To anyone that follows the blog regularly I’m sure you are calling shenanigans on my referring to this as “Week 3″ of my learning to program process as it has been a few weeks since I last posted on it. Ironically it is my interest in Android that slowed my progress on this project as I took a job as a contributor to Android and Me and it has taken me a little while to adjust to the added workload. Anyway, I’m back at it this week and I will definitely try harder to stay on track this time as I would love to be able to contribute something to the Android Market this year.
This week’s entry is going to be brief as I had to reread some of the earlier content to get myself back into the swing of things. As advertised at the close of Week 2′s post I started in on the Android Developer’s page this week and specifically I kicked off with the Hello World tutorial. I had already done the whole “Hello World” thing in vanilla Java, but I repeated it in order to see it run on the Android emulator. I won’t bother to go through the full tutorial as they do an excellent job guiding you through for the most part, but there are a couple discrepancies that I’ll tell you about.
The first instruction in the tutorial is to “open a command prompt or terminal” to create your Android Virtual Device (AVD). I’m guessing the tutorial has never really been tweaked to take into account changes to Eclipse as there is now an icon you can click (it is the little black smartphone that looks nothing like an Android phone) which opens a menu called the “Android SDK and AVD Manager.” Before you start making your AVD you should check the “installed packages” link just below the “virtual device” link to be sure that you have installed all of the necessary SDKs and APIs. Now you can make your AVD.
On the Virtual Devices page you just need to hit “new” in the upper right corner and that is where you will name your AVD and dictate the attributes such as OS version, screen resolution, etc… After this step everything seemed to match up nicely between the tutorial and my actual experience with the current software so no need for me to rehash what is publicly available there.
I’m realizing I probably should have listened to my elders and betters who told me that venturing into the Android emulator already was a mistake. Seeing things running on the emulator was too cool and I am going to be really hard-pressed to return to plain Java. I’m digging back into Head First Java again tonight and we’ll see if I can stick with it or if I’m going to rebel and seek another reference that is purely Android.
That’s all for this week, but I’m back on the horse and I think this time I’m on to stay.
As always if there is anything that you want me to touch on, or if you have found the holy grail of Android development resources please let me know in comments.
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4 Responses to Learning to Program for Android – Week 3
doctagadget July 26, 2010
Keep it up man. I am following your steps and trying to learn from a noob point too.
admin August 3, 2010
Thanks for the encouragement, I’ll start posting again soon.
Terry July 27, 2010
Are you still learning? How is it working out?
admin August 3, 2010
I had some massive setbacks with selling my house and moving, but I got back at it a few weeks ago and am going to start posting again soon. My most recent course of study was part of a review I am doing of Sam’s Teach Yourself Android Application Development in 24 Hours for Androidandme.com. I’ve really enjoyed it so far, although it does assume a little more familiarity with coding than I think most beginners have.