Friday, May 02, 2014

Time to dip my toes into Android sea!

Recently I found out about this old little project of mine and I thought to give it another try.

Two weeks ago I set up a new goal, to work on my Android programming skills. I've been gathering information for the first few days, then I set began to get an idea about what it means to develop apps on Android platform. I'll start keeping an blog of my journeys on the big Android sea, sharing the struggles and success I meet along the way.

I already had Eclipse, SDK and AVD installed since more then a year on my computer. Everything was set up on my hard drive in a folder called "Projects", which I must admit, due to a lot of work at my job lately, I haven't open it in a long time.

First thing I did was to start them up and update SDK and Eclipse to the latest versions. Once the easy part was done, I began gathering information from web. First link I found was Getting Started - Android Developers. I began the training session there but soon I realized I would have to find another source of information. The lessons there were aimed more towards someone who already has an idea about what Android development means. My only experience was a simple "Hello World" app that Eclipse creates by default when you make a new project.

After spending a few more hours searching for another tutorial, I came across Android Programming - The Big Nerd Ranch Guide and I decided to use it as my starting point. It proved to be a good tutorial and I am still using it right now.

So far I have made my first app, a simple Quizz game using activities. This lead me to learn about the structure of an Android project, manifest file, layout files, resource files, activity lifecycle, creating new activities from main activity, Model-View-Controller architecture and debugging.

Once the first app was done, I began working on my second app called CriminalIntent. I know the name sounds a bit strange, but the app is used to record a list with details about "Office Crimes" :)
The book says it's a good example to learn about Fragments and based of what I've seen so far it looks like it's an important part of my training. All applications from now on, no matter how simple, will be created using fragments.

I don't want to make this post any longer then it already is so I will stop here.

Stay tuned for further updates! ;)

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