I’m just downloading the SDK.. wish me luck!

Hello

Good luck 🙂 I gave it a go a few weeks back and quickly wrote a noddy app to display current location including OS grid ref. Once you get the hang of the Eclipse setup and understand how an Android app is structured then it’s pretty easy to get going.

Java is my thing, and it looks pretty straightforward to me so far 🙂 Got three weeks to write an app it looks like.

Oh, when you start the emulator it takes frickin’ ages to startup. I was convinced I’d mucked up the install as the emulator didn’t boot into Android. Wrong – it was fine but just took ages 🙂

fancy this – what do i need to download and from where?

http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html

Well it’s taking frickin ages to download never mind start.

how did you get on?

Didn’t finish downloading until bedtime, so have not developed yet. I’ll post updates tonight. I’ve got lots to do – this is for an after-work project for a friend…

Oh, when you start the emulator it takes frickin’ ages to startup. I was convinced I’d mucked up the install as the emulator didn’t boot into Android. Wrong – it was fine but just took ages

Me too. I think it depends on which version of android you have on too, some of them boot quicker than others.

Some people apparently don’t realise that you don’t ever need to restart the emulator, you can just compile and run or debug again. They must take forever to develop stuff.

It is shockingly easy, if you’ve ever done any J2ME, Win32 development etc. you might find yourself really surprised at quite how easy android development is, and how many useful design decisions they’ve made to make it hard to screw stuff up.

Also, getting stuff into the market is dead easy too (once you’ve paid your $25 or whatever it is), which is nice.

I’ve done AWT/Swing a fair bit and I also learned J2ME overnight once to prove to a potential employer that I could pick up new stuff.

Cheers for the encouragement 🙂

I might also need to do the same app for iOS later – harder, I expect.

I might also need to do the same app for iOS later – harder, I expect.

Not sure about harder (as long as you’re happy with objective-C), people at work who do Apple stuff think it is okay, but you need to buy a Mac to do it on which is a pain if you don’t use OS X already.

It’s pretty easy to get going, a lot of stuff’s done for you. But you do have a few WTF! moments, when something that should surely be simple/built in, just isn’t… (want to scroll that text box two ways at once, surely not! Want to pinch and zoom a large image, never! etc.)

The documentation is very well written however, a real plus point. The emulator is dog slow though, and not even that great (e.g. buggy openGL rendering in some cases). Use a tethered device with debugging turned on, soooo much faster for most stuff IME.

Oh, and good luck. 🙂

You can’t do iOS without a Mac? Bugger!

True fact. And it’ll cost you $$ to get in on the dev program too.

Can’t do symbian Qt* without a pc, which annoys me.

*you can remote compile, which works, but isn’t ideal for various reasons. And you could boot windows on your mac… but no native toolchain is a hassle.

Can you not run OSX as a virtual machine?

Looks like you can:

Install OS X Snow Leopard in VMware Windows 7

There are cross platform mobile dev resources out there which allow you to target Android/iOS/Symbian etc without having to rewrite your app each time. I’ve not used them though as they seem to use C++ which I’d rather not go anywhere near 🙂 Or if your app doesn’t rely heavily on mobile device hardware capabilities e.g. GPS then you could consider a HTML5 type approach and again use some tooling to produce a multi-platform app.

You can’t do iOS without a Mac? Bugger!

I understand it uses the x-code / OS X development stuff, which being Apple is Mac only.

Various ways to do it unofficially though:

iOS Development On Windows – 7 Options

Hackintosh?

Or VMWare?

molgrips – Member
You can’t do iOS without a Mac? Bugger!

You’re surprised?!

Mac don’t like people to developed stuff for them un less you are “approved”.

Downloaded the SDK and got Hello Android running on my HTC Desire in no time using Eclipse.

Now waiting for inspiration and time to write something more interesting.

heavily on mobile device hardware capabilities e.g. GPS then you could consider a HTML5 type approach and again use some tooling to produce a multi-platform app.

You can get location info in HTML5 at least on Android. You can even tell it whether or not you need high accuracy (GPS), or are happy with a network position to save battery.

Oh and I think accelerometer works too.

I don’t know about camera, or doing any low level sound / video, but other than that, a surprising amount of stuff should work.

que?

It doesn’t f’in work.

Downloaded a load of crap, but no start menu links to start anything up apart from this SDK manger thing. Ok, so I created a profile for a device, and tried to start that, hoping it would start something up.

No luck, appears to be complaining about a pathname with ‘program files’ in it with a space. Wtf is this, 1998?

Got the damn thing working finally. What a f’in game that was.

Now to write some code. And I apparently have to code my layouts by hand in an XML file.. great.