Case Study: Worldscope for Android

This looks like an interesting brief look at the Android App development process that you might go through as a new developer to Android:
Case Study: Worldscope for Android

The Book

Android Development Book

I bought this book: "Hello, Android: Introducing Google's Mobile Development Platform (Pragmatic Programmers)" to get me going with properly understanding Android Development. (See photo in next post on this blog) I have been playing around with most of the tutorials on the Android website, and although very useful, it's just not as enjoyable as reading a book.

I chose this book because it has good reviews, mainly on Amazon, and because it was one of the few books that includes the current version of Android (2.2 - Froyo). I am still just on the first few pages of the book, starting to build up the tutorial app (a Sudoku game) but so far I am impressed with how easy to understand it has been for someone with a reasonable knowledge of Java from a few years ago and some understanding of Android development from looking around the official docs and tutorials. It has boosted my motivation to keep working on this as the book is broken down into small increments of understanding which makes me want to keep going and learn more. So far I recommend the book but I will write more once I am further through.

Version Control

A friend of mine just introduced me to Beanstalk. This is a free on-line CVS repository (for code versioning). It seems easy enough to use, I set up one of my tutorial projects on there. In the free version you can even have 2 more people login to your repository so you can collaborate on the project. Great!
Beanstalk

Best Practices of Touch Screen Interface Design

I have been thinking about the various ways in which you can physically interact with your phone. The obvious one is the touch screen, which I imagine tends to be the primary interface to an app. Also there are the tilt sensors, possibly compass orientation and voice input. I have had a quick google of the topic of touch screen interface design. It is certainly something I plan to look into further, but I have found that the results on this topic are not as plentiful and high quality as I expected. One set of recommendations that I would like to refer back to later are linked to on this blog: Touch Usability

The link is a bit old and I was hoping for something a bit more up to date but I will add more info. on this topic as I find it.

How to Publish to the Android Market

This could be a useful bit of information further down the line. It is jumping the gun somewhat for my purposes at this stage but looks like a good explanation of publishing to the market from a quick skim of the page:
How to Publish to the Android Market

Blog from my mobile

Testing the email blogging right from gmail on my phone. Nice one Google