Developing for Android (Shallow Thoughts)

Developing for Android

I wrote yesterday about my quest for an app for reading news feeds and other timely information from the web. And how existing ebook readers didn't meet that need. That meant I would have to write something.

Android development is done in Java, using Eclipse as an IDE. Let me just state up front that (a) I dislike Java (and have forgotten most of what I once knew about it) and (b) I hate IDEs -- they make you use their crippled editor instead of your own, they control what you can put where on the screen, and they're always popping up windows that get in your way.

Okay, not an auspicious beginning. But let's try to be open-minded, follow the instructions and see what happens.

I installed Eclipse from eclipse.org after being advised that the version on Ubuntu is out of date. Then I installed all the various Android plug-ins and SDKs and set them up (there is no single page that lists all the steps, so I did a lot of googling). It took maybe an hour or so to get it all installed to the point where it could produce its "Hello world".

And then ... wow! Hello world worked right off the bat, and the emulator worked for basic testing. Hmm, okay ... how about if we use HTML as a format ... is there a standard HTML display component? Sure enough -- I added a WebView to my app and right away I had a working HTML reader. Okay, how about a row of buttons and a status bar on top? Sure, no problem.

The standard Android online docs aren't great -- they're a wonderful example of how to write seemingly comprehensive documentation that somehow manages to tell you nothing of what you actually need to know. But that's not as bad as it sounds, because there are lots of forums and tutorials to fill in the gaps. Stack Overflow is particularly good for Android tips.

And yes, I did some swearing at Eclipse and spent too much time googling how to disable features, like the "Content Assist" that periodically freezes the whole UI for a minute or so in the middle of your typing a line of code, while it thinks about some unhelpful and irrelevant hints to offer you in a popup. Turn it off in the prefs under Java/Editor. (Eclipse's actual useful hints, like the ones you get when you hover over something that's red because of an error, will still work. I found them very helpful.)

More specifically: Java/Editor/Content Assist/Hovers, and turn off Combined Hover and maybe anything else that happens without a modifier key. You probably also want to turn off Enable Auto Activation under Java/Editor/Content Assist. And possibly others -- I kept turning things off until the popups and delays went away, and I haven't found anything explaining how all these parameters relate.

Okay, so there were snags, and it's frustrating how there are almost no open source apps for this open source OS. (Yes, my app will be.) But here's the thing: in about 4 days, starting from nothing, I had a little RSS reader that did everything I needed. I've been adding features since then. Android doesn't have a reasonable battery status monitor? Fine, my reader can show battery percentage in the status bar. Android doesn't dim the screen enough? Fine, I can dim it further inside the application (an idea borrowed from Aldiko).

After less than a week of work I have an RSS reader that's better than my Palms running Plucker ever were. And that says a lot about the ease of the Android programming environment. I'm impressed!

Update: The source, an apk, and a brief discussion of how I use my feed reader are now here: FeedViewer.