Sunday, January 3, 2010

Android Development – So Easy, Yet Not So Easy

I have recently started playing around with Android. Given the success of the Droid, Droid Eris, and what looks like a phone from Google, the NexusOne, I figure the Android is going to be either the number one or number 2 development platform for mobile devices. In either case, I want to be able to write apps for my Droid, which, I love.

So this week I have attempted to start development. I have read through the online documentation, which, in typical Google fashion, is fairly complete and detailed. The Android Developer Guide includes step by step instructions for installation of the SDK, Eclipse Plugin, and samples to get you programming quickly.

Of course, nothing is perfect. So here are a couple of issues with the tools.


  • It appears that sometimes changed resources don’t get updated when the emulator is re-launched. Even though I’ve set the flag to Wipe User Data.
  • I can get one version of the Google Maps sample to run correctly but not another. It seems that the Sample Tutorial on the Web site doesn’t work for 2.0 or 2.0.1 emulators on my machine, but the sample bundled with the toolkits do. To be honest, it appears that the only difference is WHERE the MapView is instantiated, but I am still a noob at this, so I am probably mistaken

Is this going to be enough to cause me to give up? Heck no. Even though these two items are frustrating, the toolkit is still well put together and I expect to be building apps in no time. My next posts will detail the building of an app.

3 comments:

  1. Hey Ben,

    Just ran across your blog, glad you've started developing on Android! My blog is actually devoted to small tutorials and code snippets detailing some of the "less documented" parts of Android, so maybe you'll find it useful!

    http://thinkandroid.wordpress.com

    But yea, good luck with your development stuffs! Hope things run smoothly.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thx thinkandroid,

    Looks like you already have a lot of good stuff. Hope you won't mind if I refer to you when appropriate. I hope to build a couple of simple apps and post the steps and detail some of the issues. Some of the samples you have would be great reference material.

    ReplyDelete
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