Android programing in NetBeans

It’s been a while since I wrote here something. Well, it’s to change it.

Recently my girlfriend asked me: „Can I have a iPhone? Everyone has it.“ Well, she is going to have a birthday, so why not. One of my colleague complains about stupidity of that phone all the time, but he is a bit geek (in good sense). The other colleague always fight for Apple products (even thou he has an android – what an irony). He is geek a bit more.

Well I said to myself: why not, that is a good phone for a girl and finally she will have a platform where to run some SuperMemo app (my try with an old Palm didn’t work) to learn English finally. I do not have enough money for a new one, so I started to play at aukro.cz – czech equivalent of ebay.com

I am going to skip details, but I end up with partially broken (very cheep) iPhone 3G. First impression – well nice platform, but you need to have a Mac to develop app for it (don’t mentioning the fees). I already ordered a new display and when it come I also fix broken GSM antenna. Good site for this kind of stuff is ifixme.com.

Anyway it kicked me to be interested in a new mobile phone app trade. Apple did a really good job to give this technology to masses, but you need to have MacOS to develop for iPhone. My platform for this kind of stuff has to be Android. And it is really a cool platform. I can leverage my experience with java

For start you need a few basic steps:

• Read how to make it working in NetBeans. The trick which keep me looking on android site for a while was that I have to first run ./android from SDK tools directory and install platform I want to develop for. Also do not forget to restart NetBeans when you create a platform (create an emulator)
• Read some good tutorial (like this one in Czech or this currency converter tutorial in English

I have a plan to do some app for calories tracking. It helped me a lot to loose some weigh when I wrote such app in j2me last semester at university, but unfortunately I lost sources for it. It teach me a lesson: never do close source programming! Well, may be I can try to sell that tiny app if it will be really good (if I do not loose source code again).