Android Developer
Well you might say I've decided to look for something new to play with but I am intrigued to start looking on writing applications that will run on the Android platform. I've been thinking a lot about it and I knew that if I didn't make a significant effort to set aside time to accomplish this, it would never occur. So I decided to take a week off of work and hunker down reading a book on Android development and punching out a couple simple applications from the book.
Day one of the exercise went fairly well with me reading the first two chapters and coding the first two example applications. It didn't end well because I was unable to get either application working via the emulator. Like any software project there is a certain amount of setup to be performed and it's always fun setting up a new environment you've never worked in before.
As it turns out my book, which was published in 2009, was written when there was only one version of Android (there are now four) and somethings have changed. I installed JDK 1.6, Eclipse 3.5, Android plugin and downloaded the Android SDK fairly easily. Everything went well until it seems Google decided to not actually provide the sdk but instead a setup tool. I think this is were things went horribly wrong about 9 pm Monday night.
Building my first application didn't have me writing any code because the Android plugin did all the work. This was fairly easy to do, name your application hello world and you're set. The problem came when I couldn't figure out how to get the emulator to start and then I didn't realize I'd have to wait five minutes for the device to actually start. Imagine me sitting at my desk looking at a window that looks like a picture of a phone....expecting something to happen.
By this point I'm cursing my computer that is horribly slow (P4 1.6 with 756MB of RAM I bought in 2000) because flipping from my browser to eclipse takes a minute and flipping between files in eclipse takes minutes. After banged my head on my desk and I started shopping for a new laptop. I had suddenly remembered why I hated working on code at home, it was painful to work in an IDE and I just wasn't interested in buying a new computer. Clearly that's no longer the case because I bought a new laptop this morning.
Talk about upping the ante, not only am I taking a week off of work for this but now I just bought a new laptop to develop on. After watching the kids this morning and trying again to do something on my dinosaur of a pc, I took Colin and Leah to Best Buy to pick up a cherry red Dell laptop. It's my second Dell and since the first one mostly survived the kids I felt safe buying another Dell.
Buying a new laptop means setting up a new environment again! Oh joy! This time I decided to skip the book's setup and checkout Google's online documentation. I ran accross it while trouble shooting all the issues I had the night before. This time I added the tool folder and jdk to my path and created my emulator via the command line. Now I have two working Android programs running on my fake phone!
I think part of my problems last night were CKI: chair keyboard interface. When launching the emulator, the program takes a while to get to the android home screen. I was expecting the emulator to pop up my simple apps immediately. Well that's not how it works. The emulator opens a fully operational android os that looks just like the core 1.5 build (which I chose) found on a phone. I can then find my applications on the emulator just like any other app.
Now that I have finished the basics I hope to dig into the rest of the book and learn to write mobile applications I will someday put on the Android Marketplace. I have a couple ideas bouncing in my head and one app I think would be killer but I'm holding onto it and I hope to see if it's possible. I'm really excited about this as an opportunity to branch out into something different. Feast or famine, I'll try to post my journey on the blog for anyone interested to follow.
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