Here’s the skivvy on the review. Since, I made the commitment to read this Droid book, I’m going to provide review notes for each hour of the book immediately after I complete that section of the book. In theory you’ll see 24 separate posts over the next few days containing my personal notes on my experience with the book.

Hour 4 Review Notes

This hour is about Managing Application Resources… first thought is graphics and files.

Darcey and Conder are lumping Strings, colors and layout files as resources… I’m down with that.

Huh?  Resource filenames must be lowercase and no dashes… thought that died with the fax machine.  Grrrr we still have those in the insurance department.  Welcome, your time travel experience starts with a visit to 1994.

Good muggle-esque quote:  “Displaying an application correctly on a handset, rather than the Eclipse layout editor, should always be a  developer’s primary objective.”

Creating a bunch of .xml resource files in the exercises…not glamorous, but essential

Final exercise was to place an image into the layout… used one of my blacksmith and anvil shots from my Mount Vernon trip a few months ago.

Hour 4 took about 1:10 to complete cause I got lost in tweeting about the experience and playing with more properties than listed in the book!

Here’s the skivvy on the review. Since, I made the commitment to read this Droid book, I’m going to provide review notes for each hour of the book immediately after I complete that section of the book. In theory you’ll see 24 separate posts over the next few days containing my personal notes on my experience with the book.

Hour 3 Review Notes

Hour 3 is tantalizingly titled “Building Android Applications” and I’m going to stay up past midnight in order to complete it.

No coding during this hour but lots of discussion… like the link on intents http://www.openintents.org/en/

WRONG there is coding but it’s in the exercise section on the last page of the hour.  Some custom logging that illustrated when some events fired… I played with an phone call interruption to see when create, start, stop, resume, pause and destroy.

Got them to all fire according to the text book, and Hour 3 is complete in about 25 minutes… Hour 4 will have to wait until tomorrow!!

Here’s the skivvy on the review. Since, I made the commitment to read this Droid book, I’m going to provide review notes for each hour of the book immediately after I complete that section of the book. In theory you’ll see 24 separate posts over the next few days containing my personal notes on my experience with the book.

Hour 2 Review Notes

Hour 2 is all about tools and getting acquainted with what’s at your disposal and how to use.  You might think this to be really cool, and I’m sure it is to someone, but the content is weak here just a few things to do.

Learned that CTRL + F11 and CTRL + F12 change orientation of a running emulator.  Alt + Enter goes to full screen mode and even causes my second monitor to flash black for a second.

Something funny about seeing my blog site on the phone emulator… chalk it up to geek humor.

Did find a listing of more tools…http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/tools/index.html

One cool exercise to change your photo in an AVD

And now I’m done with Hour 2 in about 38 minutes.

Here’s the skivvy on the review.  Since, I made the commitment to read this Droid book, I’m going to provide review notes for each hour of the book immediately after I complete that section of the book.  In theory you’ll see 24 separate posts over the next few days containing my personal notes on my experience with the book.

Hour 1 Review Notes

I already had the Android SDK installed and Eclipse, though my version is a couple new than used in the first example so I went to the SDK Manager and downloaded the 2.3.3 API Level 10 version in a blind attempt to minimize compatibility issues.  I have no idea if this will reap dividends.

The authors mention API level 9 and you aren’t going to see it in the latest versions of the SDK

Project setup covered and a quick explanation of the different project files and page 16 is complete!

Like the breakdown of the AndroidManifest.xml file in both tabbed UI implementation and the XML… BTW the print copy of this book is in COLOR that matches my default text colors in Eclipse

The first *real* change in the application is to set up debugging… +1 for early debug recognition

Next up the Hello World app, and the dreaded create a new AVD and wait and wait and wait before it even launches for use.  Not sure how much time my future self will spend staring at this screen!

According to the clock on my machine it takes 1 min 21 sec to get from zero to the application running

In reviewing the questions and answers at the end of the book, the workshop and the Exercises I found them to be the most time occupying and ended up spending about 45 minutes on Hour 1 of the book.

“What are you going to do this weekend?”  Hanging out with the family, and reviewing a book makes the perfect getaway!

Generally my expectations are low of the “learn in 24 hours” series, so the only way to move on the Reynolds’ expectation scale is UP!

Check back on Monday and see if I made I lived through my 24 hours…

While scouring the blogosphere I ended up at this page showing a relatively easy configuration for attaching your Kindle Fire to ADB for Android Development!!

http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/sdk/Connecting_your_Kindle_Fire_to_ADB.pdf

Quick side note:  Since I’m writing mainly about Android I added the tag to my posts instead of the ubiquitous “Java” tag…at least I didn’t file ‘em all under '”internet”

This evening I explored a variety of emulators.  So far the fastest (hey, 2.2 –API 8 flavor) to load and develop from is the Galaxy Tab from Samsung, though I haven’t loaded the latest HTC’s

If Tab is your style then add the following URL under Tools | Manage Add-on Sites

http://innovator.samsungmobile.com/android/repository/srepository.xml

Go to Packages and hit the Reload option and you’ll see the add on in the location in the screen shot below…

Create your new  Galaxy Tab in the AVD (select the new Target type that was added in the previous step)

And you should get your new emulator looking like this!!

Not sure why I can only get an emulator to run for a couple days before I have to kill it in AVD manager and create a new one.  As soon as I blow it away I’m able to create a new one that will last a few days, but after that it’s toast!

Trying to map it to an action that I’m doing but all the emulators are really slow… on my 64 bit Windows machine.

There I was, just a codin’ my classes away and then that nasty LogCat had to display that “FATAL EXCEPTION: main”

I’m missing some basic setup code (probably just a line or two), and until I find that line I won’t see a darn thing in my emulator!! Another likely candidate for my error is the switching between different layout modes… I was trying to get a label somewhere on the screen besides underneath it’s predecessor.

I’m not too far from my first app, now I just need a device to run it on!!

CNET provides the first option, but it’s hardly a developer podcast though the focus on new devices and latest features is relevant

http://www.cnet.com/android-atlas/

Android weekly is nice and short (under 5 minutes):  http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/android-weekly/id424035710

And MOTODEV weekly is another Android podcast with a development flair.  To be brutally honest I can’t listen to podcasts where the host has more filler words than [ummm uuh] content and Frenchmen who name drop past clients in hopes of building credibility. 

Listen to the first two and completely ignore the last one!!