Tutorials : Create Your Own Android Apps and Games

[M Z Karim]

Tutorial 1 : Basic about Android

Android is a mobile software platform. It is an operating system too. It is designed based upon Linux Kernel. It is developed by Google and the Open Handset Alliance. Being an open source platform there is no license fees so it reduces the initial investment of the project owner.

In the era of mobile technology, Android has been showing its enormous presence attracting, both, users and Android application developers. Since its release in 2007, we have found Android's prospects in developing quality mobile applications. Whenever Google releases new versions of Android SDK, multiple new features are added to compete in the mobile technology world.

Why do people choose Android ?

The answer is Android has various characteristics to produce revolutionary mobile applications. Such as -

•   To send and receive data across mobile platform Android uses various technologies like         
        GSM,EDGE,CDMA, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, EV-DO, and UMTS
•   SQ-Lite for data storage
•   Android has wide range of libraries for image, video and audio files like MPEG4, H.263, H.264, AMR,
        AMR-WB, MP3, AAC, JPG, BMP, GIF, PNG, WAV, and MIDI formats.
•   It has comprehensive libraries for 2d and 3d graphics
•   It has Inter-Process Communication (IPC) message passing facilities
•   You can use Google talk for P2P communication
•   It has features for video camera, touch screens, GPS, accelerometer, and magnetometer.

Android has SDK which provides tools and libraries for Android app development. With its SDK a developer can design the UI for an application and debug it as well.

The SDK includes multiple versions of Android platform (For example, Android 1.1, and Android 1.5) that  can use for Android Application Development. For every version, the SDK offers a fully compliant Android library and system image.


 

[M Z Karim]

Tutorials 2 :

Android API level | A Brief Introduction to Android Programming

 
The SDKs distribution currently in the market. Google has released the Android platform under following versions.
•   Android 1.0
•   Android 1.1
•   Android 1.5
•   Android 1.6
•   Android 2.1
•   Android 2.2

Android API Level is an integer value that uniquely identifies the framework API revision offered by a version of the Android platform. The Android platform provides a framework API that applications can use to interact with the underlying Android programming system. The framework API consists of:

       â€¢   A core set of packages and classes
       â€¢   A set of XML elements and attributes for declaring a manifest file
       â€¢   A set of XML elements and attributes for declaring and accessing resources
       â€¢   A set of Intents
       â€¢   A set of permissions that applications can request, as well as permission enforcements   
                included in the system

                   Platform Version   API Level
                    Android 2.2                8
                    Android 2.1                7
                    Android 2.0.1                6
                    Android 2.0                5
                    Android 1.6                4
                    Android 1.5                3
                    Android 1.1                2
                    Android 1.0   
The above data will give us a peek into the Android marketplace for which we will create products.

The Android Development is done on two levels -

System Level – It involves modifying the Android system code and adapting it to various hardware   
                     platforms. It also involves creating additional services and features in the android system 
                     itself.

Application level – It involves creating software products and services which sits on top of the Android
                        software stack and interacts with the hardware through the underlying Android platform.

If you want to jump right into System level programming, you should perhaps start with C and Linux kernel programming.

So now that we have defined the scope of our discussions we must outline what is the minimum requirement for you to learn the application programming for Android OS.

Android applications are built using Java. The Java byte code executes on a efficient and modified virtual machine known as Dalvik Virtual Machine. Dalvik does not align to Java SE nor Java ME Class Library profiles (e.g., Java ME classes, AWT or Swing are not supported). Instead it uses its own library built on a subset of the Apache Harmony Java implementation. So we need to know basic core java but it alone is not sufficient to leverage this great platform for creating great applications. However to follow this tutorial you need to have a basic understanding of Java, XML, Eclipse and object oriented programming principles.