Getting Started with Android

Fibonacci Series for Android

I’ve recently joined the Android Developer Relations team at Google and am thus renaming this blog David Chandler’s Journal of Java Web and Mobile Development. Some of my favorite Google platforms are intersecting in new ways all the time (witness today’s announcement of Chrome Beta for Android ICS). Having done Web development for 18 years, I now turn my attention to mobile development, where I’m cautiously hopeful that HTML5 will make it easier in the long run to build cross-platform mobile apps.

As I started to ramp up on Android, my first thought was, “Why on earth did I ever wait so long to try this?” There’s something magical about connecting the USB cable to my phone and seeing my own work appear there. Perhaps it’s because I was an iPhone user for a few years and felt out of touch with my phone as a Java developer. At any rate, in no particular order, here are a few notes that I hope will be helpful to Android newbies like myself. If you’re an experienced Android developer, it will no doubt take me a while to catch up with you. Please feel free to post your favorite tips and tricks in the comments as we go along.

To get started, I installed the Android Developer Tools plugin for Eclipse and started working through the tutorials on the Android Developer site. At first, I was trying too hard. To get started, you really don’t need to worry about adb or running “android” from the command line, as you can launch the AVD manager and SDK manager right from Eclipse. The tutorials are written to run apps using the emulator, but it’s easy and faster to use your actual phone:

1. On your phone under Settings | Applications or Settings | Security, allow “Unknown sources.”
2. On your phone under Settings | Development, enable “USB debugging.” It’s also useful to enable “Stay awake” so you don’t have to unlock the screen frequently.
3. Plug in your phone via USB cable and choose the “Mount as disk drive” option if prompted. You should now see it listed when you run “adb devices”.
4. In Eclipse, click Debug as | Android Application. You will be prompted to choose a device (which should show up automatically) or launch an emulator. Edit the launch configuration for each project to change the default action.

That was easy.

Creating visual appeal

A visually appealing app is a strong indication of quality and is easier than you might think to create. Android Asset Studio is an online tool that will take any image or text, size it appropriately for various screen densities, and package it so you can just drop it into your res folder. Even easier, you can do it within Eclipse: choose File | New | Android icon set and just follow the prompts.

Capturing screen shots

When you upload your app in the Android Market, you’ll need two screen shots of your app. The ADT plugin for Eclipse has a tool that makes this easy. Open the DDMS perspective and click the camera tool to snapshot a running emulator or connected device.

There’s also a third-party utility to project your phone’s screen onto your display. This is really useful when giving Android talks for your local JUG or GTUG.

Packaging your app

When you’re ready to distribute your app, you’ll need to sign the .apk file. In Eclipse, choose File | Export | Android application and it will walk you through the process, including creating a keystore. To test your app on your phone, run “adb -d install path/to/your.apk” on the command line. The -d option selects connected devices. You can also use -e to target the emulator. You may get a warning that you need to uninstall the old version of your app first. If you do, just run “adb -d uninstall package_name,” where package_name is the root Java package associated with your app, like com.turbomanage.

Publishing to the Android Market

Go to the Android Market, sign up for an account, and upload your artifacts. Your app will be scanned for malware and should show up in an hour or two. It took me only a few days to get ramped up enough to create my first app, which I packaged and published in an afternoon. It really couldn’t be easier. When you publish, do pay attention to your application version and SDK version. Note that target SDK version is distinct from minimum SDK version, and both are important for maximum compatibility across devices.

Introducing Fibonacci Series for Android

For my first app, I took a shallow dip into my creativity pool and came up with a Fibonacci Series calculator. There are several Fibonacci apps (mostly involving stock trading) already, but I just needed a simple calculator for when I’m on a dinner date with friends and suddenly can’t remember one of the five-digit Fibonacci numbers, for example. Regular readers of this blog will recognize the related sunflower illustration thrown in for good measure. The app gave me a good opportunity to use simple TextViews, a custom view for the Canvas on which to draw the sunflower, and practice handling orientation changes (go ahead, turn it sideways and see what happens). Oh, and I incorporated a tabbed interface and the menu button also. There are lots of tutorials on these topics online already, so I think for now I’ll just point you to the source code.

As a newcomer from GWT, I found the concept of an Activity very familiar (GWT’s Activities and Places are deliberately modelled after the Android). I ran across only a few gotchas. One that I remember is that overriding onConfigurationChanged() in your Activity does not guarantee you will get notified of all orientation changes because it doesn’t get called if another app is in the foreground when the orientation changes. But no matter, you can check every time in the Activity’s onCreate() method. It also took me longer than it should have to figure out how to hook into the phone’s menu button (just override onCreateOptionsMenu()). The tutorials on the Android Developer site as well as the new Android Training section under Resources cover most of the beginner topics quite well.

For new developers, the single most useful page on the site is this one: Common Tasks.

And don’t forget the android tag on Stack Overflow, which Google officially supports.

Once again, here’s the source.

Enjoy!

Oh, and if you’re wondering about all the status bar icons in the screen shot above, yes, I really did publish the latest version to the Android Market while on the plane, listening to music, with USB cable connected. Android development is pretty addictive…