I'm looking into it atm. Any experienced devs here try to make an app? If so, how did you find the SDK to work with?

Cheers!

no

Thanks for the feedback.

Anyone else?

I couldn't even install the bloody SDK, which isn't a good start. "SDK Setup.exe" doesn't do anything... I tried from the command line to see if there was any output but nope.

Then I tried tools\android.bat update sdk as suggested in the text file and that dumped a Java Exception.

Not a good start at all :-)))

uhm, do you have the java sdk/jre installed?

uhm, do you have the java sdk/jre installed?

Worked that one out myself already. S'all good baby.

Have you had a bash at Android?

he's too busy bending over for steve jobs

I've also not developed anything for android, but I have some great ideas, well mostly rip offs of iPhone apps I've read about

I've not had any experiance developing with android, but I am happy to test your stuff out.

What sort of things you looking to make?

Very broad application targeted initially at recruitment market (for commercial use) and general public consumption. Will be a $3 ish app.

I don't complete many things that I start in my freetime, so don't get too excited.

Also, I watched that vid you sent me on Steam last night before you logged off, lol. That was whack! I sort of found it funny but kinda disturbing as well. The snowman was funny. The swearing elf was disturbing. Haha.

there are some good intro tutorials here to have a play

http://www.droidnova.com

there are some good intro tutorials here to have a play

http://www.droidnova.com

Cheers big ears. Nice source.

I'm not a programmer, but I do own a Motorola Milestone, so I am wishing you luck in your Android endeavors. The more apps, the better. =)

he's too busy bending over for steve jobs

made me lawl

I'm not a programmer, but I do own a Motorola Milestone, so I am wishing you luck in your Android endeavors. The more apps, the better. =)

Where'd you get your Milestone? I've been looking at replacing my HTC Dream with one.

Very broad application targeted initially at recruitment market (for commercial use) and general public consumption. Will be a $3 ish app.

I don't complete many things that I start in my freetime, so don't get too excited.

Also, I watched that vid you sent me on Steam last night before you logged off, lol. That was whack! I sort of found it funny but kinda disturbing as well. The snowman was funny. The swearing elf was disturbing. Haha.

I gotta get around to getting my phone to use paid apps. Stupid optarse.

Haha, glad you liked the vid :P

Where'd you get your Milestone? I've been looking at replacing my HTC Dream with one.

I got it from Expansys (the UK site, not the Australian one). Took less than a week to get here. They had an exclusive deal on it when I ordered, so I couldn't get it anywhere else. That's over now though, so I'd suggest looking around to get the best price.

Developing using the Android SDK is a piece of cake, particularly for a Java programmer (which I am in a large part).

Just using the emulator makes me want to have an Android phone, lol.

can i ask why?

can i ask why?

I have a Sony-Ericsson W880i at the moment as my phone, which is cool, but I want something a bit broader. I don't want to go the iPhone route because it's a one phone option, not very flexible.

I don't want to go WinMo because I've been there and it sucked. Just looking at the HTC phones that seems the best bet.

Then I also wanted to dev something for a handset since I haven't done that before. Looked into iPhone SDK and Apple started to annoy me about as soon as I typed in the URL - so Android seems the best option.

As for using the emulator, the interface is just nice. Emulator is really f***ing slow on a mediocre laptop with 1GB RAM though.

Ok. Probably a good move if your writting an app to sell. Position yourself now in the market.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8442205.stm was a good article too.

Too bad anyone on Optarse (like me) wont be able to see your app unless it's free. :(

Too bad anyone on Optarse (like me) wont be able to see your app unless it's free. :(

I'm with Optus as well. What's the go with not showing non-free apps? I'm not across the billing mechanism - do you buy via Credit Card or via your phone account?

You pay through Google Checkout, just just uses your credit card I believe. As far as I know, it's not connect to your actual account with your carrier in any way at all, so I don't really know why Optus block access to paid apps on the Market. You can get around it if you root your phone and install an app called Market Enabler.

Ah yeah. I found this quote from Optus:

Optus is currently working with Google to provide an Android application store to our customers, and we are optimistic it will be available soon.

Sounds like they are trying to get a cut.

Sounds like they are trying to get a cut.

That's exactly what they want and why we're suffering as a result. I can't remember the site I saw it on, news was a couple months ago that they wanted a cut which is why we haven't got paid apps yet.

Well I wont be using their stupid service unless it somehow manages to be cheaper than the official Market, and offers all of the same applications.

Well I wont be using their stupid service unless it somehow manages to be cheaper than the official Market, and offers all of the same applications.

Where aboots can I get info on rooting my phone to get market access?

Another s***ty thing about optarse is they take f***ing ages to release the updates.

Interesting comment on article I read:

Ummm, there’s no paid apps in Canada. How come that didn’t get an article.

Also interesting from Market Enabler website:

Market-Enabler is an application to fake the phone's location and access markets from other countries. Android market is separated into regions (country and carrier specific) and some apps are just enabled for a specific country and not available to the other countries.

Where aboots can I get info on rooting my phone to get market access?

Just Google the model of your phone with something along the lines of 'android root access.'

Ok, I set up a dev env on an Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 with 8GB RAM (Win 7 x64) and the emulator is much more usable.

http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/9008/81420762.jpg

It's definitely a very appealing development platform. The debugging is perfect, exactly as debugging any other managed application.

I'm looking into it atm. Any experienced devs here try to make an app? If so, how did you find the SDK to work with?

