Introducing the Android Basics Nanodegree

Introducing the Android Basics Nanodegree

Android Android Developer Featured Udacity

Posted by Shanea King-Roberson, Lead Program Manager Twitter: @shaneakr Instagram: @theshanea

Do you have an idea for an app but you don’t know where to start? There are over
1 billion Android devices worldwide, providing a way for you to deliver your
ideas to the right people at the right time. Google, in partnership with
Udacity, is making Android development accessible and understandable to
everyone, so that regardless of your background, you can learn to build apps
that improve the lives of people around you.

Enroll in the new Android Basics
Nanodegree. This series of courses and services teaches you how to build
simple Android apps--even if you have little or no programming experience. Take
a look at some of the apps built by our students:

The app "ROP Tutorial" built by student Arpy Vanyan raises awareness of a
potentially blinding eye disorder called Retinopathy of Prematurity that can
affect newborn babies.

And user Charles Tommo created an app called “Dr Malaria” that teaches people
ways to prevent malaria.

With courses designed by Google, you can
learn skills that are applicable to building apps that solve real world
problems. You can learn at your own pace to use href="http://developer.android.com/tools/studio/index.html">Android Studio
(Google’s official tool for Android app development) to design app user
interfaces and implement user interactions using the Java programming language.

The courses walk you through
step-by-step on how to build an order form for a coffee shop, an app to track
pets in a shelter, an app that teaches vocabulary words from the Native American
Miwok tribe, and an app on recent earthquakes in the world. At the end of the
course, you will have an entire portfolio of apps to share with your friends and
family.

Upon completing the Android Basics Nanodegree, you also have the opportunity to
continue your learning with the Career-track Android Nanodegree (for
intermediate developers). The first 50 participants to finish the Android Basics
Nanodegree have a chance to win a scholarship for the Career-track Android
Nanodegree. Please visit href="http://udacity.com/legal/scholarship">udacity.com/legal/scholarship
for additional details and eligibility requirements. You now have a complete
learning path to help you become a technology entrepreneur or most importantly,
build very cool Android apps, for yourself, your communities, and even the
world.

All of the individual courses that make
up this Nanodegree are available online for no charge at href="http://udacity.com/google">udacity.com/google. In addition, Udacity
provides paid services, including access to coaches, guidance on your project,
help staying on track, career counseling, and a certificate upon completion for
a fee.

You will be exposed to introductory computer science concepts in the Java
programming language, as you learn the following skills.

• Build app user interfaces
  
• Implement user interactions
  
• Store information in a database
  
• Pull data from the internet into your app
  
• Identify and fix unexpected behavior in the app
  
• Localize your app to support other languages

To enroll in the Android Basics Nanodegree program, href="http://udacity.com/nd803">click here.

See you in class!

Get ready for Javascript “Promises” with Google and Udacity

Get ready for Javascript “Promises” with Google and Udacity

Develop Udacity Web

Sarah Clark, Program Manager, Google Developer Training

Front-end web developers face challenges when using common “asynchronous” requests. These requests, such as fetching a URL or reading a file, often lead to complicated code, especially when performing multiple actions in a row. How can we make this easier for developers?

Javascript Promises are a new tool that simplifies asynchronous code, converting a tangle of callbacks and event handlers into simple, straightforward code such as: fetch(url).then(decodeJSON).then(addToPage)...

Promises are used by many new web standards, including Service Worker, the Fetch API, Quota Management, Font Load Events,Web MIDI, and Streams.

We’ve just opened up a online course on Promises, built in collaboration with Udacity. This brief course, which you can finish in about a day, walks you through building an “Exoplanet Explorer” app that reads and displays live data using Promises. You’ll also learn to use the Fetch API and finally kiss XMLHttpRequest goodbye!

This short course is a prerequisite for most of the Senior Web Developer Nanodegree. Whether you are in the paid Nanodegree program or taking the course for free, won’t you come learn to make your code simpler and more reliable today?

