Android app development - What lured me to it!

The invention of telephone was definitely one of the finest inventions of mankind! I'm quite fascinated on witnessing the development from the then wired, bulky telephones to the present wireless mobiles. The past decade has seen tremendous development in the way we interact with our fellow humans. I still remember the days when cordless phones were first used; I used to wonder how such a thing is even possible! And then there was this "pager", going viral among the business class. Within a few years, came the mobile phones. At that time, I didn't fathom that this technology would be the future of a revolution in the communication industry. Now I know exactly where we are heading to; at least in the present scenario dominated by the Android market!

Since the day I bought my first android device, I was always curious to know how things worked. I've always been raring to understand how android apps worked, but procrastinating, thinking that this was just for the computer geeks. But things proved wrong when I started experimenting. I'm writing this blog to share my experiences on how to develop apps for the android OS.

Lets get started straight away!

As of today's world, everything starts with a Google search! I too started off with those generic words, "how to create android apps".

The android development software is a freeware and can be downloaded from the following link. For the comfort of beginners, the download package consists of all prerequisites that are needed for the proper functioning of this software.

http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html

After downloading the Android SDK from the above link, extract the contents of the file to the root folder. (i.e. C drive for most cases). You could extract them into a folder called "Development".
One word of caution is not to move or rename any of the folders. This may render certain internal links unusable and we may need to manually reestablish the links.

So finally, the installation path will be C:/Development/adt-bundle-windows-x86-20131030

Inside this "adt-bundle-windows-x86-20131030" folder, there are three folders (eclipse, sdk and workspace). We'll be developing apps using the "eclipse.exe" application in the "eclipse" folder. The workspace folder will contain the backups of the apps we develop. Additionally, there is one "SDK Manager.exe" application in the "adt-bundle-windows-x86-20131030" folder. This is used to install add-ons. For eg. the Android ADT will presently install only the  files required for running the apps in 4.4 (kitkat) version. If you want to run the app in a different platform, Jelly Bean say, you have to manually download the required files for version 4.2.

Now, give yourself a pat on the back for successfully installing the Android ADT. We'll see about displaying the generic "Hello world" message in our first android app in the next post!