FOSDEM ‘10 is a free and non-commercial event organized by the community, for the community. Its goal is to provide Free and Open Source developers a place to meet. The event takes place at the ULB in Brussels on the 6th and 7th of February.
Yesterday night we put the last hand on the FOSDEM schedule application and made it available to everyone on the Android Market. The application is compatible from Android 1.5 to the latest version.
Features:
- List of events by day and track
- Room maps
- Share an event by text, mail or on your social network
- Application-wide search
- Favorites
- Notifications when a favorited session is about to start
The schedule is downloaded the first time you start the application. You can manually update it later, as the schedule still gets some events added or updated. Since the downloaded schedule XML is over 500K and a lot of visitors come from abroad, we advise you to download it over WiFi to avoid roaming charges.
I worked on several parts of the application: The XML parsing, this is very slow on Android, using the XMLPullParser API, the DB and a content provider for the events, the app-wide search, the favorite’s mechanism and their notifications, the design of the event screen and a share feature to post the sessions you’re attending to Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, text, etc.
I also intensively used the next things:
- Sending and receiving broadcast events
- Using a background service
- The notification mechanism
- How to make a content provider
- How to implement search in your app
- Make better use of intents
The application is open source under the GPL license. You can grab the source on our sourceforge project page. We’re 3 persons working on it: Christophe Vandeplas, Pieter Iserbyt and me. If you have any suggestions, don’t hesitate to tell us, we’ll be glad to add it to the next update.
To download the application, search on ‘FOSDEM’ on the market or just scan this QR code.
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