Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Day 7

January 15, 2013

Well the end of my fist week came with a whimper. Nothing done today. My daughter was sick and kept me up most of the night. No energy to work on this today. I'm turning in early.

Goodnight.

Monday, January 14, 2013

Day 6

January 14, 2013

Today there are some frustrations.

In following (and typing) the code from the book, several errors occurred. I ended up deleting my project and downloading the book's source code from the site. After unzipping it and importing the project I'm working on, I was able to run her code.

There seems to be some steps missing, or assumptions made by the author, in what is needed to make the code work. The code from the Wrox site had many more lines in it that the book just doesn't discuss. I'm not sure if this is stuff I'm supposed to know or not.

I've always found it easier to learn by retyping code myself and making my own mistakes. I'm afraid this time, I'm going to have to download her code and try and learn from it.

Hopefully I'll be able to do this.

We shall see...

Sunday, January 13, 2013

Day 5

January 13, 2013

I spent the most time yet with the book and learning how to program for Anrdoid. I worked with activities and some with styling and themes. 

Saturday, January 12, 2013

Day 4

January 12, 2013 (happy birthday, Howard)

No development today.

I spent my time today reading the introductory chapter of the book and thinking about what application I want to develop. To be honest, when I got to the part of the book that discusses how to name a package I became side-tracked. The author said that she names packages using her domain name (i.e. net.<domainname>.<appname>). This put me on a track of coming up with my own domain name, registering it (and renewing a few others I have that were about to expire) and consolidating domain names I have to one registrar. I gotta stop being so easily distracted.

Back to the matter at hand...

I came up with a few ideas for an app:
  • Softphone
  • Weather widget for the lock screen
  • Weather & clock widget for the daydream mode
The latter two are things I've looked for in the Play store and don't see many options. So why not try myself. The first one above sounds challenging. Since I work for a VOIP company, it's something I can certainly make use of. I've purchased one for my iPhone so I'll try and copy the features and functions from that.

Friday, January 11, 2013

Day 3

January 11, 2013

I ordered a book from Amazon last night to help me learn how to do this and it arrived today. The book is called Beginning Android 4 Application Develoment. I haven't had a chance to crack it open yet. I want to focus on the online tutorial I found: http://developer.android.com/training.

Tonight I finished the "Starting another activity" tutorial.

Thursday, January 10, 2013

Day 2

January 10, 2013 - found a few tutorial sites but ended up using the Google one and began writing my first app by following the lesson. Showed my wife and daughter the simple text field and button Imade "myself."

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Day 1

January 9, 2013

Downloaded the SDK and eclipse and built my first hello world app. The previous night I ordered an Android development book from Amazon.