BTC640/Mobile

Lecture

This week we'll be looking at how to develop for mobile devices. On a small screen there is little room for anything, thus presentation is king.

We will set up an Android development environment including an emulator, create a simple Android application, and a small webpage geared to mobile.

Android development environment

Unless you already have an Android development environment set up you will need to use the Andora 1.2 live CD. This is a modified version of the popular Fedora linux distribution, modified by Raymond Chan to include the Android development tools including Eclipse with all the plugins, the Android SDK, and tools like the Android emulator.

The point of a live CD is that you can test the operating system on the CD without installing it or making any changes whatsoever to the harddrive. That means that all of the changes you make during the session, including projects and virtual devices you created will be gone as soon as you reboot. Everything is stored in RAM.

If you're using your own machine - simply put in the CD, reboot, and tell your machine to boot from the CD. If you're using one of the lab machines - turn the switch to "External", put in the cd, and reboot. You do not need an external harddrive.

Once it boots - click the login button. Then wait for Eclipse to start, which will happen automaticlly. Note that this environment is a lot slower than it would normally be because everything has to be read from the CD. Eclipse will start automatically, wait for that.

AVD

An Android Virtual Device is a virtual machine that runs Android, it's great for testing applications. You can normally create virtual machines with different Android versions but on Andora we only have the 2.3.3 SDK installed. You still can choose different screens and other hardware parameters.

Lab

This is a marked lab. Please submit it using Moodle (Lab5).

In the lab you'll be doing some the same stuff that I've shown in class. You can use the live cd or create a more permanent Android development environment on your own machine. No point making it on the lab machines, unless you only want to practice the setup.

Submit a zip file (or another compressed format) of your project and a screenshot of the emulator running your code.