Friday, June 25, 2010

Using Android with Eclipse, creating AVDs on Mac

I found some helpful information on working with Android in the Eclipse environment, and added my own comment on creating an AVD, here.

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

taking a crack at things with 2.1


Verizon Wireless released an Android 2.1 ROM update for my HTC Eris Droid cell phone. I am hoping maybe that the Android Application Programming Interface docs and the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment plugins might be a more friendly environment for me with the updated software revision. I have been struggling to get traction with the Android 1.5 environment, as I am having trouble with the documentation not seeming to make sense with what is happening in Eclipse when I try to write some code.

I am taking a fresh run at things...

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

HTC Eris Droid

Yeah I bought a new phone, my wife and I have HTC Eris Droids now. I set up the IDE on my MacBook to handle Android 1.5 as a compiler target, and thrashed around trying to get the code to build for hours. My talkLock splash screen app runs on my phone now, even though I don't know why. I intuitively threw some hacky code in and it worked. It has something to do with R.drawable.image_name not resolving; Eclipse said it wanted an "int" so I figured out the resource id of my "image_name.jpg" image.

I get frustrated sometimes because the official tutorials have code in them that doesn't work, which means that this Android stuff is all very new and rough right now. I am fairly patient though, because I realize that I'm running Eclipse on platforms other than Windows, so I'm working in an environment that is shared by a very small percentage of Android hackers, which is a very small percentage of Java programmers overall. So it's really amazing that any of it works at all.

My only Windows box is very old and so I'm going to try to avoid doing development on it. It's a Pentium III Sony Vaio. I am not interested in seeing how Eclipse runs on it.

I am putting builds in the talkLock area on marmot.