Introducing a New Course on Developing Android Apps for Auto

Introducing a New Course on Developing Android Apps for Auto

Android Auto Featured Udacity

Posted by Wayne Piekarski, Developer Advocate

Android Auto brings the Android platform to the car in a way that’s optimized for the driving experience, allowing the user to keep their hands on the wheel, and their eyes on the road. To learn how to extend your existing media and messaging apps to work within a car, we collaborated with Udacity to introduce a new course on Ubiquitous Computing with Android Auto.

Designed by Developer Advocates from Google, the course shows you how to take advantage of your existing Android knowledge to work on this new platform. The best part is that Android Auto is based on extensions to the regular Android framework, so you don't need to rewrite your existing apps to support it. You'll learn how to implement messaging apps, by using Notification extensions. You'll also learn how audio players just work on Android Auto when you use the Android media APIs. In both cases, we work through some simple Android samples, and then show what changes are needed to extend them for Android Auto. Finally, we show a complete music playing sample, and how it works across other platforms like Android Wear.

If you have an interest in Android-based messaging or media apps, then you need to learn about Android Auto. Users want to be able to take their experience to other places, such as their cars, and not just on their phones. Having Auto support will allow you to differentiate your app, and give users another reason to try it.

This class is part of our larger series on Ubiquitous Computing across Google platforms, such as Android Wear, Android Auto, Android TV, and Google Cast. Designed as short, standalone courses, you can take any course on its own, or take them all! The Android Auto platform is a great opportunity to add functionality that will distinguish your app from others. This Udacity course will get you up to speed quickly with everything you need to get started.

Get started now and try it out at no cost, your users are waiting!

New Courses -- Developing Watch Apps for Android Wear

New Courses -- Developing Watch Apps for Android Wear

Android Wear Featured Udacity

Posted by Wayne Piekarski, Developer Advocate

We recently released a new Udacity course on Ubiquitous Computing with Android Wear, built as a collaboration between Udacity and Google. Android Wear watches allow users to get access to their information quickly, with just a glance, using an always-on display. By taking this course, you will learn everything you need to know to reach your users with notifications, custom watch faces, and even full apps.

Designed by Developer Advocates from Google, the course is a practical approach to getting started with Android Wear. It takes you through code snippets, and deep dives into sample code, showing you how easy it is to extend your existing Android apps to work on Android Wear. It also covers how to design user interfaces and great experiences for this unique wearable platform, which is important because the interface of the watch needs to be glanceable and unobtrusive for all day use.

This class is part of our larger series on Ubiquitous Computing across Google platforms, such as Android Wear, Android Auto, Android TV, and Google Cast. Designed as short, standalone courses, you can take any course on its own, or take them all! The Android Wear platform is a great opportunity to add functionality that will distinguish your app from others; and this Udacity course will get you up to speed quickly and easily.

Get started now and try it out at no cost, your users are waiting!

Introducing the Tech Entrepreneur Nanodegree

Introducing the Tech Entrepreneur Nanodegree

Android Developer Apps Education Featured Udacity

Originally posted on Google Developers Blog

Posted by Shanea King-Roberson, Program Manager

As a developer, writing your app is important. But even more important is getting it into the hands of users. Ideally millions of users. To that end, you can now learn what it takes to design, validate, prototype, monetize, and market app ideas from the ground up and grow them into a scalable business with the new Tech Entrepreneur Nanodegree.

Designed by Google in partnership with Udacity, the Tech Entrepreneur Nanodegree, takes 4-7 months to complete. We have teamed up with most successful thought leaders in this space to provide students with a unique and battle-tested perspective. You’ll meet Geoffrey Moore, author of “Crossing the Chasm”, Pete Koomen, co-founder of Optimizely; Aaron Harris and Kevin Hale, Partners at Y-Combinator; Nir Eyal, author of the book “Hooked: How to build habit forming products” and co-founder of Product Hunt; Steve Chen, Co-Founder of YouTube, rapid prototyping company InVision and many more.

All of the content that make up this nanodegree is available online for free at udacity.com/google. In addition, Udacity provides paid services, including access to coaches, guidance on your project, help staying on track, career counseling, and a certificate when you complete the nanodegree.

The Tech Entrepreneur offering will consist of the following courses:

• Product Design: Learn Google’s Design Sprint methodology, Ideation & Validation, UI/UX design and gathering the right metrics.


