It’s been some time since I last posted. I guess things kind of got a bit too normal for me and I wasn’t stumped enough to write about it. Well luckily for me, work has allowed me to work on their mobile application. I am currently writing a simple app in both Android and iPhone (with Microsoft Windows Phone to come when the device is available).
I started this project knowing a little (very little) about iPhone and objective-c (the language that is iPhone) and nothing about java or Android. Since my Mac was on order I decided to start the Android project first. I chose Eclipse as my IDE and followed the instructions on the Android site. Getting the emulator and the development environment setup was pretty easy and I didn’t really run into any issues until I had to d/l the Android SDK versions (for each phones version). I did get one error that was complaining it could not rename a folder, but that was documented and it was easily solved by running SDK Setup.exe in the SDK folder.
My plan was to create something that was somewhat portable between the two platforms. As far as I can tell there are some things in each platform that are just plain old different. For instance hooking up a view (nib) to a view controller is way different than loading a layout in an activity. Both languages support inheritance and I knew I could capitalize on that front.
The application is a simple news reader that show new stories daily and allows you to select a headline and read a story. Once the app goes out the door I will be adding features to it to make it cool, but for now it’s really basic.
In the following postings I will detail some of the design decisions I made and why I chose them. I will also detail some techniques I used and do lots of complaining about limitations along the way. Limitations in both platforms.
I do miss the awesome IDE Visual Studio brings and the power of .net, but I am really enjoying the learning experience and I also love not knowing and then figuring things out.
