Comments on: Ground-Up Android, Part 2: Our First Project

By: Negi

Negi — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 07:27:58 +0000

thanks for posting this tutorial!

By: Sergi and Replace

Sergi and Replace — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 11:24:46 +0000

Why is everybody blaming? Yoni is offering a free tutorial that, I assume, he's doing on his own time for free. Just welcome it and do not complain about it being too detailed.

Yoni, thanks for your work.

By: Matt J.

Matt J. — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 18:18:20 +0000

First of all, I am simply not seeing the same things you are. Long before I see “Press Menu to unlock”, I see a screen completely blank except for the word 'Android', written in a funny font. Then it changes to another funny font, and I only see a direction to unlock after I myself press something — and even that is over 10 seconds after actually launching.

Now I do not expect you to debug my qemu installation, nor to accommodate all its peculiarities in your tutorial directions. But make no mistake about it: when Google wrote their tutorials they tested it out on multiple platforms, and made sure that each line of their instructions makes sense on all of them. That is your 'competition'.

Nevertheless, I do consider it fair to announce at the top of your tutorial that you are assuming a clean installation. But it seems to me that your own memory of what you wrote there is faulty. For what I am finding on the first page is quite different from “clean Android 1.6/Eclipse 3.5 setup on OS X.”. What I found contradicts that, saying, “You'll want a recent version (3.4 or 3.5) of the Eclipse IDE”

This is a significant difference in wording. Even though you are doing all this for free, you will find it well worth your time to eliminate such discrepancies. More people will benefit from your efforts if you do.

I found the above wording at http://activefrequency.com/blog/2009/ground-up-...

Finally, I am not finding it all that straightforward to follow along, but the modifications are not all that major. And I am really learning something from the tutorial, so thank you.

But I am expecting the most glaring discrepancies in Part 5;)

By: ysamlan

ysamlan — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:59:45 +0000

What I meant by reading the screens: when you switch to the emulator, the screen says "Press Menu to unlock" (like on an actual phone). Then when you unlock, it says "Waiting for debugger to connect..." which I think is pretty self-explanatory. (The exact time you have to wait depends on your hardware, OS, version of SDK, and AVD; I usually find it takes 1-2 seconds during my development on a Core 2 Duo Mac with OS X on a 1.6 SDK and AVD).

If you are working from a clean SDK 1.6 and Eclipse install, and following along, then yes, you'd only have one AVD option available at runtime (the one you created in the tutorial). And if you installed the 1.5 SDK and created your own AVDs previously, then I assume you know how to manage them.

I'm posting these tutorials to help the community for free; even most development books I've bought don't post particular instructions for Linux installations over the book's OS of choice. I can't possibly test and give directions for every possible hardware, OS, and legacy SDK/IDE configuration; I say at the top that I assume a clean Android 1.6/Eclipse 3.5 setup on OS X, but it should be straightforward to follow along on other platforms with minor modifications.

By: Matt J.

Matt J. — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:45:57 +0000

I do understand the need for avoiding excessive detail. And to be sure, explicitly calling out for each field what can be entered would be a lot of detail. But there is a third way: you can say much as you have in this post, that the fields called out in the text should be entered as called out, the others are optional. And the PNG file should not show them filled in, since this contradicts the directions in the text.

By: ysamlan

ysamlan — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:41:52 +0000

Ah – That's a fair criticism, but for the fields I don't step through, it's because what you actually put down in those fields is really unimportant — for example, you could name your package and Activity class anything you feel like (within the rules of any normal Java project), and your AVD can be named whatever you'd like. I didn't want to dump in excessive detail and give readers the false impression that there are some magic values for those fields that need to be filled in, and Eclipse itself warns you if you enter anything invalid for those fields. The fields I called out in the text are the important ones (SDK version, for example) where entering a wrong value might actually interfere with the reader's ability to follow along.

By: Matt J.

Matt J. — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:32:13 +0000

I never do see a screen “press Menu, and wait one second”. And after pressing Menu, I have to wait much longer than just one second before I see anything.

Could this be because my emulator is picking up a different AVD? I didn't see anything in the tutorial telling the user how to pick the right AVD: you seem to assume that the AVD created in the tutorial is the only one. Or could it be my emulator is already out of date? Somehow, this seems highly unlikely, since I first downloaded Android just a few days before 1.6 was released. Or is it really that different on the Linux platform? Have you tried following your own tutorial steps on a Linux installation of Eclipse?

By: ysamlan

ysamlan — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:27:05 +0000

Matt,

I was trying to strike a balance between giving as much detail for beginners as possible and overwhelming the user with unecessary or obvious directions, which would increase the length and apparent complexity of the tutorial without actually making the tutorial any easier to follow (see Seth's comment above — he felt the tutorial was *too* detailed in some ways).

I felt that “unlock the emulator screen and wait for the debugger to connect” fell into the “unecessary” category, since just reading the screens presented to you should tell you what to do there (press Menu, and wait one second). That was really just a judgment call, and it could have gone either way… but I think it's OK this way, as you yourself illustrated: Although you seem to disagree about the necessity of telling that in advance, you did manage to figure out the necessary steps yourself

By: Matt J.

Matt J. — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:25:00 +0000

I was referring to the PNG files in the tutorial web page, not to the PNG file in the project. If I follow the instructions in the text of your web page, I leave many of the text fields blank. But in the PNG file, you show them filled in.

By: ysamlan

ysamlan — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:16:41 +0000

I'm not sure what you mean by "the need to enter what is in the PNG files." There's only one PNG file used in this project, and it should be a drop-in replacement of the PNG file that already comes in the skeleton project ADT creates for you.
As far as your AVD manager not showing you Donut options, make sure you have the 1.6 SDK installed, too, not just the newest ADT/Eclipse. http://developer.android.com/sdk/1.6_r1/index.html - and that the Android config settings in Eclipse are pointing to that installation. If you do a clean Android/Eclipse install according to Google's directions, that should be the case.