Tipster: Introduction
 

A tip calculator is quite a simple application. When you go with friends to a restaurant and wish to divide the check and tip, you simply add the tip percentage to the total and divide by the number of diners. I have seen this application on my simple cell phone too. So I thought of implementing it in Android as a means to learn how it all works.

When I looked at the various tutorials, each one demonstrated a specific set of features. I tried different tutorials and then set about to write an application which would be as close to a real world application. Obviously this meant using different features of the API. The end result was a good enough application which used lots of features all in one application.

I know that many developers want a short tutorial with just the code pieces and brief explanations. Somehow, I cannot just post code and few comments. I always end up writing such tutorials as if I am speaking out to a live person.

So here it is, whatever I learnt and applied, for your perusal.

Introduction

In the world of application development many may found that earlier prototyping can help a lot. "Show your ideas at the beginning and be sure that you will get proper feedback from the customer, collect it and build great software" this is a simple rule that helps a lot in my day-to-day activities. I know several kinds of the prototypes but the most difficult is always a GUI.

What the customer expects? How to place various elements on screen? What is required and what is optional? How to organize dialogs? How to show customer the GUI without implementing it? We try to solve today all that questions in our public effort - Android GUI Prototyping Stencil for Visio.

 

 

Download the documentation for Android 1.0 SDK in PDF form, created from the HTML documentation.

 

Getting Started

Developing Applications

Developer Toolbox

FAQs

Bootcamp

(Thanks to frickingnutz.com)

I confirmed the following procedure only on my linux host (FC8). Sorry for Windows and Mac users.

1. Get toolchains from CodeSourcery (Choose ARM GNU/Linux and IA32 GNU/Linux).

2. Get kernl source code from here.

3. Deploy toolcains and kernel source and enter in the kernel source tree.

Installing Google Android SDK 1.0 On Ubuntu 8.04 Desktop

Version 1.0
Author: Falko Timme <ft [at] falkotimme [dot] com>
Last edited 09/24/2008

This guide explains how you can install the Google Android SDK 1.0 on an Ubuntu 8.04 desktop. With this stable release of the Android SDK, you can now develop applications for Android smartphones (like T-Mobile's G1) and offer them on the Android Market.

I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

1. Preliminary Note
2. Installing Java And Eclipse
3. Installing Google Android SDK 1.0
4. Creating A First Android Application ("Hello, Android")
5. Links

How to Install the Android SDK on Windows XP and Create an Application that Runs in the Android Emulator
This tutorial shows you how to download and install Android SDK to get you started developing Android applications.

1. Download and Install the Android SDK and Test the Emulator
2. Install Java
3. Install Eclipse
4. Install the ADT Plugin in Eclipse
5. Create Hello World Application

The Panoramio web site has a great collection of photos from all over the world, and they also have a very convenient web API. I thought it would be a lot of fun to use Android to access this content while you are out walking around – and especially to have Android find interesting photos based on your current location. The resulting open source application is now available in the apps-for-android project.

The application starts by showing your current location in a custom MapView. You can pan and zoom this map to choose the area you want to search.

I've written a small application called WebViewDemo that shows how you can add web content to your application. You can find it in the apps-for-android project. This application demonstrates how you can embed a WebView into an activity and also how you can have two way communication between your application and the web content.

Years ago I was addicted to a simple game that I played on my then state-of-the-art Pentium-75. In this game, balls would bounce around, and I would try to partition them into small enough spaces so that I could go to the next level where more and more balls would be added. As of a couple of months ago, for the life of me, I couldn't remember the name of this game. So when I sat down to write an application for Android in my 20% time, I thought, why not try to recreate something similar? After completing most of the game and showing it to some of my friends at work, one of them said, "Oh, this reminds me of JezzBall!" Eureka! If working on this game does nothing more than reveal the name of one of the favorite games of my youth, I'll call it a success, but in the meantime, I'm happy to announce that the source of this application, named Divide and Conquer, is now available on apps-for-android.

The game starts with instructions:

I've posted three new open source samples to the apps-for-android project: Triangle, SpriteText and Downloader.

The first two samples, Triangle and SpriteText, show techniques that would be useful to anyone using the OpenGL ES 3D graphics APIs to write Android applications. The samples contain several reusable classes that may eventually be incorporated (in some form) into the SDK. Chief among these is the GLView class, which abstracts the OpenGL ES book-keeping code from the rest of the application. GLView helps handle the extra work OpenGL ES applications have to do when the activity is paused and resumed, and when the display goes to sleep and wakes up. In the Pause/Resume case the OpenGL surface has to be recreated. In the display sleep / wake-up case the entire OpenGL context has to be recreated.