Some experiences in Android programming

I recently started developing an app for Android. The app is nothing complicated. A few screens which display data from a webservice. The data are events like “having dinner together” and you can register to join the event. As being new in Android programming (and this time, I wanted to create a “real” native Android app, not a PhoneGap / cordova based app), it’s quiet a learning experience necessary.

So here are some resources that helped me get going:

• Youtube videos: Android App Development for Beginners Playlist. While video tutorials are a very slow medium to transfer information, it’s still convenient, to just listen and watch. At least, if you watch a couple of the videos, you’ll notice some legendary burps.

• The IDE Android Studio provides a lot of templates to get you started, e.g. master-detail-flow and some preferences activities.

• Of course, there is great information available from Google itself, e.g. http://developer.android.com/training/basics/network-ops/managing.html which explains the basics of accessing network calls. There are much more tutorials and guides available.

• If you want to have the common behavior of “pull to refresh”, then this blog post explains how to implement this: http://sapandiwakar.in/pull-to-refresh-for-android-recyclerview-or-any-other-vertically-scrolling-view/

• Showing dialogs the standard way is simple, but keeping them open because you validated the user input and you cannot proceed, is not so obvious. This stackoverflow question deals with this problem: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4016313/how-to-keep-an-alertdialog-open-after-button-onclick-is-fired

• Using the GridLayout inside Android studio looks easy. However, there are some pitfalls, which deal with how many space the single cells (or the widgets within) will use. One pitfall is described in this blog post: http://daniel-codes.blogspot.com.au/2012/01/gridlayout-view-clipping-issues.html

• Having a nice launcher icon is a must. However, it’s quiet cumbersome to create the icon in the different needed sizes/resolutions. This great online tool helps in achieving this: https://romannurik.github.io/AndroidAssetStudio/icons-launcher.html

• While building the app you’ll discover the need for more icons. Google provides a lot of icons ready to use here: https://design.google.com/icons/index.html.