So my plan was to start some Android development with Eclipse in Linux, just to sharpen the saw. But you know what? With all of the improvements in Linux over the last ten years, it still sucks. If ANYTHING goes wrong, you are screwed. You have to change some bit flag in some cryptic file that there are four references to in Google, and then restart seventeen times.
Specifically, what I did was install Eclipse in Jaunty Jackalope using Add/Remove. That was admittedly my mistake – Jaunty doesn’t support 3.4 or 3.5 of Eclipse, which are needed for a quality experience in Android development. Second mistake – I tried to install Eclipse 3.5 manually over top of 3.2. HORRIBLE idea. When I figured out what I had done, it was a mess to fix it. In short, total time to compile Hello World, 5 hours.
Windows 7 experience: 10 minutes. We will be talking about Windows.
To get started, you want to install the JavaSDK.
Next you want to install the Android SDK.
Finnally, you want to install Eclipse.
After all of the installations are done, you will want to configure the Android tools for Eclipse. Part of this is adding the SDK components. This is all well document, and most importantly, it is hard to screw up.
The only weirdness is the necessity to manually create the package file. IT’s easy but weird. From a command prompt, go to the location that you put the Android SDK (Mine is just in the Documents folder) and run this:
android create avd --target 2 --name my_avd
The you just need to create a new Android project in Eclipse. I’d write about it, but it was so well documented in the Hello World documents.
And there we go. Got the whole things running, in just about ten minutes.
The actual programming thing, well that’s next.