Introduction
In the past few days, I have been attempting to get my hands on some new technology. I tried many but finally landed with Android development. The only thing which attracted me to this is that I can deploy my apps directly to my phone. Here is a quick tutorial on how to get started.
Android plugins are available in the major IDEs like Eclipse and NetBeans. I tried configuring with all of them but the
ADT (Android Development Tool) is available and easy to use and is recommended. Just download the bundle and extract it to a specific location and it does everything for you.
With a single download, the ADT Bundle includes everything you need to begin developing apps:
- Eclipse + ADT plugin
- Android SDK Tools
- Android Platform-tools
- The latest Android platform
- The latest Android system image for the emulator
Stay tuned for more posts on Android development.
Getting Started with Development
I hope the
Android Development - Intro helped you in configuring your machine for developing Android apps. This tutorial is a quick start of our first Android app. Here is a walkthrough of that.
Step 1: Start Eclipse, extracted from the adt-bundle, i.e %….%adt-bundle-windows/eclipse/eclipse.exe
Step 2: A workspace launcher will popup and you have to define the workspace for your android apps. A workspace is a place where all the source files are kept.
Step 3: Once you have selected your workspace now your IDE is ready for you. Go to File > New > Android Application Project. See:
Step 4: The next step is to configure your project, it will have options like creating custom launcher and adding activity, etc. See:
Step 5: Hence we have checked the Create custom launcher icon in the previous screen, this screen allows adding our custom launcher icon. Here I'm using the default icons.
Step 6: Next we must decide the activity for our app, there are various types of activities available but for beginners, we will start with BlankActivity.
Step 7: On this screen you can provide the name of your activity.
This was all the configuration part, it's done. Now you can start your real coding. After completing the preceding steps, you will see a designer screen, where you can design and code your app.
Now we have the blank app with the title MyFirstApk and "Hello world!" text in the center. This is just a hello world app, let's start running the Android App.