the:chris:walker ↩

On Android Development

Aug 1, 2013

I never used Java before. I had visions of dependency hell and having to use a giant IDE instead of Sublime.

Turns out Android Development isn’t all that bad. We chose to use Maven as the dependency and build tool - not sure if Android’s new Gradle based system is any better, but Maven is working for us.

Same situation with the IDE, I’ve been using Android Studio and despite:

having a splash page beacuse it…
takes 30-40 seconds to even start up and then
is laggy quite often

The benefits of the smart environment are pretty big, especially for a beginner like me, who is just learning all the API’s I need to create apps.

Personally I found the whole Activity, Service, Broadcast Reciever and associated lifecycles more complex than the new language. Java itself is pretty easy to grok.

It’s been fun over the last few weeks getting familiar with what Android apps can do (hint: a lot). Looking forward to writing something little for myself soon…

thechriswalker lives in Exeter, UK with his wife: Rosie, son: Orson and daughter: Florence. He likes bacon, drinks too much coffee, doesn't like spiders and enjoys solving problems. He'll use Vi over Emacs and doesn't usually talk about himself in the third person.

Code Monkey by trade, I like writing daemons and systems software. Preferably in Go. I've written a bunch of variable-quality stuff, all of which lives on Github.

If you want to get in touch, throw me an email.

Also, I am definitely now a qualified professional wood-hole-was-used-to-create-fire-recognitionist, which is totally a thing and will likely make me a billionaire in the future. So if you have some wood with a hole in it and want to know if that hole was created in the process of attempting to light a fire, then I'm your man.