Creating a mobile guided tour application for the Android platform

Presumably, one may want to put together an IDE suitable for running and debugging Android applications. Google actually does a fair job of documenting this, but there’s no reason why I can’t add to it.

1. You need Eclipse. This is a free IDE used to write the Java code for our program.
2. Next, you need the Android SDK. To install it, all you have to do is unzip it to a safe place on your C drive.
3. Now, you need the ADT plugin for Eclipse. This is installed from within Eclipse by selecting Help, Install New Software and following the instructions on Google’s page.
4. Finally, you’ll want to follow the rest of the instructions on Google’s Quick Start page. The end result is a working install of the Eclipse IDE for writing Java code, a copy of the Android SDK for all the necessary libraries, tools, and the Android virtual machine; and the ADT plugin to tie the Android SDK into Eclipse.

After you have a working development environment, you can open my projects by

1. Downloading and extracting the ZIP file
2. Specifying that folder as your “Workspace” when starting Eclipse. Workspaces are analogous to Visual Studio solutions.

One nice thing about a Linux development environment is package management. Anything you could possibly ever want is just a download away.

However, there are a LOT of downloads.  Kernel.  The X Windowing System and GNOME.  VM Guest Additions.  GCC and Kernel-Sources for compiling said guest additions – they’re kernel objects.  Apache, PHP, and MySQL.  WordPress.  Eclipse.  The Android SDK.  Android SDK Components and images.

In fact, I’m still downloading.  At least I didn’t need to compile much – trying to hack a newer kernel into CentOS for OpenGL support took over an hour of compile time and broke GRUB.  Hooray for VM snapshots!

Although I finally have a fully-configured IDE, “Hello World” might have to wait ’til the morrow.