First steps with Android

31.08.2011 08:28 ·  Notes  ·  android

Android… So, it got to me. No, I did not become the happy owner of a shovel-shaped device mistakenly called a “phone” (my old SE K320i is great). It’s much worse than that :-). I had to find out how to develop applications for Android.

After successfully downloading and installing the SDK, I started looking for an IDE. On Android Developers there are two options: Eclipse with the ADT plugin and command line + any editor. I tried this Eclipse… IMHO, it’s an abomination. Firstly, it is terribly slow. So slow that M$ Visual Studio under VirtualBox beats it in terms of responsiveness and convenience. Secondдн, the interface organisation is awful. I have often heard that GIT is for aliens, in this case, Eclipse is not clear who wrote it and for whom :-). You won’t believe me, I spent about 15 minutes trying to find a way to open an existing project. It turns out that you have to import them not open. And the rest, like annoying hints on a quarter of the screen, the inability to change anything in the project properties if there are errors, etc. In short, Eclipse didn’t work for me.

I decided to write the code in Geany and build it manually in the terminal. However, there is also IntelliJ IDEA, which is rumoured to support the Android SDK, but I didn’t bother to try it (maybe for nothing).

P.S. By the way, for me the emulator wouldn’t work on the main X server, failing with

XDM authorization key matches an existing client! SDL init failure, reason is: Couldn't open X11 display

I wasn’t in the mood to look into it, so I just ran it on a separate X server.