
My First Android App
Ive now spent around 24 hrs developing an android app. I downloaded the SDK and Eclipse and for the first time in ages i started to work with Java. I spent quite a bit of time working with C# over the years and to be honest since i started focusing on the android SDK i havent even really noticed the difference. there was zero time needed to adapt back to Java.So my first app – is a NASA image of the day app. Now sharp people out there may know that theres a Headfirst Android Programming book that uses exactly that example, and that was my starting point – but i got lucky because the examples didnt work. The SDK has changed a bit since the book i had was published and NASA have even changed the formats of their RSS feeds. I also went a lot further than they did with the book. The skills i learned for the book
- Setting up the dev environment
- Creating an application
- Downloading RSS
- Programatically parsing XML
- Working with the Android UI
- Working with permissions
- The basics of Android Architecture
And the stuff i did on top of it:
- Creating and Binding Android services
- Rendering Menus + catching those events
- Creating widgets
- Executing timed events
- Saving things in the file system
- Deploying my app.
I would like to thank Glen for a very late Friday evening working on this – he has significantly more android experience than i do and he helped me understand service binding and some of the key concepts of appication architecture at a time (midnight – 2am) when i was having hassle getting my head around it. We were talking about it on a Skype conversation while he was playing Diablo 3….
I found some fairly cool sensible restrictions as well – at one point i tried to put a 300k image into my widget and got a java out of memory error – which was a bit of a surprise – but the reason it happened was because my image was bigger than the total amount of memory allocated to the screen. That forced me to scale my image – which was a good thing.
Its quite cool to have my first app installed on my phone – though to be honest i probably wont keep it there. My first attempt wasnt really coded to my usual standard and ive learned how better to do things next time. The important thing is the app worked! I will probably build another app this week.
You can download my app for Android here. Its not perfect but it works!
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Posted by Owen Richardson on July 16, 2012
https://owenrichardson.wordpress.com/2012/07/16/my-first-android-app/