The many steps of an Android Hello-World

As I promised on my last post, I couldn't resist not to write at least a hello-world application on my new phone. I went so through the, a bit long, task of installing the Android developer tools and writing my first program with it. I followed, step-by-step, instructions provided from Google Android SDK how-to pages. As a start I installed on my desktop computer but, soon, I'll try installing Android SDK on the EEEPC too.

Installation

The first step I took has been, of course, installing Eclipse IDE, a quite plain install from the software centre apart from some compatibility problem with Oracle Java 7. I had to revert to OpenJDK as default JVM in order to make Eclipse start.

The second step has been downloading and extracting Google's Android SDK. I though, at the beginning, about installing on a system folder like “/opt”, until I discovered that Android's Eclipse plug-in takes care of downloading and upgrading files on the SDK folder. I so went back to installing it on my home folder since running Eclipse as root user every time you have to do an upgrade is far from being advisable. By the way installing the SDK has only matter of extracting the downloaded file:

tar -xf android-sdk_r20.0.3-linux.tgz

Then I started Eclipse and selected the “Install new software” option from the “Help” menu opening the plug-in installation form. Here I added Google plug-in update URL (with the “Add...” button) and selected all the “Developer tools” items.

New toy on the desk: LG L3 Optimus E400

I'm not easy at changing my devices, unless they stop working. This time I did sort of an exception and after only a little more of two years I decided to change my (still doing its job) Nokia 5800 XM. Android phones always attracted me, since I first heard of Google promoting this new operating system, but price kept me from buying one since now. After having a look at the (not many) low priced models available here in Genoa my choice fell on the LG L3 Optimus E400. The phones I evaluated had roughly the same features and price so, at last, had been the plain metal-black design of the LG phone that triggered my choice. I'm not usually design-driven in my choices but when design is the only difference ...

By the way the new phone does all the old phone did even if the camera quality is far from what the old Nokia had. Is not new that thin bodies and good lenses are things that hardly go well together.

I'm not going to become a mobile developer tomorrow but ... be sure I'll post some hello-world in android as soon I'll find the time.