Android

So yesterday I decided that I would look into what is involved in writing an app for Android, Google's mobile phone OS.

I downloaded the various SDKs, eclipse plugins and emulators and spend about half a day setting them all up (Tip of the day, if using this in a Jazz client, change the Jazz client to use a Sun JVM instead of the default IBM one).

Once the set up was done, I jumped right in at the deep end and started to put together a UI for a very simple app designed to display a D&D character builder save file. I originally tried to build the UI using java, but nothing appeared. Puzzled, I looked through a the docs and tutorials and nearly everything used XML files to define the UI instead, so I tried that and quickly got something up and running. It wasn't pretty, but it did the job.

I'll reserve judgement until I see how hard it is to make it pretty (including the support of changing orientation to landscape).