I’m learning Android Dev

November 3, 2013

It’s about time I took a look and saw how the other half lived. I’m learning Android development. I bought the BNR Android book and have started working my way through the chapters. Keeping in mind I’ve only been doing this for two or three days, here are my thoughts:

• Big Nerd Ranch writes exceptional books.
• The Android Emulator is slow. It’s like DMV slow.
• I’ve spent a surprising amount of time cleaning builds and restarting Eclipse and the emulator. I wouldn’t expect to get into that kind of debugging so quickly, especially on such a simple project. And while I’m complaining about Eclipse, non of their image assets are Retina. Since this is the only non-retina app I’ve used in a while, the appearance is strikingly bad.
• String handling in Android is much better than in iOS. Has anyone written anything similar for iOS? Checking the googles…
• I haven’t used Java since 2006 or 2007. It was surprisingly easy to pick back up.

I realize that my complaints about Eclipse and the emulator can be fixed by switching to a different IDE and using alternate emulators, but I’m making a conscious effort to learn the official way to develop Android apps before I strike out on my own and customize my own environment.

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