A couple weeks ago I learned that I am going to be having a lot of free time soon. Everyone in the office I work in is being layed off.
This of course has its ups and downs. I have the whole month of December off which is great. Downside is I don't have a paycheck for very long.
One of the things I have wanted to do for a while is a little programming on a mobile OS. The hot one these days is the iPhone, but there are a few problems with that. One, I don't have a Mac, and two, there are lots of know issues getting your software into the app store.
One platform that seems interesting, and I can develop for is Android. From wikipedia:
Android is a mobile operating system running on the Linux kernel. It was initially developed by Android Inc., a firm later purchased by Google, and lately by the Open Handset Alliance.[3] It allows developers to write managed code in the Java language, controlling the device via Google-developed Java libraries.
I started reading up on how to write apps for Android, their basic architecture, and the development environement, then promptly fell asleep. I needed to get hands on now, so I started setting up a development environment following the instructions on DataSprings site.
One issue I encountered is a bit of an oddball. I set up my virtual device properly, but every time I tried to run it, the emulator claimed I had not created any virtual devices. I tracked down the problem to a non standard computer setup. The setting for My Documents is "D:\My Documents" and the virtual device was created there. Unfortunately the emulator doesn't correctly look up the My Documents directory. It was looking in "C:\Documents and Settings\gfox\My Documents".
I fixed this first by copying the virtual devices to the C drive, but then I undid that and used junction to link the C drive device directory to the actual directory.
So far the craplet I have written has a single button that launches a second "form" when it is clicked. Not bad for a couple days investigation.
I have a couple ideas for applications, so when I am actually not working any more and have some real time to devote, I hope to make some progress.
One hurdle I might face with this project is that I have never done any Java programming. So far the code I have written is very, very similar to C#, so no big deals there. I have a suspicion that I will be referring to Google lots on this.