As the first real post, I will be talking about my plans for the coming 30 days. Starting today, I will go on a journey to learn Android development. My goal after these 30 days is simple: Publish an app in the Play Store.
I don’t have much experience in programming. I started out last year with Python and have since then developed many small programs, mostly simple algorithms and small unfinished games. I have a good foundation of the basics otherwise I would not have been able to create my own 2D tile-based game, building the engine from scratch with Pygame.
Why android development? First of all, because I want to create something I would want to buy myself. Second, because I want that something to reach a target audience that likes my product. Android lets me put my app on the Play Store and that’s a great channel for reaching big audiences. I didn’t go iOS because of the restrictions (license and OSX) and because I myself own a Galaxy SII.
Day – 1
So far I’ve been able to set up my development environment and build my first app. I followed the guidelines from developer.android and installed the android SDK and eclipse with the ADT plugin for an optimal Android development environment. I created a project and ran my first app on my phone:
I must say it feels motivating to have such a fast time from setup to first app. Whenever I do any small changes and compile the code, it takes no less than 2-4 seconds for the app to run again on my phone. I feel this fast feedback is very important so that I don’t lose momentum. I have also set up the AVD (android virtual device) in order to test my future apps on different specs.
Leave a Reply