• Prototyping: Experiment with rapid-low and high-fidelity prototyping on mobile and the web using online tools.


• Monetization: Learn how to monetize your app and how to set up an effective payment funnel.


• App Marketing: Understand your market, analyze competition, position your product, prepare for launch, acquire customers and learn growth hacks.


• How to get your startup started: Find out whether you really need venture capital funding, evaluate build vs. buy, and learn simple ways to monitor and maintain your startup business effectively.

Pitch your ideas in front of Venture Capitalists

Upon completion, students will receive a joint certificate from Udacity and Google. The top graduates will also be invited to an exclusive pitch event, where they will have the opportunity to pitch their final product to venture capitalists at Google.

Introducing Android Developer Nanodegree in India with Udacity—1000 scholarships available

Introducing Android Developer Nanodegree in India with Udacity—1000 scholarships available

Develop Udacity

Originally posted on the Google India blog

Posted by Peter Lubbers, Senior Program Manager, Google

With a vision to transform India into a hub of high-quality mobile developers for global and local apps, we’re delighted to announce the launch of a program to offer Android Developer Nanodegrees in India in partnership with Udacity. The Android Nanodegree is an education credential that is designed to help developers learn new skills and advance their careers in a few months—from anywhere on any device—at their own pace.

The Udacity Android Nanodegree program comprises of courses developed and taught by expert Google instructors from the Google Developer Relations team and will include project reviews, mentorship and career services from Udacity. The curriculum will be updated regularly with new releases and will provide developers with a certificate that will help them to be a more marketable Android developer.

With 3 million software developers, India is already the second largest developer population in the world, but we still lag behind in creating world-class apps. With the launch of this program we want to bridge the gap by providing India’s developer community with an easy way to learn and build high quality apps for the world. Today, only less than 2% of apps built in India feature in top 1000 apps globally and our goal is to raise this to 10% in next three years.

The Udacity Android Nanodegree program is open for enrollment from today. The program takes an average of 6-9 months to complete and costs Rs. 9,800 per month with Udacity refunding 50 percent of the tuition upon completion. Google and Tata Trusts have partnered to give 1000 scholarships for the Android Nanodegree to deserving students and will be available from today. Interesting applicants can visit https://www.udacity.com/india for more information.

Speaking about their association with the Android Nanodegree program, Mr. Venkat - Managing Director of Tata Trusts said, “India has one of the youngest population of developers, where the average age of a developer is just 25 years old. While the last decade has established India as the largest provider of a skilled IT workforce to the world, there is an opportunity to help our young developers and equip them to compete on a global stage through educational and skill building programs. As part of our association, we’re glad to announce 500 free scholarships for the complete Android Nanodegree."

New Course: Android Design for Developers

New Course: Android Design for Developers

Android Android Developer Material Design Udacity

Posted by Nick Butcher, pixel pusher

What makes an app intuitive and easy to use? What makes it hard or frustrating? How can your app stand out in a competitive market? Learn the fundamentals of good Android design and the patterns that have proven to work on Android to help you to build better apps.

This 5-lesson series, available on Udacity, begins with a crash course on the fundamentals of Android UI design. It helps you to sort your DIPs from your pixels, to pick the right layouts and navigation structures and shows you how to style your app to match your brand. The rest of the course is a deep dive into the principles and implementation of material design to show you how to build beautiful consistent experiences that are right at home on Android.

Lesson 2 dives into the concept of tangible surfaces, and how they establish hierarchy to make your UI more understandable. Lesson 3 looks at applying bold graphic design, or how the principles of space, color, typography and imagery help you to create a beautiful, branded experience. Lesson 4 studies the use of meaningful motion to bring your apps to life and create a seamless and more intuitive experience. Finally, lesson 5 shows how adaptive design makes your app shine on any screen size.

This course is aimed at developers familiar with Android who want to boost their design skills or designers who want to understand more about the platform they’re creating for. The full course is available for free or you can enroll in Udacity’s Android Nanodegree for extra help and support. So sign up for the Android design for developers course and go build something brilliant!