Creating An Android App 1 : Introduction

OK, here it goes.  I'm going to qualify this as being my first attempt at Blogging consistently.  Certainly this is my first attempt at blogging about a project, so bear with me OK?

I want to use Android to play around with location based services.  Why?  Because its pretty new and I see lots of opportunities to leverage computers in peoples pockets, that's why.  So my next few posts will be detailing the building of a simple app I'm calling, MyFriends.

This is an app that will track my location and send it to a server.  It will also send the location of all my friends to the same server, and share the location data between devices.  Initially, all the app will do is display my location on a Google map along with the locations of my friends, if they are in the maps viewable area.

This app is pretty simple, and I've seen some similar apps on the app store, but I'm doing this as an exercise to get familiar with Android.  And who knows, maybe, just maybe, this will turn into a usable app.

Things my app will need to do:

• Get my location data
• Send the data to a server via HTTP(S)
• Get my friends data from the server via HTTP(S)
• Create a Google Map view and Overlays to show the locations of me and my friends.

So, I've defined an app and the general scope of the first revision.

Next - Installation of the development tools.