University of Santo Tomas

Institute of Information and Computing Sciences

Department of Information Technology

Seminar Narrative Report

Seminar Attendee
Student number: 2014068886 Bayocot, John Michael A.

Seminar title
Easy A: Android App Development for Beginners
Venue
Engineering Conference Hall
Date/ Time
February 17, 2018 / 8am-5pm
Resource Speaker
Mac Valmores

Lessons learned in the seminar attended

The seminar focuses on the different areas or systems where mobile

development could be applied. The areas could be in security, internet of things,
intelligent systems, virtual reality, and mesh networks. The very first think that
we are being asked when developing mobile apps is that it could either be a
native or cross platform. The advantage of cross platform development is that
many users could use the app but you might be challenged with User
Experience (UX) requirements in both platforms. Several tools could be used
such as Android Studio, Xamarin, Unity, Ionic in developing mobile apps. In
security, a popular application is doublelocker android ransomware which
creates two reasons for the victims to pay one it changes the PIN and second it
encrypts all files using the AES encryption algorithm. There two popular
encryption algorithm the AES and DES but most companies uses 3DES.
Everything is in the cloud and there are several cloud service providers for
mobile applications such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google
Cloud Platform. During the afternoon session, the resource speaker discussed
the different information in terms of developing Android application in Android
Studio.

I learned the different behaviors of layouts especially Relative Layout where

there is a reference to other objects and Linear Layout where you can align the
views one by one. In layout xml, the layout_width and layout_height is
mandatory needed and it is advised that you should not put an exact size.
Several symbols you see in layout xml such as @ refers to a folder and @+
means it is created during runtime and without that it is precompiled. I also
learned that Strings are immutable in nature which means unmodifiable or it
cannot be changed. All String objects resides in memory which has a special
area of memory called “string constant pool” but the reason why it is
immutable is that it creates a new string object when a reference is made to the
 University of Santo Tomas
Institute of Information and Computing Sciences
Department of Information Technology

original variable. String is also case sensitive and in android studio you can
define string objects in strings.xml. These concepts were being taught during
OOP and with that the speaker gives a recap of the important OOP concepts.

Nowadays, there is a high demand for mobile developers because the industry
needs it. The resource speaker gives us an overview of what we need to
prepare for technical interview. He emphasized that we should have a
knowledge in Git. The Git Repositories would serve as our developer portfolios
and the recruiters are looking on how you write the code because there are
apps that work well but the code is not efficient.