

The problem is that this design patterns can be applied on devices running ICS, but the tools are missing on the older versions and Gingerbread STILL has more than 50% of the chart. Take a look at the official charts if you don’t believe me.

So, we have tools and guidelines, but not available to older versions.

The solution is to use the android support library, which bring many of the features back to 1.6, and on top of that ActionBarSherlock, which is an amazing library written by Jake Wharton (only compatible up to 2.0 but should be enough)

The session will cover the most important patterns and how to configure the libraries to continue with a hands-on where the attendants can either do a small demo project to get to know the tools or migrate one of their existing apps to use this paradigms. Finishing with pizza and beer as usual.

Go to the meetup page of the Guru session to RSVP, be quick, there are few spots left already.