Monday, January 07, 2013

Time to study and to experiment - I want to build my app - day 2

This is day 2 of my experience in building my own Android app.

I downloaded the whole ADT bundle for Windows here and I installed it.
Then I started my training by chapter one, Building Your First App, that's basically an Hello World app.

This is a quite easy app to develop that shows you some basic concepts behind Android development: the Activity class, the View class and the Intent class. Beside that, it helps you familiarize with the emulator and its usage for building, running and debugging apps.

My impression now is... there is a lot of things to study and the complexity is high because the field is huge and this platform suffers fragmentation: I mean you cannot rely on the fact your app will run on Jelly Beans only (at least for my app). Therefore some APIs cannot be used generally and you have to learn way A as well B to do just the same thing.

Before continuing my training, I discovered a site where Open Source Android app are listed: it can be useful for doing some practice by studying already-skilled-programmers' code. Here it is: F-Droid. This site, as well as the SDK samples, can help a lot. (Practice makes perfect).

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