Held: Wednesday, 25 September 2013

Back to Outline 15 - Documentation and Javadoc. On to Outline 17 - Building Your First App (1).

Summary

We begin our quick and dirty introduction to Android development.

Related Pages

• Reading: An Introduction to Android Development
• Lab: Your First Android Project
• EBoard (HTML) (PDF)

Overview

• Why build Android Apps?
• Issues in Android development.
• Warnings!
• Lab.

Administrivia

• I realize that there's crud going around campus. Do yourself and your classmates a favor and get rest if you are sick. Drop me a note to let me know.
• Reading for Friday: Adding Actions to Your Android App
• Lea knows much more about Android development than I do. I'm better at resolving problems than she is. Together, we shold be able to make things go well.
• EC Opportunities
  • Learning from Alumni Thursday @ 2:15: Jim Finnessy
  • CS Extras Thursday @ 4:30: Jennelle Nystrom on Microsoft
  • CS Table Friday (The Story of Mel, A Real Programmer)
  • G-Tones, Saturday, 3:30 at Herrick Chapel
  • Baseball Scrimmage Sunday (11 am?)
  • Water Polo Saturday or Sunday
  • Others?
• Other things
  • Facing the Bear, 7-9 pm Wednesday
  • Swipe your P-Card at the Football or Soccer game
  • Poweshiek CARES March Thursday. Leave from Herrick at 4:45 p.m. Email chenjerem@gmail.com for more info. I can also forward you the email.
  • Poweshiek CARES March Thursday, Oct. 3. Meet at Drake at 5 p.m.
  • GHS Homecoming Parade Thursday, Oct. 3. If you've never seen a small-town homecoming parade, it's worth it. (And last year's homecoming queen is a current Grinnell student.)
• HW 5 will be released some time this afternoon/evening.

Why Android Apps?

Why are we doing a bit of Android development in a class whose primary foci are supposed to be object-oriented design and data structures and algorithms?

• Developing applications helps you contextualize your work. While we will often build toy programs, they are likely to be more real.
• As you'll quickly see, App development exercises many of the concepts you've been learning about object-oriented design, particularly inheritance and polymorphism.
• App development allows us to introduce some concepts that modern curricular standards suggest should be covered somewhere in the curriculum, such as event-driven programming, markup languages, and basic GUI progrmaming.
• Too often, we have you build only small programs. Working with Apps let you get a taste of dealing with larger programs.

Quick notes on Android development

Here are some things to keep in mind as you develop for Android.

• Android applications have many disparate pieces
  • UI elements - buttons, text areas, etc.
  • Layouts - Govern the placement of UI elements
  • Resources - Sounds, images, even many of the strings that you put on the screen.
  • Code - does the real work
• There are various ways to tie things together
  • Call this code when this action occurs (event-driven programming)
  • Use this resource here
  • Etc.
• You'll find that you need to plan a bit better where things go and how things interact.

Warnings

• Many interacting parts leads to many potential problems. Things won't always go as easily as they might. (And Eclipse is involved, which always makes things more dangerous.)
• We will do a few quick classes to give you the flavor of development. After that, we are likely to provide you with apps that you modify.
  • We really don't want Android to interfere. It's an add-on, more than anything.
• I'm barely a novice Android programmer. But I have years of experience dealing with the complications of programming.

Lab

• Do the lab.