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.