Beginning Google Android Development

My wife and good friend have a G1 and I’m absolutely in love with the damn thing. I plan on getting one soon, however I’ve read a lot and some people are saying to wait for the MyTouch. However, this does not prevent me from getting my hands dirty with some Android development.

Since I’m a .NET guy I thought it would be fun to see what the experience would be like to develop a simple app. A few things that I wanted accomplish during this little project:

• Use Eclipse
• Use the ADT for Eclipse
• Test with an Emulator (Android SDK provides one for free, emulator.exe)
• Use the Accelerometer in Android

The fun part being the Accelerometer stuff. If you don’t know what one is, here’s a Wikipedia snippet from the accelerometer article:

An accelerometer measures the acceleration it experiences relative to freefall. This is equivalent to inertial acceleration minus the local gravitational acceleration, where inertial acceleration is understood in the Newtonian sense of acceleration with respect to a fixed reference frame, which the Earth is often considered to approximate.

Cool, huh? Basically, I want to move the phone and events should fire when certain velocities and inertias are achieved. This should be a good math based challenge for me. Calculating positive and negative accelerations, gravity, etc. Getting this to work is something I plan on doing over the next few days.

So far after playing with it a bit I’ve found that the best place to start is truly with the Android SDK’s Hello World. I’m impressed with the documentation and how to information in the Hello World. It has really helped. Check it out here.

If you’re interested in following along my Android journey, I’ll probably be posting my in depth findings here and my snippets/comments on the experience on my twitter.