Cheers!

Actually I found the Basic SDK rather excellent. The layouts use a boxing technique like CSS so doing basic layouts is a piece of cake. Debugging using Eclipse works pretty much exactly as you would expect including being able to debug across multiple threads. I've found Logging any exceptions in Debug mode to be an excellent way to identify any strange behavior.

The only gripe that I would have about it is the Lack of graceful backwards compatibility between the Android Versions of the SDK's.

If you wanted to take advantage of developing for the SDK 2.1, but have graceful features disabled for a phone with a lower SDK, you can't. So if you want maximum compatibility you would either have to compile different versions of your app with each SDK version or just compile for the lowest SDK that you wish to support. Unfortunately the Android Market Place does not allow you to market your 1 app across several different compatible version downloads (not to my knowledge).

Aside from that, there are a lot of things that I would have thought would have been built into the SDK but isn't such as lazy loading images into a ActivityList (even loading resources from the SD Card will lock the UI thread).

If you are looking at doing anything thats outside of what is documented and the sample examples you'll need to do a lot of searching the web to see if someone has had the same issue, as the solutions provided would have been obvious had there been better documentation with examples.

Aside from that it's excellent to work with.

The AusGamers android app only took me about a day to setup the development environment (installed Ubuntu into a Virtual Machine on my workstation + Eclipse Galileo + Java EE). About a week to have a working prototype by Learning the SDK, and another week to polish it (researching slowdowns, refactoring, cleaning up code, changing design etc).

Looking forward to doing more development work using Android.

Xion is da man!

I think I know Xion... I can vouch for his "da man" ness

Sorry guys I gave Google a buzz, they said they were full and werent taking any more frickin interns

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4045/4505156500_3e0d83d78a_o.jpg

oh you're going to develop on their hardware for free? wtf who does that?

Where aboots can I get info on rooting my phone

Love it

Khel approves of this shady *cough* hobby

yeah so I completely forgot about this thread
I'm sorry for being an apple fanboy, f*** apple and f*** the iphone
as beautiful as it is, I can't believe I put up with apple telling me that I cant sync my device to more than one computer at a time, can't tether it without paying my telco, can't f***ing drag and drop music to it

why bother

Desire Eta 11 days

how can you not drag and drop music to it? isn't that what itunes does?

hows this for being a compliant little corporate citizen. For preapproval to buy a Nexus One I had to scan in my drivers license and bank account summary to verify my identity. All I have to do now is hand over the dosh while my current G1 seems to have become threadlocked for about the last 2 days. Now if that's a case for the com pool moving ahead to 2.1 and freezing 1.6 devices, fml and f google.

sounds like a dodgy merchant more than a dodgy designer

what do you do about dragging and dropping if you want to put an album on your phone at work, but the one and only device that you are allowed to sync to is back at home on your desk?
oh you burn a cd and take it home, load it on that computer, then sync it?
sounds like a huge f*** around to me - I'd know, I've done it a few times

If by merchant you mean the payment gateway im using (comGateway) then I am fairly confident that they check out ok having read about happy customers on Whirlpool having used the service. Not sure though, still fairly peeved I had to hand over so much info to get this far. Next thing they'll be sending me a DNA swab kit ;-P

last edited by trillion at 22:59:04 09/Apr/10

well, what I was getting at was which party required your ID to pre-order?
where I come from, if someone treats me like I'm an idiot and I can buy the same service somewhere else, even if its a little more expensive, I'll take my business elsewhere on pure principal

this was from google.com/phone due diligence peeps, I suppose

cant blame them for treating potential low volume customers like idiots, they would supply to their local resellers that they have agreements with before some joe shmoe wanting a single unit shipped

at least they were nice about it, had all the trimmings of a politely worded email

last edited by trillion at 23:20:59 09/Apr/10

hrm fair enough
I was shocked today to find that I had to hand over my drivers license today to buy a cheap piece of s*** nokia in the post office

was it unlocked without sim or with a registered sim in it? afaik carriers dont really like prepaid junk as theres nothing really in it for them but marketing opportunities. their goal is to get you on contract so they can do you for higher call rates

i think it was locked to optus but I only intend to use it for 2 weeks, I just needed it for business as I havent taken a call or sms in 2 days
I chucked the other sim away anyway, I opened the box and kept the phone + charger, put my sim in and away she goes

oh you're going to develop on their hardware for free? wtf who does that?

lol, sweet trolling?

It's worse for Apple, you have to pay to sign up and get the SDK (I believe, from my brief PM discussion with 3dee a while back).

Like anything, it's either a hobby or an investment. Some people grow vege patches, some people program. I do both.

any updates on android dev anyway?
I might as well have a play with it, I've been ignoring the fact that apple even have one because they want me to pay for it - seems pretty evil to me

Nah, haven't touched it. The emulator is really tedious even on a really solid PC and I don't have an Android device yet. Will be getting one in the next few months though no doubt.

One thing I'm pretty certain about is that I'm keen to go the webapp route for a lot of things.

Xion, why didn't you use a webapp approach for yours? Like the iPhone one made by 3xodus? Then you would have killed many birds with one stone.

I heart Android.




That is all.

Xion, why didn't you use a webapp approach for yours? Like the iPhone one made by 3xodus? Then you would have killed many birds with one stone.

One of the reasons we built our Android app, like the iPhone app before it, was to get some experience doing Real Work with the SDK; you cant get that with a webapp.